On August 23, 2011, rebels armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and backed by NATO warplanes overran Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound, Bab al-Aziziya, ending the North African dictator’s nearly forty-two-year reign. Within days, ordinary Libyans were visiting Bab al-Azizya en masse, wide-eyed tourists in the seat of power of their own land. Signs reading “Down, Down U.S.A” and “We love our Leader Muammar Qaddafi forever” greeted them at the door – perhaps posted during the revolt, perhaps of older provenance. Inside the rubble-strewn compound, visitors found the iconic House of Resistance, which was bombed by the United States in 1986 in retaliation for Qaddafi’s terrorism and then preserved in its ruined state by Libya’s self-proclaimed “Brother-Leader” as a symbolic reminder of his country’s oppression by the “great powers.”

Six months earlier, almost to the day, Qaddafi had stood there, in front of the very same House of Resistance, and delivered a bloodcurdling speech promising to crush a week-old revolt in Libya’s second largest city and eastern hub, Benghazi. With rebel forces on the verge of victory, the end was now near. Qaddafi would flee to his hometown of Sirte, and the fighting against him would drag on through October, but for all intents and purposes, with his compound now in rebel hands, his four decades of dictatorship were over.