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By Libya Herald reporters.
Benghazi, 18 August 2015:
This evening the sound of Grad rockets reverberated in Benghazi as the army continued a . . .[restrict]substantial counterattack after losing considerable ground to a surprise IS thrust from its enclave in Sabri.
Details of the battle earlier today are unclear but IS fighters were able to push more than a kilometre north-west from Sabri through the Zrairia district into Al-Thama where they came close to seizing a strategic bridge.
The three-hour attack was met with repeated air strikes from Air Force Mig 21s as well as rocket and cannon fire from attack helicopters, in use in the fighting for the first time in some weeks.
IS forces are understood to have suffered nine dead and one man captured. No figures of their own casualties have been released by the army.
The IS advance over a not insignificant area of ground would appear to bear out the view that they are accomplished street-fighters, in attack as well as defence.
However, the weight of airpower deployed against them today, as last week after their surprise thrust which took the Bou Ashreen building on the edge of Sabri, seems to have been decisive.
The army appears to have mounted an early counter-attack which pushed IS fighters out of all the territory they had overrun in the first part of the day. One source close to the military was predicting that the remaining IS-held area of Sabri was likely to fall.
Such victories have however been forecast before. Indeed, the IS assault today comes after the House of Representatives had just demanded that Libyan army chief of staff Major-General Abdul Razzaq Al-Nazhuri come and explain to them why the fighting in Benghazi was still not over, as the army had been promising for months that it would be. [/restrict]
