Gaddafi's ghost town after the loyalists retreat

Until last month, the town of Tawarga was home to 10,000 civilians.

But as dusk fell over it last week, the apartment blocks stretched, black and dead, into the distance, and the only things moving were sheep.

This pro-Gaddafi settlement has been emptied of its people, vandalised and partly burned by rebel forces. The Sunday Telegraph was the first to visit the scene of what appears to be the first major reprisal against supporters of the former regime.

"We gave them thirty days to leave," said Abdul el-Mutalib Fatateth, the officer in charge of the rebel garrison in Tawarga, as his soldiers played table-football outside one of the empty apartment blocks. "We said if they didn't go, they would be conquered and imprisoned. Every single one of them has left, and we will never allow them to come back."

The people of Tawarga and their neighbours in Misurata, 20 miles down the road, were on opposite sides in Libya's revolution. As the besieged Misuratans bravely fought to save their town from the Gaddafi forces encircling it, some of the artillery fire raining down on them came from Tawarga.

"We urged them not to fight us, because they are our brothers, but they insisted on fighting," said Mr Fatateth. But he also appeared to concede that the civilians of the town had been caught in the middle, saying: "Gaddafi used to take the Tawarga people and use them as human shields when his troops approached Misurata."

Rebels say that civilian volunteers from Tawarga were with Gaddafi troops when they ransacked dozens of houses in Misurata in March. There are also claims, impossible to verify, of rape and other abuses by Tawargans. Mr Fatateth said that one young captured rebel had been tied up and used as a doormat in the town.

Whatever the truth, there appears little room for reconciliation in this corner of the new Libya. For the first time in the country's revolution, we saw large numbers of houses, and virtually every shop, systematically vandalised, looted or set on fire.

The inhabitants fled so fast that many had not time to take with them the photos of their own children. They, and other small personal treasures – a Barbie doll, a Calvin Klein T-shirt – still lay on the floors. Some valuables, such as televisions and stereos, had been stolen. But rather more often, they had just been smashed.

Even the local hospital had been vandalised. The beds were dragged out of the wards and ripped. Glass in the windows and doors was broken. Medicines, forms and computer printouts were scattered along the corridors, and the doctors and nurses had vanished with everyone else. Outside, you had to watch your step: anti-personnel mines lay on the pavement.

The clue to it all lay in the green Gaddafi flags still flying from many of the houses. There is no disputing that this was a centre of support for the regime. But that support appears to have been at different levels.

Some of the houses had apparently been used for fighting, with bullet holes in the walls. The majority of looted or vandalised properties, however, had not.

Mr Fatateh said that some had been taken over by pro-Gaddafi militias after the civilians had fled, and a two-day battle had ensued with rebel forces on the 10th and 11th of August.

And as so often in Libya, there is also a racist undercurrent. Many Tawargas, though neither immigrants nor Gaddafi's much-ballyhooed African mercenaries, are descended from slaves, and are darker than most Libyans.

Along the road that leads into Tawargha, the Misurata Brigade has painted a slogan. It is, it says, "the brigade for purging slaves [and] black skin."

"We have met Tawargas in detention, taken from their homes simply for being Tawargas," said Diana Eltahawy, a researcher for Amnesty International who is currently in Libya. "They have told us that they have been forced to kneel and beaten with sticks."

Even fleeing is not, it seems, enough to save you. Tawargas have also been arrested at checkpoints, seized from hospitals and detained on the street. "They are really afraid. They have nowhere to go," said Ms Eltahawy.

On Aug 29, Amnesty says it saw a Tawarga patient at the Tripoli Central Hospital being taken by three men, one of them armed, for "questioning in Misurata". Amnesty was also told that at least two other Tawarga men had vanished after being taken for questioning from Tripoli hospitals.

One 45-year-old flight dispatcher and his uncle were arrested by armed rebels while out shopping in the al-Firnaj area of Tripoli on 28 August.

They were taken to the Military Council headquarters at Mitiga Airport just east of the capital. The men told Amnesty they were beaten with the butt of a rifle and received death threats. Both were held for several days in Mitiga and are still detained in Tripoli.

Many Tawargas are now cowering in makeshift camps around Tripoli. But even there, they are not safe. In one camp, a group of armed men drove in and arrested about a dozen Tawargas. Their fate is still unknown. Another woman at the camp said her husband left the camp to run an errand in central Tripoli, about a week ago. She hasn't seen him since.

"If we go back to Tawarga, we will be at the mercy of the Misratah brigade," said one refugee, who declined to be named. "When they entered our town in mid-Ramadan [mid-August] and shelled it, we fled just carrying the clothes on our backs. I don't know what happened to our homes and belongings. Now I am here in this camp, my son is ill and I am too afraid to go to the hospital in town. I don't know what will happen to us now."

Any rebel abuses pale by comparison with those of the regime. People who saw the charred skeletons of prisoners, machine-gunned and burned by Gaddafi's retreating Khamis Brigade, or who witnessed the indiscriminate bombardment of Misurata, will not quickly forget the scenes.

But old Libyan habits of repression may be starting to reassert themselves.

And it is not the first time that pro-Gaddafi civilians have suffered reprisals. In July, as rebels swept through the Nafusa mountains, the village of Qawalish was subjected to a very similar fate. Many of the people there, pensioners and young children, simply could not have been part of any military action for the regime.

Back in ghostly Tawarga, there is little sympathy for the victims' plight.

Mr Fatateth said: "The military council will decide what will happen to the buildings. But over our dead bodies will the Tawargas return."

Ibrahim al-Halbous, another local rebel commander, put it even more simply.

"Tawarga no longer exists," he said.