I first met Atiri four days later. He was standing in the yard of the prison he had escaped from, a big man in a sweaty orange polo shirt with enormous, haunted eyes. It was noon under a blazing sun, and the smell of rotting corpses was stifling. Three men lay dead on the ground at our feet, their bodies bloated, dried blood pooled around them. Acrid smoke was still rising from the dark interior of the warehouse where Atiri and his fellow prisoners had been held. I walked over to take a look. I have been to a number of war zones, but nothing prepared me for what I saw. Dozens of skulls and twisted skeletons lay in a charred mound, surrounded by bones and bits of old, burned tires. There were at least 50 human remains there, and probably many more. Atiri, standing behind me, had known these men, some of them just teenagers. One was an imam who led them in prayer, he said. Atiri’s eyes roved wildly around the prison yard, his face contorted with grief. It was only after the massacre, he told me, that he realized the significance of something he saw two hours before it all began, as the guards were moving him across the prison yard. An officer had arrived at the prison’s front gate, flanked by aides. A guard whispered to Atiri that it was Khamis el-Qaddafi, the dictator’s youngest son, a military commander known for brutality. “The guard told me, ‘Khamis is signing the orders for your final release,’ ” Atiri said as we stood by the fire-blackened warehouse. “And he laughed.”
By that time, the last great battle of the Libyan civil war was over. After 42 years, the bizarre pageant of Muammar Qaddafi’s rule had collapsed quickly, in a final spasm of senseless killing. Scores of prisoners — perhaps hundreds — were executed at makeshift holding facilities like the one I saw, for no apparent reason. Many of the victims were not even rebels, just citizens picked up in random sweeps in the final days. Even the guards were killed at some jails, perhaps to silence a witness, perhaps because they refused orders. No one could say.
The end left Tripoli in a state of giddy disbelief. On the day I arrived, Bab al Aziziya, the dictator’s high-walled stronghold, lay wide open, with Libyan families strolling through and gazing wonderingly at the ruins. Outside, the vast public square was a wasteland littered with burnt-out cars, twisted metal and rags. Rebels from across Libya rode wildly through the city, firing bursts from rifles and anti-aircraft guns. Young men fanned out to trash every picture of the man known as Brother Leader and to cover the walls with triumphant, satirical graffiti. Muammar — the name is similar to a word for “builder” — was scrawled out and replaced with the rhyming Mudammer, “destroyer.”
But the celebration was tinctured with deep unease. There was still talk of snipers, of a counterattack by Qaddafi’s men, of a fifth column of “sleeper cells” lurking inside the capital. Victory had come too easily. Only weeks earlier, the rebels seemed in disarray, and Qaddafi’s forces, having withstood more than four months of NATO air strikes, seemed poised to hold out for many more. Then, on Aug. 20, a planned uprising broke out in Tripoli, as the ragged rebel army converged on the city from various directions. The final battle, expected to last weeks, was over in two days. Qaddafi and his top lieutenants fled almost immediately. Now it was hard to know who was a killer and who a mere dupe. The rumors changed every few hours: Qaddafi and his sons, who were still issuing lurid threats by satellite phone against the rebel “rats,” were hiding in the tunnels under Tripoli, people said, and might soon flood the city with mustard gas or poison its water.
