No surrender, no going back...

So, the wily yet ruthless Guide of the Libyan Revolution was still in town and keen on taming his rebellious capital. Dont't believe the dogs in the media (who had announced his nocturnal escape to Venezuela). I'm still here, he boasted, appearing on Libyan state television, beneath an unwieldy gray umbrella...
The Guide unleashed his special forces and mercenaries into Tripolii's streets, while pro-Gaddafi supporters invested the capitlal's Green Square. Snipers hovered over the demonstrators on rooftops.
Groups of Land Cruisers with masked men wearing military uniforms with heavy guns just passed in front of my street heading to downtown. They are the regime's guards. God help us tonight. Helicopters are shooting down on people on the ground in Tripoli, one resident told the WP.
Libyan airforce jets also dropped small bombs on the protesting crowds, as one witness told the NYT.
I can hear some shots and and some airplanes...We are expecting a disaster tonight. I don't know if I'm going to be alive tomorrow, a Tripoli resident told McClatchy.
In the Fashloum district of Tripoli, residents erected barricades to protect their neighborhood.
In the Tajura area, dead bodies still littered the streets; wounded protesters lay there as well.
Airstrikes and the targeting of ambulances prevented their evacuation.
Some witnesses told the WP that mercenaries riding in ambulances were shooting demonstrators in the streets...
In short, it was an obscene amount of gunfire, one witness recollected. They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction.
An untold number of demonstrators were killed. One source counted 61 dead in Tripoli, according to Aljazeera.        
The bloodbath sparked worldwide condemnation.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, declared that the Gaddafi regime's tactics against demonstrators amount to crimes against humanity.
The prominent suni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who returned to Egypt last week after fifty years in exile, and spoke to the two-million-strong crowd on Tahrir Square Friday, issued a fatwa urging Libyan soldiers to turn on Gaddafi. I am issuing a fatwa to kill Gaddafi. To any army soldier, to any man who can pull the trigger and kill this man to do so, he declared on Aljazeera.    
The Guide finally addressed the nation this afternoon in a televised speech.
He refused to make any concessions, however and dismissed the demonstrators as rats and sick people.
A small group of young people who have taken drugs have attacked police stations like mice. They have taken advantage of this peace and stability. However, it is not their fault these young people; they tried to imitate what happened in Tunisia. However, there is a small group of sick people that has infiltrated in cities that are circulating drugs and money, the Guide affirmed.
He urged his fellow Libyans to eradicate these troublemakers for the good of the nation.
Go out to the streets, chase them, take away their arms, arrest them, prosecute them, hand them to security. The rebels are a bunch of terrorists, he claimed. He also asked them to demonstrate in support of the regime tomorrow...
More ominously, he announced that he had only begun to resist. I haven't even started giving the orders to use bullets, he said, and warned that he would cleanse Libya house by house, if the uprising did not end. 
Though he did disclose that he would reform the government, he nevertheless vowed that he was going to die here as a martyr.
Gaddafi thus seems intent on doing whatever it takes to save his regime, even if that entails waging war on his own people..
His opponents have no illusions on this question.
He will never let go of his power. This is a dictator, an emperor. He will die before he gives an inch. But we are no longer afraid. We are ready to die after what we have seen, one protester, Abdel Rahman, told the NYT.
The only thing we can do now is not give up: no surrender, no going back. We will die anyway, whether we like it or not. It is clear that they don't care whether we live or not, Mari Al Mahry, a resident of Al Bayda, in eastern Libya, told The Guardian
Gunfire was heard in the streets of the capital after Gaddafi's speech...
Yet, the butcher of Tripoli is doomed.
The regime's dignitaries are bailing out, one after the other...
The east of the country has fallen...
The support of the tribes is disintegrating...
The only question remaining is the following:
how many will he slaughter before Libya is finally free?  
(the photograph of Gaddafi addressing the nation is by AP photo/Libya State Television via APTN)