Brussels: NATO has agreed to take control of operation Odyssey Dawn for enforcing the no-fly zone in Libya, a NATO official said.
The diplomatic movement came when Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi challenged the no-fly zone only to see one of his few remaining planes destroyed by a French jet.
The official said that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen will shortly go into a meeting of the North Atlantic Council where a formal consensus will be reached for NATO to assume the no-fly zone responsibilities for Libya.
They won’t say it’s a deal until every one of the 28 NATO members in the room agrees with NATO taking over the no-fly zone. “We are very close,” the NATO official said.
The no-fly zone order will go from the NATO Council to Adm. James Stavridis, NATO
Supreme Allied Commander on down the chain to the component commanders.
On Wednesday, NATO announced it was taking responsibility for enforcing the naval arms embargo for Libya.
The United States will remain part of the Operation Dawn, but it we will have limited participation going forward, which would include contributing tankers and a personnel recovery teams, but not an Airborne Warning and Control System, Africa Command’s Gen. Carter F. Ham told ABC News.
“The phrase that we use is that the United States will contribute its unique military capabilities to whatever this second phase of operation would be,” Ham said. “There’s probably some intelligence support that we would continue to provide, some communications, tankers for aircraft… But we wouldn’t see probably a large number of fighter aircraft for example.”
Ham said he’s confident the command can be handed over “relatively quickly” but “there are frankly some mechanical and procedural pieces — particularly with regard to the air operations — which are very very complex” that may take a longer while to transition.
Earlier today the foreign minister of Turkey, a NATO member that had expressed strong concerns about the Libya intervention, said Turkey’s demands had been met and that the operation will be handed over to NATO, according to a press statement.
Gadhafi challenged the allies’ no-fly zone for the first time, sending up a warplane over the city of Misrata where it was quickly destroyed by French fighter jets.
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