Sirte is a coastal city in central Libya, historically associated with Muammar Gaddafi — his birthplace and the site of his final stand. In Damiri, it appears through Osama Alfitory's first-person account (EP 10) of the battle that ended the 2011 revolution.
In October 2011, Sirte was the last city under Gaddafi's control. Revolutionary forces besieged it for weeks. Osama Alfitory was embedded there as a fixer, working alongside international journalists during the final days of fighting. The city was devastated — buildings shelled, infrastructure destroyed, civilians caught between forces.
On 20 October 2011, fighters captured Gaddafi near Sirte. Osama was at a mass grave site when people started shouting "we've got Gaddafi." A fighter ran past holding a gold-embossed pistol. Osama reached the field hospital — a chaotic, violent scene. He saw Gaddafi being beaten. He did not feel joy. He described the moment in terms of numbness: "I was used to corpses by then."
He later interviewed Mansour Dhao, one of Gaddafi's last close guards. Dhao revealed that Gaddafi and his son Mutassim were estranged in the final days. Gaddafi had been reading the Quran obsessively, with no internet, no laptop charger, relying on a satellite phone to call someone in Syria who relayed news from Arabic television. When family members had once asked him to step down, his reply — word for word — was: "I stepped down in 1978," referring to the Jamahiriya declaration.
See: Gaddafis Capture at Sirte
Sirte's destruction became a symbol of the revolution's cost. A city reduced to rubble to capture one man. The numbness Osama described — functional during combat, corrosive afterwards — later surfaced as PTSD. The images from Sirte were among those his mind filed away and returned to him in nightmares four years later.