For months, in furtive, snatched conversations in Tripoli streets, and confidently among rebels fighting at the front, Libyans have talked about "the moment".
By Nick Meo, Zintan
The rag-tag, poorly-armed rebel armies have always known that when the time was right they needed an uprising inside Libya's capital to bring down Muammar Gaddafi and end their war.
Even with Nato's powerful air attacks helping them by pulverising Gaddafi forces they are not strong enough to take the capital without the help of its population.
All summer opponents of Gaddafi inside Tripoli have all been waiting, planning, and hoping – smuggling weapons into the city, secretly training and recruiting, and coordinating with the rebel forces outside.
Late on Saturday night, it seems, "the moment" finally arrived. Reports from within the Mediterranean city of nearly two million people are of confused and bloody fighting.
Armed residents have attempted to take over their districts in the opposition-supporting east of Tripoli, and there have been firefights with Gaddafi loyalists in the streets across the city. Confused reports speak of dozens of deaths, although with communications limited and journalists highly restricted in their movements it is difficult to know exactly what is happening.
The regime has desperately sought to play down the importance of Saturday night's fighting. There are just a few armed gangs making trouble, according to government spokesmen – but Libyans know that what happens now will probably determine whether their war for freedom comes to a quick and glorious end, or a long, bloody and destructive one.
As the government sought to play things down rebel leaders based in Benghazi immediately pronounced the uprising "Zero Hour", the moment when the repressed population of Libya's capital city had their second chance to throw off the tyrant's rule, after February's attempt was crushed.
Rebels say they smuggled weapons into Tripoli in tugboats to arm their supporters, who were ready. There are claims that the military airport has been seized but the new uprising seems to be mainly based in Souk Al-Juma and Tajoura, two big, mainly working-class districts in the east of the city which have long been hotbeds of the opposition. Massive protests broke out in both districts in February at the start of the uprising against Gaddafi and their population gained a reputation for fighting hardest against the security forces brought in to batter then into submission. Since then the districts have been patrolled by soldiers who are routinely attacked at night in a low-level guerrilla war of sniping and hurled grenades, fought from alleys and narrow streets.
Awkwardly, those districts are in the wrong part of the city; the rebel advance is not from the east, from Misurata and Benghazi, where it was always expected to come from, but from the west, where rebel forces have made extraordinary gains in the past ten days.
They only have to advance another thirty miles or so to make it into Tripoli. But Gaddafi's forces are still heavily armed, especially with rockets and mortars, and seem to be fighting hard, although there are reports of growing desertions. Those reports will cheer rebel morale – they know that they can only win when the regime finally crumbles, and in the next few days rebels will watch with desperate interest for signs of that happening.
The regime is equally desperate to keep its toughest units in the fight, perhaps in hope of a miracle. The Gaddafi family know they were close to being overthrown in February when the uprising started, but they were ruthless and determined and they survived. Since then they have survived the onslaught by Nato and months of attacks by rebels. Only a few weeks ago their confidence was growing.
Now if Gaddafi's toughest forces can hold back the rebels advancing from the west, rebel fighters who are desperate to come riding to the rescue of their brothers in the city, brutal security forces may be able to crush the rebellion inside Tripoli for a second time.
The rebels' blood is up, and their morale is sky-high, but they may not have logistics in place and organisation to launch another offensive so soon after the one that surged north to capture Zawiyah last week and cut the coastal road which is Gaddafi's lifeline.
"The moment" has come, but the danger for the rebels is that it may have come a bit too soon.
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