Residents: South Libya tribal fighting continues

A senior Libyan government official said Friday that warring tribes in the south have brokered a cease-fire after five days of deadly clashes, but residents said the fighting continues and is inching toward another city.        

The conflicting reports from the oasis of Sabha some 640 kilometers south of Tripoli show the isolation of Libya's desert communities, where tribes with a history of rivalry often live side by side.        

The fighting in Sabha resembles an earlier outbreak of inter-tribal violence in February in the oasis of Kufra, over 900 kilometers to the east. In both places, the clashes pitted Arab tribes that reportedly had close connections to ousted dictator Moammar Gadhafi against the African Tabu tribe, close to the rebels that overthrew him. In both places, authorities struggled to move troops across the hundreds of kilometers of desert highway to keep the peace.        

As of Thursday, five days of fighting in Sabha left more than 50 dead, according to the United Nation Support Mission in Libya, as the tribes exchanged fire with automatic rifles, mortars, and rockets.        

Deputy chairman of the governing National Transitional Council Abdel-Majid Seif al-Nasr, a Sabha native, said that a cease-fire was signed Thursday and that the city was now quiet, with hundreds of ex-rebel militia from other cities pouring into the oasis to quell the violence.