SIRTE  (AFP) – Desperate residents fled Moamer Kadhafi’s hometown Sirte on Friday as fighters of Libya’s interim government held off a final assault on one his two remaining bastions to allow civilians to escape.

A commander of National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters near Sirte said pro-Kadhafi forces were targeting residents even as they fled, with a fighter killed and a packed family car destroyed when their convoy was hit.

NATO said it was nearing the “final phase” of its air war in Libya, a day after warplanes struck just one target in an intense bombing campaign that has lasted six months.

And a commander of the new regime said a captured general loyal to Kadhafi had said the fugitive Libyan leader was secretly moving around in the southern desert.

One month to the day since Kadhafi’s compound fell to rebels in Tripoli, the campaign to take Sirte and the ex-Libyan leader’s other principal remaining bastion of Bani Walid was on hold for another day.

Asked why NTC fighters were delaying a final assault on Sirte, commander Osama Muttawa Swehly told AFP: “We’re trying to get the families out.

“We are averaging between 400 to 500 cars a day. We are basically trying to starve (the Kadhafi forces) out.”

He said one escape convoy had come under fire from anti-aircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms.

“One fighter was killed and one family car was destroyed,” he said, with an unknown number of occupants also presumably killed.

“We are giving the families every chance to get out. Once that stream turns into a trickle then stops, then it will be time to act,” he added.

On the frontline east of Sirte, fighters acknowledged that the push on the city had been difficult.

“It is taking a long time to reach Sirte because of severe resistance from Kadhafi’s forces. We don’t know how long it will take even now,” said Rabiya Salam, a 29-year-old former bus driver.

When rebel fighters stormed and captured Kadhafi’s Bab al-Aziziya headquarters on August 23, they found no trace of the strongman, who has since made several broadcasts claiming he is still in Libya.

While the country’s new authorities do not know where he is, they are focused on taking the coastal city of Sirte and the desert redoubt of Bani Walid, two places where some think he might be.

But reports also emerged that he may be in the south.

“General Belgasem al-Abaaj, who we captured on Monday, said that Kadhafi had contacted him by phone about 10 days ago, and that he was moving secretly between (the oases towns of) Sabha and Ghat,” an NTC commander, Mohammed Barka Wardugu, told AFP.

Abaaj had said that Kadhafi “is helped by Nigerian and Chadian mercenaries who know the desert routes,” added Wardugu, spokesman for the Desert Shield Brigade.

Earlier this week, NTC forces announced that they had captured Sabha, southern Libya’s largest city, but the situation in Ghat, a remote town close to the Algerian border, remains unclear.

In recent days, new regime forces have also claimed full control over all three main towns of the Al-Jufra oasis, north of Sabha, leaving Kadhafi loyalists in Sirte and Bani Walid effectively cut off from any line of escape to the south.

While another full-scale assault on Bani Walid was on hold Friday, an AFP correspondent with NTC fighters a few kilometres (miles) outside the town said clashes had erupted there early in the day.

NATO on Thursday bombed a large complex near Sirte that was housing an ammunitions storage facility and military barracks, according to the alliance’s daily operations update.

This compares to 11 military targets struck in Sirte and the Al-Jufra town of Hun on Wednesday alone, or 17 in the same areas on Tuesday.

The alliance, which conducted some 70 strike sorties on many days early in the campaign in April, flew just 34 missions aimed at spotting targets on Thursday, the update showed. NATO has conducted 8,829 strike sorties since March 31.

“Although NATO is approaching the final phase of our engagement in Libya, we are determined to continue the mission for as long as necessary,” an alliance official told AFP in Brussels.

In other developments, the UN atomic agency confirmed the existence of raw uranium in Libya after US news channel CNN reported that new regime forces had found potentially radioactive material.

International Atomic Energy Agency spokeswoman Gill Tudor said the uranium, stored by the Kadhafi regime, had been declared to the IAEA and that the agency hoped to examine the material “once the situation in the country stabilises.”

French oil giant Total announced it would restart production from an offshore oil platform off Libya within days, making it the first major to return to work since the fall of Kadhafi.

“We are going to restart production on Al-Jurf this weekend,” a spokesman said, referring to a field Total operates in a joint venture with the Libyan state oil company and the German firm Wintershall.

The Al-Jurf platform lies around 100 kilometres (60 miles) offshore and previously produced around 40,000 barrels per day.