that town, 31 opposition tanks and 45 artillery pieces. you see in the videos over the past few days, sticks and rocks and light webry in the desert but 31 opposition tanks and 45 artillery pieces? that is the government s claim. they also say they did not want bloodsh bloodshed. in tripoli government forces launched fire on the streets. remember all week the regime has been calling tripoli calm, painting over any anti-government low slogans and sponsors pro-government rallies, not allowing reporters where they were operating. people who live there are also telling us gadhafi forces have been going door to door, rounding up dissidents, hauling them away, in some cases killing them. today despite all this protes r protesters did come out in the streets of tripoli, overflow crowd praying outside a mosque. according to numerous eyewitnesses, they were fired upon. watch.
unarmed protesters, i mean, not that we need more evidence of that, but there was more evidence of that today? reporter: well, i came back and asked what your response is, and they said well, the government said they were firing into the air. that isn t the way it steamed to me, and, you know, with people injured, i don t think that was the case. but that s their line. ben, you re in the east. you were with anti-government protesters and armed fighters now, heading toward the oil refinery town. what did you see? reporter: we were outside the town and we saw a truckload and pickup trucks and carloads of fighters, and there are fighters in this country, there are no longer peaceful pro-testers,
to frighten them to go away. to attack the harbor. you frighten your own people. you will kill your own people. no. dropping bombs just to frighten their own people, not bombing, by the way. ben wedeman and their crew were there. reporter: outside the town where this ongoing battle is happening. we watched this libyan air force plane flew overhead. i can tell you exactly what the target was. it was us. it was us and the people all around us, which was, i would say, about 250 individuals, most of them volunteer fighters getting ready to move ahead forward to engage the libyan forces. so i guess, yeah, we were the target. nothing else. in their public statements the gadhafi regime has built itself no credibility during this crisis. gadhafi is repeatedly pla lly bl qaeda. hours after we asked question about what the drugs were, and
security situation change as you make that move? reporter: you know, some people describe this as six million people or so living in libya there. a large percentage, including tripoli, live along the coast of the border there. it s an economic heart land. it has oil refineries. there s a lot of agricultural production in the area as well. as you leave tripoli, you pass those checkpoints on the outskirts. then you get close to where the oil refinery town, now interestingly we didn t get there this time rather than last time. this time they took us around the town to the oil refinery. it appears to be working correctly. officials told us it hadn t been attacked. we drove to the next town.
dead and a hell worse than afghanistan. meanwhile, u.s. warships steamed toward the region entering the suez canal and into the mediterranean all headed to libya. and the battlefield, gadhafi forces attacked the oil refinery town of brega trying to retake the critical port. stephanie gosk is in benghazi with the latest. today he struck back at the east for the first time since opposition forces seized this region of libya. the early morning hours, a 50-truck convoy with mounted machine guns lay siege to the town of brega where there is an oil terminal and an air strip. rebel forces fought back and going back and forth in a fierce battle all day long. there have been air strikes as well, an ammunitions depot has been targeted several times. gadhafi spoke himself in tripoli on state tv reeighting some of the things we ve been hearing from him that this uprising has