NORTH OF BANI WALID, Libya (Reuters) ? Fighting resumed in the besieged Libyan town of Bani Walid on Saturday after diehard loyalists of Muammar Gaddafi dug in there shelled a key checkpoint controlled by transitional government forces on its northern outskirts.
A Reuters correspondent outside Bani Walid watched a column of National Transitional Council pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft machineguns and fresh ammunition rushing back into the interior desert town as dusk fell.
The day before, NTC fighters seeking to capture one of the fallen, fugitive Libyan leader's last bastions had beat an embarrassing retreat from Bani Walid under withering heavy weapons fire from his loyalists.
"There is heavy fighting. We are fighting back with mortars. The Gaddafi militiamen provoked us. And we went into the city to fight them," said NTC fighter Younis Mohamed as he was reloading his truck's machine gun to go back into battle.
"Gaddafi forces attacked the checkpoint so our troops went in. There is a lot of fighting inside the city right now," Abdullah Kenshil, the senior NTC official responsible for Bani Walid, told Reuters.
NTC fighters had spent much of the day grumbling about their setback the day before as mortar rounds from Banin Walid's defenders whistled by them, only aggravating the anti-Gaddafi forces' humiliation.
NTC forces had cooled their heels outside the town, some 180 km (110 miles) south of the Libyan capital Tripoli, through more than two weeks of abortive negotiations for its surrender.
They were finally given the order to launch a full-on military assault. But after hours of heavy fighting on Friday, NTC men poured back out of Bani Walid almost as fast as they had gone in, saying they had been ordered to retreat after facing stout resistance.
That was a tough setback to a new government trying, almost a month after its forces overran Tripoli, to extend its control over all of Libya and take remaining strongholds of the man who ruled the North African state eccentrically for 42 years.
Late on Saturday morning, NTC reinforcements began to arrive from around Libya and fighters said another 1,000 men from Tripoli and other parts of the country were on their way.
(Reporting by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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