by Patrick Appel
Jon Lee Anderson reports from Tripoli:
Prisoners, including some hapless looking African “mercenaries,” are languishing in a welter of backroom jails around the city. In one such place this week I found a couple dozen men from countries like Chad and Niger ranging in age from sixteen to sixty, some of them with battered faces and bandaged wounds. It was difficult to know whether they were professional fighters, or merely migrant workers who had been press-ganged by the old regime’s forces—both circumstances have applied in the Libyan conflict. Their jailers—the rebels—aware of media allegations of past prisoner abuse by their forces, took pains to proclaim that they were treating them well. It was impossible, however, to really know.
More worrisome reporting on violence against dark-skinned Libyans and Africans here.
The Dish 