The advance on Tripoli begins on Sunday, August 21, in Zawiya, a city of 250,000 on the coastal road, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Tripoli. A column of rebel combat vehicles stretches for a kilometer along the road, heading east. It is a ragtag force that includes cars filled with fighters and the rebels' combat vehicles: pickup trucks with machine guns, rocket launchers and rapid-fire guns mounted on the beds. Most of the rebels are from the Nafusa Mountains, and they are traveling in groups identifiable by their stickers, groups like the Zintan Brigade and the Tripoli Brigade. With about 2,000 men Uraibi's group, the Jadu Brigade, is one of the largest.

Whenever the convoy comes to a stop in the scorching heat, the pickups spread out from the road, firing at individual buildings or groups of soldiers. Then it continues on its way in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes, leaving the air smelling of burnt gunpowder. A thin man with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing a green canvas uniform, squats by the side of the road. Ali A., a businessman from the western German city of Giessen, is taking a short break from the war.

The war began for him 22 years ago, he says, when he fled through the desert. His rage against the regime began to grow in Germany, where he managed to get by, first as an asylum seeker and later as a German citizen. But he felt disconnected from the life he was living there, gleaning bits and pieces of news about his real life in Libya from friends in the country. He prefers not to see his last name in print, especially in SPIEGEL, fearing that the German authorities could decide to prosecute him for killing people in Libya. The man, who operates a rocket launcher, has no idea how many people he has killed.

As a young man living in Jansur, a Tripoli suburb, he printed flyers with a group of friends. They distributed the flyers outside schools at night, demanded more democracy and protested against Gadhafi's senseless war in Chad, where more than 7,500 Libyans were killed by the time it ended in 1987.

Gadhafi's secret police tracked down the small group, and one day they came to his parents' house to arrest him. He wasn't home, but he happened to call the house while the men were there. His brother told him about the police and Ali, fearing that he would be sent to prison for years, never even went home that day, leaving his wife and their three-month-old daughter behind.

"I didn't know that it would take 22 years," he says, speaking German with a faint regional dialect from the western state of Hesse.

Only three days after the uprising began in Benghazi, Ali closed his business in Giessen. He flew to Tunisia and crossed the border into the mountains, where he joined the Nafusa rebels and then joined another group of rebels from Jansur. The group has now formed its own brigade, the Jansur Brigade, probably the smallest with only 40 men.

He knows that his daughter now has a child of her own. But neither his wife nor his daughter know that he is coming, that he is a soldier in this war and that he is killing others so that he can return to life in Jansur.

Suddenly his comrades call out to him. It's time to move on. They are approaching a bridge where Gadhafi's soldiers are waiting with tanks. He climbs behind the steering wheel of the black Ford F-150. The pickup is camouflaged with mud, and other rebels are now manning the rocket launcher on the bed, which they take turns operating. "I can see them," he says. But the men quickly lose sight of one another in this chaotic war, and in his case it's because his only means of communication is a German mobile phone that doesn't work here in Libya. He accelerates and the group starts driving toward the rumbling sound of gunfire near the bridge, where only fighters dare to go.

As Abu Bakr Uraibi will later recount, his group with the Jadu Brigade is nearby-- and not moving from the spot. Uraibi has learned a lot in recent months.

Shortly after the uprising began, he took his wife and five children and drove home to Jadu. He was afraid that Gadhafi's troops would attack the towns in the Nafusa Mountains, and he knew immediately which side he would take. The people living in the mountains are not Arabs but Berbers, the original inhabitants of Libya, with their own language and writing that looks like primitive rock drawings. "Gadhafi always discriminated against Berbers," says Uraibi. "He didn't trust us."

Uraibi is doing relatively well, he says, but he is fighting for the future. "Gadhafi ruined our country, the healthcare system, the schools. Our oil makes us as rich as the sheikhs on the Gulf. But where is the money? And why do we isolate ourselves? We could have tourists, we could travel and we could be open."