The rebel forces were seeking to regroup but needed reinforcements, Mohamad Samir, an army colonel fighting with the rebels, told The Associated Press.
On Sunday, troops loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had attacked rebel troops in the coastal town of Bin Jawwad using tanks, helicopters and fighter planes, and pushed them east, stalling, for the moment, hopes by the antigovernment fighters of a steady march toward Tripoli.
That attack began at about 9 a.m. on Sunday, said rebel fighters, who had to retreat down the main coastal road under a barrage of artillery shells, missiles and sniper bullets. Outgunned, the rebels fanned out in the desert and fought back, only to be forced to retreat again.
By 9 p.m., the road east from the city was full of fleeing rebel cars, including several pickup trucks mounted with heavy weapons. More than a dozen ambulances, ferrying wounded and dead rebel fighters, sped toward a hospital in a nearby town. Ambulance drivers and doctors said at least 10 people had been killed, though they expected that number to rise once they were able to reach Bin Jawwad.
A journalist for France24 television was wounded during the fighting, according to a photographer who saw him at a local hospital.
Outside of nearby Ras Lanuf, weary fighters gathered at gas stations, drank milk distributed by volunteers and tore at loaves of bread. Mahmoud Bilkhair, an army second lieutenant fighting with the rebels, sat in his car with other fighters, exhausted and staring out the window.
“We’re trying,” he said. “We’re not advancing. We can’t do anything about it.” But he and other fighters said they would regroup and return to Bin Jawwad.
The rebel defeat, just a day after they celebrated a major victory in taking the oil port at Ras Lanuf, fit into the emerging, grueling rhythm of a conflict where the combatants claim no clear advantage and fight, repeatedly, over a handful of prizes.
In the east, the rebels, full of enthusiasm but short on training and organization, are trying to capture Surt, a stronghold of Colonel Qaddafi that blocks the rebel path to Tripoli. They are also fighting to hold onto the city of Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, where they have accused the loyalists of committing a massacre.
Government troops, having ceded large, strategic parts of the country in recent days, are better armed but still on the defensive as they try to undo rebel gains.
The standoff in Zawiyah continued there on Sunday, a day after forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi waged a heavy assault toward the city center, then pulled back to close off all roads out.
Rebels in nearby towns said mobile phone service to Zawiyah had been cut off completely and landline service was intermittent, making it hard to gather information. Secondhand reports through rebel networks on Sunday indicated Libyan Army tanks had once again moved into the center of the town.
An hour before dawn on Sunday, Tripoli also erupted in gunfire, the sounds of machine guns and heavier artillery echoing through the capital. It was unclear what set off the gunfire, but quickly, Qaddafi supporters took to the streets, waving green flags and firing guns into the air. Crowds converged on Green Square for a rally, with many people still shooting skyward.
Refugees continued to flee to neighboring countries, sometimes with tragic consequences. The authorities in Crete said that at least three Bangladeshi evacuees from Libya died Sunday after they tried to swim from a Greek ferry toward the island.
As of Friday, about 192,000 people had fled the country, according to the International Organization for Migration. Of those, 104,000 people had crossed into Tunisia and about 87,000 had fled to Egypt. More than 5,000 people are stranded at Libya’s border with Egypt, the organization said, including many Bangladeshis and Sub-Saharan Africans.
Eight British Special Forces soldiers were briefly taken captive by Libyan rebel forces in the east of the country, according to British news reports on Sunday.
The soldiers, from the elite Special Air Service, had been part of a team escorting a British diplomat to meet with Libyan rebels, according to The Sunday Times of London, which first reported on the incident. The newspaper cited anonymous Libyan and British sources and said the men had been held at a military base over the weekend.
Further reports later Sunday suggested that the eight men had been released and were aboard the Cumberland, a Royal Navy ship off the coast of Libya.
The British foreign secretary, William Hague, confirmed in a statement that “a small British diplomatic team” in Benghazi, a rebel-held city in eastern Libya, tried to “initiate contacts with the opposition” but “experienced difficulties, which have now been satisfactorily resolved.”
“They have now left Libya.” Mr. Hague said. The government declined to immediately provide further details.
As rebel leaders have pressed their efforts to form a shadow government in recent days, the focus of the revolutionaries, and their supporters, has shifted from Benghazi toward the fighters making their way west.
After successfully capturing Ras Lanuf, hundreds, and perhaps more than 1,000 rebel fighters were in Bin Jawwad overnight on Saturday. They managed to briefly push farther west, but came under a fierce attack about 9 a.m., the fighters said.
For most of the day, the battle raged in a small area east of the city. Rebel fighters fanned out along the sides of a road, sending squad-size units into the rocky terrain and small hills along the two-lane road in an effort to keep the loyalists from flanking them.
By nightfall, government forces seemed to have firm control of a small town and factory about a half mile east of Bin Jawwad. With mortars, heavy machine guns and tanks, they bombarded rebel positions for hours.
Air strikes pounded the area through the day, and attack helicopters fired on rebel gatherings. There were lingering questions about the intentions of some of the pilots, who seemed to have missed easy targets in recent days. Early on Saturday, a warplane dropped a bomb east of Ras Lanuf, but it did not explode. Later, the plane bombed the same position again, but missed.
On the outskirts of Ras Lanuf on Sunday, the bodies of two pilots could be seen in the wreckage of their downed jet, which the rebels claimed they shot down on Saturday. The debris was scattered for hundreds of yards around the pilots, and one of them appeared to still be wearing his Libyan Air Force uniform.
In interviews, rebel fighters said the loyalists were using residents of Bin Jawwad as human shields, making women stand next to their houses. The rebels said they held back their fire as a result. But witnesses said that the rebels seemed to use every weapon at their disposal, including Katyusha rockets, multiple grenade launchers and antiaircraft guns as they tried to dislodge the loyalists. It was not enough.
Rebels have said they have been attacked repeatedly by foreign mercenaries hired by Colonel Qaddafi. But after the battle in Bin Jawwad, several rebel fighters said that though they saw mercenaries, many of the soldiers they faced were Libyans, wearing army uniforms. They said that for much of the day, it had been hard to determine who was firing at them, as they ran from repeated shellings.
As the rebels fell back, witnesses reported seeing bodies on the road. Rebels gave their own estimates of the dead: one man said he had seen two bodies, another said he had seen seven. Throughout the afternoon, there were rumors that reinforcements would be coming from Benghazi to help retake Bin Jawwad.
As the rebels retreated, they stopped to pick up about a half-dozen Filipino factory workers from the small town as the government advanced. The workers got into a pickup truck and were driven to safety.
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