France, Britain ask Nato to step up Libyan operation

Nato is not doing “enough”, the French Foreign Minister Allen Juppe said, as he clamoured for heavier strikes to destroy heavy weaponry used by Gadhafi’s forces in Libya to break the present stalemate on the ground.

“Nato must play its role fully. It wanted to take the lead in operations,” Juppe said, adding that Libyan civilians remain at risk. William Hague, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, called upon Nato to step up military operations against the Libyan regime and called on the embattled leader to quit.

“We must maintain and intensify our efforts in Nato,” Hague echoed Juppe. “That is why the United Kingdom has in the last weeks supplied additional aircraft capable of striking ground targets threatening the civilian population... Of course it would be welcome if other countries also did the same,” he was quoted as saying by BBC on arrival at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg.

Ceasefire call

France, UK and the US under the banner of Nato are leading the drive against pro-Gadhafi forces in Libya. Juppe said Nato should target heavy weapons besieging Misrata where an increasingly bloody siege by Gadhafi’s troops led rebels to dismiss the African Union call for a ceasefire as meaningless.

“It must play its role today which means preventing Gadhafi from using heavy weapons to shell civilian populations,” Al-Jazeera quoted Juppe as telling France Info radio ahead of travelling to Qatar for a Libya contact group meeting tomorrow.

Libyan rebels have been pushed back in recent weeks despite air raids by Nato on the forces of Gadhafi. Government forces shelled Misrata, which has been the scene of heavy bombardments for more than a month.

Government forces began a renewed attack on Monday on Misrata, the lone rebel bastion in western Libya, hours after news emerged of an AU ceasefire plan.

Earlier this week, the rebels had pushed back an advance by Gadhafi’s forces into the town, 214 km east of Tripoli, that has been under siege of Gadhafi’s forces for over six weeks.

The Red Cross was set to open a Tripoli office and plans to send a team to Misrata to help civilians trapped by fighting, reports said. In the eastern battlefront, reports said three rebel fighters may have been killed overnight near the town of Ajdabiya, the gateway to the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

The government forces were rapidly pushing ahead in the battle till Monday, when a major Nato strike destroyed 25 tanks on the outskirts of Ajdabiya and Misrata, helping the opposition stem their advance. While 11 tanks were hit outside Ajdabiya, which the rebels were struggling to hold on, while another 14 were targeted on the outskirts of Misrata.