I came across an anti-Gaddafi demonstration for the first time in February 2011 in Baghdad’s Tahrir square.

A Gaddafi poster found in his bunker in Tripoli. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali – Tunisia’s former ruler – had left the country a few weeks earlier, and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak would be ousted just a few days later. In the context of the “Arab spring”, angry Iraqis were also protesting against their corrupt government and the lack of opportunities.

At the same time, many of them were carrying portraits of leaders who had been governing their Arab neighbouring countries with an iron fist for decades.

“Gaddafi has been in power for over 40 years so far, don’t you think it’s more than enough?” a young Baghdadi carrying a caricature of the ousted Libyan leader told me. I remember telling that man that Gaddafi could well stay in power another two decades until he died peacefully in bed. He nodded, but time has proved us both wrong.

Sadly enough for the Iraqis, the rest of the world hardly got to know that Baghdad’s main square is also called “Tahrir” – “freedom” – and, like the one in Cairo, it also hosted several “days of wrath”.

By early spring the international media were flooded with reports coming from Benghazi in Libya. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) had been bombing Tripoli for weeks, so I thought of entering the country on a Libyan visa to report, among other things, on the real impact of NATO bombings on the local population.

Working conditions, though, were far from ideal to conduct independent research. Libyan officials said I would only be able to leave the hotel assigned by the government either by bus, where Libyan officials would herd foreign journalists, or escorted by security agents.

I soon realised that reporting from Libya involved either being voluntarily “imprisoned” in a golden jail by Gaddafi’s regime, or “embedding” with the Libyan rebels on the country’s different fronts. I chose the latter.

As the weeks went by, the Libyan war turned into a stalemate situation in Libya’s eastern front as well as in Misrata – a besieged rebel coastal enclave in the centre of the country.

It wasn’t until mid-May when I discovered there was also a “mysterious” and still under-reported third front in western Libya. Surprisingly, only a few journalists had entered the country via the Tunisian border through the Nafusa mountains – a mountain region which hosts Libya’s biggest Berber population.

I had read all those statements where Gaddafi described the rebel side as a group of “drug addicts and al- Qaeda members” assisted by “foreign mercenaries”. I was curious what I was going to find once I set foot in Libya.

By late May, the Nafusa mountain range was under constant bombing from Gaddafi’s positions down the valley. My very first and obvious experience was that Gaddafi had been, and still was, bombing the civilian population, at least where I was.

As for the real nature of the rebels’ ranks, I came across farmers, teachers, accountants…all had been forced to take up weapons, when available. The majority were Berbers, members of Libya’s biggest minority who had endured repressive treatment from a regime attempting to erase them by denying their very existence.

“Call yourselves whatever you want inside your homes – Berbers, children of Satan, whatever – but you are only Libyans when you leave your homes,” Gaddafi said, according to a 2008 cable released by Wikileaks.

In a Berber settlement called Yefren, I met Madghis and Mazigh Buzakhar, two brothers who had been arrested and tortured after Gaddafi’s secret service had confiscated “compromising” material: around 500 volumes on the Amazig language and culture they had sneaked through several trips to neighbouring Algeria and Morocco, countries that also host a significant Amazigh population.

“They imprisoned us with those condemned to life imprisonment or the death penalty,” Mazigh Buzakhar said. “We thought that our only way to leave that prison was execution.”

Madghis and Mazigh were literally released by the revolution that erupted on Feb. 17. Muhammed al- Bakker, a black Libyan from Nalut – a mountain village 70 kilometres from the Tunisian border, was not that lucky. “They simply put me in jail and nobody told me why until six years later.

“They said I was accused of being a spy and their proof was that I spoke English,” Mohammed told me in flawless English he had taught himself. He had spent 18 years in prison due to the paranoia of a man who saw “foreign western agents” and “al-Qaeda terrorists” behind any opposition to the alleged “rule of the masses” he was leading.

It couldn’t be otherwise for the leader who was convinced that all Libyans “love me”, as he told the BBC in a rare interview in late February, amidst an uprising against him that was gaining momentum by the day.

After a series of attacks coordinated with NATO aircraft, anti-Gaddafi fighters took over Tripoli on Aug. 21. The little resistance posed by Gaddafi loyalists came as a surprise to local civilians and fighters and, of course, to foreign reporters.

The massive yellow cranes abandoned at the Green Square – today “martyrs’ square” – spoke volumes about Gaddafi’s megalomania: they were supposed to hoist the world’s biggest portrait – of Gaddafi, of course – to celebrate the 42nd anniversary of his coming to power on Sep. 1.

Those planned celebrations were replaced by those claiming victory over his fallen regime.

People were euphoric; nobody thought that the battle for Tripoli would just be a “matter of hours”. Now we have come to know why. The upcoming stalemate against Ben Walid and Sirte – Gaddafi’s native town – would soon tell us that the loyalists had not surrendered but pulled back from the capital to offer resistance in the toppled regime’s last strongholds.

*Karlos Zurutuza has reported extensively for IPS from Libya over recent weeks.