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The warplanes launched fresh airstrikes on anti-regime positions around the port city on Monday. Witnesses say at least three people have been killed in the attacks.
The revolutionary fighters say they can take on the government’s elite ground forces, but are outgunned when the regime uses air power.
They have begun pulling back from Ras Lanuf and the nearby city of Ben Jawad after the regime resorted to heavy use of air attacks.
Opposition fighters in east Libya regrouped on Sunday and moved back towards Bin Jawad after forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi had ambushed rebels and ejected them from the town earlier in the day, a Reuters witness said.
“We are just outside Bin Jawad. There are thuds of mortars landing near rebel positions, leaving puffs of smoke, and also the sound of heavy machine guns in the distance,” Reuters correspondent Mohammed Abbas said in a brief report.
“There’s a steady stream of rebels heading back west towards Bin Jawad,” he said.
Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi fired from tanks at residential areas in the western Libyan town of Zawiyah on Saturday, as fighting in the town continued, Arabic satellite channels reported. “Now with all the artillery, tanks and armored vehicles, we’re seeing battles and killings we haven’t seen in Iraq. I consider it total genocide,” said one witness who spoke to Al Arabiya television.
“The battles have now entered the city. More than 15 armored vehicles entered two hours ago along with a tank. There is heavy firing in all the areas and mosques have announced ‘jihad’ against these brigades,” the man told Al Arabiya.
Witnesses also said that pro-Gaddafi forces break through rebel defenses at Libyan city of Zawiyah.
Dozens of people have been killed in clashes between South Sudan’s Army and a rebel faction near Fangak town in Jonglei state earlier this week, officials said on Wednesday.
Rebel leader George Athor claimed later that about 100 people, mostly soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), were killed in the latest fighting. But the SPLA said actual death toll in the fighting was closer to 40.
South Sudan Army spokesman Col. Philip Aguer told reporters on Wednesday that deaths in the fighting was not something to be “proud of,” and accused the Athor-led rebel faction of “refusing peace, amnesty, and the cease-fire.”
Brega: In a fierce day-long battle, rebel forces in this strategic oil town successfully repelled an attack on Wednesday by government loyalists backed by artillery and war planes, witnesses in the town said.
At least six were confirmed dead and 16 wounded in the fighting, the witnesses said, and the death toll was expected to rise.
The attack seemed to spearhead a broader effort by the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to reassert control over strategic oil assets in the eastern part of the country, which have been seized by rebel forces in recent weeks.
Senegal has cut diplomatic ties with Iran, accusing Tehran of supplying weapons to separatist rebels in its southern Casamance region, the foreign ministry said.
“Senegal has decided to break off diplomatic relations with the Republic of Iran,” the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
The statement linked the Iranian weapons with an attack on Sunday in Casamance, the latest in a string of such attacks by rebels engaged in one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts, which resulted in the deaths of three Senegalese troops.
The Ethiopian army is fighting two rebels in two different borders as it tries to secure its border towns.
Ethiopian troops supporting Somalia’s weak transitional forces have been battling al-Shabaab insurgents for the past week in the town of Beled-hawo, near the Somalia-Ethiopia-Kenya border.
The fighting erupted early hours of Wednesday when Ethiopia tried to fairwell more than 2,000 Somali police across the border. They have been receiving training in Ethiopia since 2009. Minutes after their deployment they came under attack from heavily-armed al-Shabaab insurgents.