Islamic State’s brainwashing machine has been in full swing in Sirte, turning people into unscrupulous suicide bombers and targeting civilian infrastructure such as hospitals with armored car bombs, RT’s William Whiteman reports from the city.
During his visit to the city, Whiteman was lucky to narrowly escape the fate of many victims of car bombs, which are grimly referred to by pro-government Libyan fighters as “dogmas.” If not for a fighter with an RPG who spotted and stopped a suicide bomber heading towards them in a car at full speed, the crew would likely not have survived.
The jihadists use such vehicles as effective mobile bombs that inflict huge casualties not only on Libyan government troops, but innocent civilians as well.
Mohammed, a local journalist, told RT’s correspondent about a brutal attack that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants carried out on a hospital that almost leveled the building to the ground. Standing at the foot of the crater left by a massive explosion, Mohammed said that the jihadists had planted a bomb in an ambulance.
As the vehicle was approaching the hospital, an unsuspecting doctor rushed to it, intending to help the wounded people.
“It was an ambulance. We had a famous doctor in Misurata. He saw the ambulance coming so he ran to it. Yeah, he ran to it. He thought that there was an injured person inside the ambulance. So, it went off and he got killed, alongside many people here,” Mohammed said, while speaking to Whiteman in a dilapidated building with giant holes in its crumbling walls and ceiling.
Many people are inspired to become suicide bombers by an “enforced martyrdom complex,” Whiteman argues, as he is shown messages written by members of the jihadists’ families scrawled on the walls of their abandoned homes.
“‘I am Omar Deynar, along with my daughters, and also with the mother of Omar – Tunisian. We were sleeping here in peace’ and ‘hahaha,’” some of the writings, partly inscribed in English, read.
“And again you’ve got written ‘hahaha’. So they’re literally laughing at the fact they’re going to die,” Mohammed notes, adding that some of the haunting messages had apparently been written by women and children.
While Libyan forces have almost cleared Sirte of IS militants with the help of heavy US air strikes, which have been targeting jihadists’ positions within and around Sirte since early August, intense fighting still continues in some neighborhoods.
Looking just across the street through the shutters of an apartment used both as a hideout and a firing position by pro-government fighters, the RT crew could see a white satellite dish on a building where IS militants may be hiding out.
“The guys here have told us that this area that we’re seeing now – this white satellite dish, this is where Islamic State are. They’ve been seeing movement around here. So that’s how close the front line is. Literally, just across the road here,” Whiteman said.