BENGHAZI (Reuters) – NATO air strikes in Libya are being hampered by Muammar Gaddafi's forces hunkering down near civilians, France said on Wednesday after rebels accused the West of doing little to stop his siege of Misrata.

NATO officials have said their six-day-old air campaign is now focused on Misrata, under daily shelling and sniper fire as the only big population center in western Libya where a popular revolt against Gaddafi has not been suppressed.
The head of Libya's rebel army accused NATO of being too slow to order air strikes to protect civilians, allowing Gaddafi's forces to slaughter the people of Misrata.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said NATO operations were becoming more complicated in having to deal with the fact that Gaddafi's forces had frequently deployed close to civilians as tactical protection against air strikes.
“We've formally requested that there be no collateral damage for the civilian population,” he told France Info radio. “That obviously makes operations more difficult.”
He said he would address the issue shortly with the head of NATO, adding that Misrata's ordeal “cannot go on” but that “the situation is unclear. There is a risk of getting bogged down.”
Fattah Younes, head of the rebel forces, said in their eastern stronghold city of Benghazi that NATO had let them down.
“NATO blesses us every now and then with a bombardment here and there, and is letting the people of Misrata die every day. NATO has disappointed us,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
Frustration at Gaddafi tactics
Echoing Juppe, the head of France's armed forces voiced frustration at the pace of NATO operations.
“I would like things to go faster, but as you are well aware, protecting civilians means not firing anywhere near them,” Admiral Edouard Guillaud said in an interview on Europe 1 radio. “That is precisely the difficulty.”
He said NATO forces were concentrating their firepower on Misrata where rebels were holding the port zone, while trying to pre-empt any transport of weapons toward Tripoli, the capital and Gaddafi's power base.
Warplanes from Arab states Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were taking part in these missions, Guillaud added.
NATO now spearheads air strikes targeting Gaddafi's military infrastructure and polices a no-fly zone and an arms embargo, but is wary of hitting civilians in the North African state.
The alliance has denied that the pace of air strikes has abated since it took over the task from a smaller big power coalition of the United States, Britain and France on March 31.
“The assessment is that we have taken out 30 percent of the military capacity of Gaddafi,” Brigadier General Mark van Uhm, a senior NATO staff officer, said in Brussels.
But van Uhm said Gaddafi was using human shields and hiding his armor in populated areas, curbing NATO's ability to strike. “When human beings are used as shields we don't engage.”
Younes said the area where Gaddafi troops were did not include civilians, and Abdelsalam in Misrata agreed:
Photo: French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe
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