In Bani Walid, another Gaddafi stronghold, there were chaotic scenes as injured fighters were rushed to a field hospital. They say they were ambushed by pro-Gaddafi forces 20 kilometres outside the town.

This is raising fears that Libya could be facing a protracted insurgency of the sort that has played out in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pro-Gaddafi forces still hold a swathe of the country along the central coast and into the southern desert, more than three weeks after the fall of Tripoli and their leader’s exit.

Interim government forces met stiff resistance in Mahruqua in the south. They eventually prevailed and set about destroying the civic symbols of Gaddafi’s rule including a monument to the deposed leader’s Green Book, the document outlining his political philosophy.

At this time, a military spokesman for Libya's transitional government says revolutionaries have no certain information about Moammar Gadhafi's location. The spokesman Col. Ahmed Omar Bani says he thinks anybody who knew where Gadhafi was would turn him in for the nearly $2 million bounty set by the revolutionaries.