2011 — Libya's Day of Rage Against Gaddafi

On February 17, 2011, Libyans answered the call for a "Day of Rage" against Muammar Gaddafi's forty-two-year rule. Protests that had ignited two days earlier in Benghazi spread across the country, as some soldiers crossed over to the crowds.

Within months, rebels formed the National Transitional Council, and by October Gaddafi was gone. But the uprising that toppled a tyrant left Libya fractured, and the country is still healing. February 17 began as one day of protest; it became the opening of a revolution whose promise and whose wounds Libya carries still. The fall of a forty-two-year rule took months; the work of rebuilding a country would take far longer than that.