“We must resist these enemy rats, who will be defeated thanks to the armed struggle. Leave your homes and liberate Tripoli,” he said in a new defiant audio message on Thursday, AFP reported.

“Do not fear the enemy and the bombardment. Liberate Tripoli from the foreigners and traitors,” Gaddafi noted in the recording broadcast on loyalist TV channels.

The embattled ruler also called on all Libyan tribes to expel what he called foreign agents from the country.

Libya has been the scene of intense fighting between regime troops and revolutionary fighters since a revolution seeking to topple Gaddafi began in mid-February.

This week, Tripoli came under the control of the opposition fighters, who also captured Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziyah compound in the capital. His whereabouts, however, is yet to be known.

Around 1,000 opposition forces have surrounded 10 buildings near the compound, facing heavy resistance from the buildings.

Fighting was also reported elsewhere throughout Tripoli.

Gaddafi’s defected former Prime Minister Abdessalam Jalloud said the ruler is either holed up in southern Tripoli or has fled to the desert.

Jalloud added that in the first scenario, Gaddafi would remain hidden “until roads reopen and then he will emerge perhaps disguised as a woman or something else to leave” the capital.

“The second possibility is that he already fled a while ago and is either at the border with Algeria, or in [the northern or west-central Libyan cities of] Sirte or Sabha, and he will then cross the desert,” the ex-premier said.

AGB/HN