AJDABIYA, Libya — Nabil Mustafa Kharraz rushed to the front without a weapon. He ended up in a grimy provincial hospital with rocket shrapnel in his brain and a bloodied bandage wrapped around his head like a turban.
“He’s a brave boy,” said his father, Mustafa Kharraz, standing at his son’s bedside. He held a tube containing dark shards of metal a doctor had plucked from the 20-year-old’s head. “I’m proud he did his duty for his country.”
In his bed a day after fleeing a withering assault by government forces in the oil city of Ras Lanuf, Nabil promised his father he would fight again — though he still doesn’t know how to fire a gun.
Armed only with intense devotion to the revolution in eastern Libya, the chemical engineering student epitomizes the madly courageous but wildly incompetent rebel force that has taken on canny strongman Moammar Khadafy. Made up of students, clerks and accountants, the “people’s army” has proved supremely vulnerable and, in some cases, helpless.
The idealistic protesters-turned-soldiers grew overconfident and inattentive after two swift triumphs. Then they retreated in chaos when Khadafy unleashed his professional army and its punishing heavy weapons and warplanes.
That army is now pushing eastward, scattering the outgunned rebels. All that stands between Khadafy and rebel headquarters in Benghazi are disorganized volunteers and army defectors spread thinly along the coastal highway.
Not a single heavy-gun emplacement is dug in along the 140-mile desert highway from the rebels’ new defensive line in Port Brega to Benghazi. And all that protects Port Brega, a strategic oil hub, are the same outdated weapons that proved so ineffective in Ras Lanuf.
At a rebel checkpoint about 25 miles east of Ras Lanuf late Saturday, fighters flung themselves into the desert each time a government warplane passed overhead. Gun trucks ferrying rebel reinforcements, many unarmed, sped west to the front, passing ambulances with blue lights flashing headed in the opposite direction.
It is an asymmetrical fight. The rebels can muster only ancient, hand-cranked antiaircraft guns, heavy machine guns, recoilless rifles, rockets, grenade launchers and assault rifles.
The pro-Khadafy forces fight with what the military calls “stand-off” weapons. From a distance, they pummel the rebels with airstrikes, artillery, tanks and, according to rebel fighters and opposition leaders, from guns aboard ships in the Mediterranean Sea.
“I never saw them with my own eyes,” Ibrahim Sharf, 35, whose left leg was shattered by a rocket barrage, said of Khadafy’s troops. His leg, wrapped in gauze that oozed blood, was held together by four metal pins.
“If they would only fight us man to man, we’d destroy them,” Sharf said, grimacing in his hospital bed.
The rebels, who fight from private pickup trucks and cars spray-painted “People’s Army of Libya,” have only three or four days’ cushion of gasoline supplies, said Khaled Ben Ali, a logistics official.
For the first time Saturday, motorists waited in long lines outside gas stations on the coastal highway. Some stations ran dry. The fighting has closed many gasoline refineries, triggering a fuel shortage in the rebel-held east.
Port Brega, 85 miles east of Ras Lanuf, is now in Khadafy’s sights. The dictator’s son, Seif Islam, has vowed to reclaim the eastern half of Libya from rebels who have held it since late February.
