Al-Azhari, who spoke to The Associated Press by phone from the city, said one officer told rebels he was ordered "to turn Zintan into a desert to be smashed and flattened." Resentment against Gadhafi runs high in Zintan because it was the hometown of many of the detained army officers who took part in a failed coup in 1993.

Ghoga said 16 people died Tuesday and Wednesday in Zintan, which has no electricity or landlines.

The withdrawal of the tanks from Misrata and Zintan was a rare success for the rebels, who are struggling daily against Gadhafi foe know it will take time. We need a government to liberate the eastern territories. It was just because there was a vacuum. We don't have political experience. We are learning as the days go by. Now there is an understanding that we need a structure."

Details from the rebels were sketchy and sometimes contradictory. Ghoga said Jibril was appointed to lead the new body about a month ago, and that it cannot be called a government because rebels do not control the whole country. "This is a working body for an emergency period only," he said.

Gadhafi, meanwhile, was defiant in his first public appearance in a week late Tuesday.

State TV said he spoke from his Bab Al-Aziziya residential compound, the same one hit by a cruise missile Sunday night. "In the short term, we'll beat them, in the long term, we'll beat them," he said.

Libyan state TV showed footage it labeled as "the crusader imperialism bombs civilians" _ a house that was demolished and burning. Weeping women slapped their faces and heads in grief while men carried a barefoot girl covered in blood on a stretcher to an ambulance. A man screamed "a whole family was killed."

Gadhafi's regime has alleged that dozens of civilians have been killed in the international bombardment. The Pentagon on Wednesday said there was no evidence of that.