October 7, 2011

Iraq offered its experience of rebuilding the country and gearing up for democracy during a visit to Baghdad on Oct. 6 by Libya’s interim premier Mahmud Jibril, officials said.

Jibril’s visit was his first since a mid-February revolt in Libya that eventually led to strongman Moamer Kadhafi’s overthrow, and he met with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. "Prime Minister Maliki offered the experience of Iraq in rebuilding the state, writing a constitution and holding elections," said Maliki’s media advisor Ali Mussawi. "The two sides found similarities between the two regimes of Saddam and Kadhafi," he added, referring to now-executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was ousted by a 2003 US-led invasion.

Meanwhile, intense fighting on the western front of Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte has killed eight revolutionary fighters in what Libya’s transitional government hopes will be the final push into the holdout city.

Deputy Defense Minister Fawzi Bukatif told on Oct. 7 that revolutionary forces were poised to enter the city from all fronts in a final attack on Sirte, the last major city to remain in loyalist hands.

Ambulances sped down the main road leading to Sirte carrying 125 wounded to a field hospital set up in an abandoned villa eight kilometers from the center of Sirte. Doctors say a senior commander, Ali Saeh of the Free Libya Brigade, was injured, shot twice by a sniper. As the fighting raged Thursday night, the fugitive Gadhafi called "on the Libyan people, men and women, to go out into the squares and the streets and in all the cities in their millions" to reject the NTC. NTC reinforcements were on their way to Bani Walid for another assault of Gadhafi’s loyalists who are fiercely defending the oasis town

Compiled from AFP and AP stories by the Daily News staff.