Tripoli:
NATO member nations approved Thursday evening a plan under which the alliance will assume command of the no-fly zone over Libya, while allied warplanes delivered a ferocious round of airstrikes on Libyan ground forces that seems to have begun to shift momentum from the troops loyal to Colonel Moammar el-Gaddafi to the rebels opposing him.
The secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told reporters that the NATO action did not mean an end to the coalition's operations. "At this moment, there will still be a coalition operation and a NATO operation," he said.
A decision on NATO assuming broader authority for the campaign may come in a matter of days, he added.
The groundwork for the deal was reached after a four-way telephone call between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the foreign ministers of Turkey, France and Britain, the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, told Turkish reporters in Ankara.
Earlier on Thursday a French Rafale fighter jet fired on a Libyan warplane that had been detected by reconaissance aircraft flying above the embattled city of Misurata, the French Defense Ministry said in a statement. The plane was hit by a missile shortly after landing at a nearby military airbase, the Defense Ministry said.
In Misurata, rebels say they are feeling reinvigorated by a second night of American and European air strikes against the Gaddafi forces that have besieged them. The rebels say they continue to battle a handful of Gaddafi gunmen in the city but that the armored units and artillery surrounding the city appeared to have pulled back, their supply and communication lines cut off by the air strikes.
A spokesman for the rebels told Reuters that their fighters had killed 30 snipers in Misurata on Thursday and destroyed the staircases of buildings being used by the gunmen, stranding them there. Thart report could not be independently confirmed.
The Gaddafi warships that had closed the port have left, the rebels say, opening a vital supply outlet and allowing them to make arrangements with the international aid group Doctors Without Borders to evacuate 50 of their wounded by boat to Malta on Sunday. Mohamed, a rebel spokesman in Misrata, said that only two residents were wounded Thursday, following 109 deaths over the previous six days.
"His last name was withheld to protect his family from reprisals, and he spoke by satellite phone powered by a hospital generator, since the city remains without electricity, water or telecommunications.
In a news conference, Khalid Kaim, the deputy foreign minister, denied the rebel claims of military gains, saying that the Gaddafi government had controlled Misurata for a week "except for pockets of violence." He said that utility companies had turned on the power and water, and faulted the rebels and international air strikes for turning them off.
Mr. Kaim also denied that French fighters had destroyed a Gaddafi warplane, saying that no Libyan military aircraft had flown in days in observance of the United Nations resolution.
In what was potentially one of the first signs of breakdown in discipline among the Gaddafi forces, rebels near the eastern city of Ajdabiya said they were in negotiations with a unit of pro-Gaddafi troops who have offered to abandon their position and withdraw further west. The unit, stationed at the northern entrance to the city, had lost contact with its commanders, a rebel spokesman, Colonel Ahmed Omar Bani, said.
The negotiations, which were being conducted through a local imam, had hit a snag on the issue of whether the troops would keep their weaponry and withdraw further west or simply surrender, as the rebels were demanding.
The rebels have made inflated claims in the past, and these reports have not been corroborated by independent sources. In addition, the Gaddafi forces have backed away before, only to return with renewed fury, particularly in Misurata and, earlier, in Zawiya.
It was not immediately clear how the NATO agreement reached Thursday would work in practical terms. In recent days, NATO leaders have discussed a plan under which political leadership of the mission would still be controlled by key NATO members involved in the campaign, along with representatives of the Arab League and African Union, as demanded by France, which did not want to turn over the direction of the campaign to the American-dominated NATO alliance. To that end, foreign ministers of key countries, including France, Britain and the United States, will meet on Tuesday in London.
At the same time, the NATO military structure, which is used to running a many-nation campaign, as in Afghanistan, would eventually take over the military command and control of the Libyan fighting, on the model of Afghanistan. There, too, a coalition known as ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, is in charge of the campaign, which is coordinated and commanded through NATO military structures.
The Turks, who are angry with the French for excluding them from the mission planning last weekend in Paris, have expressed concern that the campaign could exceed the limits of the Security Council resolution authorizing it and lead to a larger war including ground troops. Turkish concerns were apparently allayed in the telephone call.
As the air campaign entered its sixth day on Thursday, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, sounded a note of confidence, telling reporters in Paris, "The destruction of Gaddafi's military capacity is a matter of days or weeks, certainly not months."
He added: "You can't expect us to achieve our objective in just five days." France was at the forefront, along with Britain, of efforts to mobilize support for the no-fly zone over Libya which was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. It is also the only Western power to have formally recognized the Libyan opposition based in the eastern city of Benghazi as the representative of the Libyan people.
At a news conference on Thursday, Libyan officials in Tripoli acknowledged for the first time that the residents of Misurata had been living for days without water, electricity or telecommunications. But they attributed the cuts to technical problems and blamed rebels for blocking the government's ability to enter the town center to make repairs. President Obama demanded that the Gaddafi government restore power and water in an ultimatum before the air strikes began.
American military officials said that the first stage of the military campaign, when more than 160 Tomahawk missiles fired from ships at sea largely destroyed Colonel Gaddafi's air defenses and air force, had made the skies safe for coalition warplanes. The allies were conducting stepped up attacks on ground troops, military officials said, without fear of being shot down.
"We are interdicting and putting the pressure on Gaddafi's forces that are attacking population centers," said Rear Adm. Gerard P. Hueber, the chief of staff for the American-led operational command, speaking to reporters by audio link from a ship in the Mediterranean.
Admiral Hueber said the United States and its allies were striking at Colonel Gaddafi's ground forces in both Misurata in the west and Ajdabiya in the east. Air attacks in such urban areas, which have the potential for many civilian casualties, meant the military was operating in "an extremely complex and difficult environment," he said.
The goal was to "interdict those forces before they enter the city, cut off their lines of communication and cut off their command and control," the admiral said.
As long as Colonel Gaddafi's forces were fighting in and around cities where the allies had ordered them to back off, he said, coalition attacks would continue. He said the allies are in communication with the Libyan units about what they needed to do, where to go and how to arrange their forces to avoid attack, but there was "no indication" that the government's ground forces were following the instructions.
Admiral Hueber also said that the coalition was communicating with rebel forces. But later, when he was pressed on whether the United States was telling rebels not to go down certain roads because there would be airstrikes there, he said he had misspoken. American military officials have said there are no "official communications" with the rebels, which remains a delicate issue. Contact with the rebels would reflect a direct American military intervention in the civil war of another country.
Obama administration officials continued to say that although they were not specifically seeking to attack Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan leader might be ousted from power by his own family or inner circle. "I think there are any number of possible outcomes here, and no one is in a position to predict them," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, said during an official visit to Cairo.
Both Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cited defections within Colonel Gaddafi's ruling circle and alluded to divisions within his family, although they provided no details.
"We've heard about other people close to him reaching out to people that they know around the world -- Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America, beyond, saying: 'What do we do? How do we get out of this? What happens next?' " Mrs. Clinton told Diane Sawyer of ABC News on Tuesday night.
On Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton cited reports of others now considering defecting, though she did not elaborate.
"We've been hearing a lot of things from many different sources," she said at the State Department after a meeting with the foreign minister of Morocco, Taieb Fassi Fihri. "But what is very clear is that Gaddafi has lost his legitimacy to govern and the confidence of his people."
Mrs. Clinton defended the operation so far. "I know that the nightly news cannot cover a humanitarian crisis that thankfully did not happen," she said, "but it is important to remember that many, many Libyans are safer today because the international community took action."