HOURS after Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was indicted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague on June 27th, a rebel group calling itself the Free Generation Movement furtively torched a billboard in the heart of Tripoli, Libya's capital, showing him in dress uniform. The impoverished residents of Souk al-Juma, one of Tripoli's rubbish-strewn suburbs, quietly cheered the news of the arrest warrant. “I saw it on a television,” whispers a delighted video-games salesman. “He's finished—game over, Qaddafi.”

Maybe so. But his security service is still cracking down on Tripoli's restive suburbs. Every night armed checkpoints ensure that whole districts are locked down. Plain-clothes policemen still go from house to house, taking away suspected rebels or their sympathisers. “Some never come back,” says a young man who was detained for three days.

Fear stalks the capital. If you ask people about politics, they tend to flee into the city's ill-stocked shops and unpaved alleys to escape the eyes of informers. “Neighbours are always watching,” says a resident, playing loud music to avoid being overheard. He turns it up even louder at night to drown out the sound of police guns. “They shoot for hours,” he says. “Often we cannot sleep.”

Pictures of the colonel and the plain green flag that symbolises his rule are less common than before. Some brave residents are so keen to speak out that they accost strangers, asking if they are journalists. Some shopkeepers quietly insist on pressing gifts on foreigners or refuse payment for goods. “Thank you, America” and “Obama good”, say others.

When thousands of Tripoli people rose up four months ago, inspired by rebels in Libya's eastern city, Benghazi, and elsewhere in the Arab world, they were spurred into action by the grinding poverty which many Libyans still suffer and by the stark contrast of the dank suburbs with the shiny new skyscrapers in central Tripoli occupied by the oil-rich elite tied to the colonel. “But it is not just about money,” says a shopkeeper. “We also want freedom and democracy.” Like many of his neighbours, he is sure the colonel is finished. “The rebels will come and save us.”

But they are taking their time. Sympathisers in Tripoli are generally lying low. Some of them attack checkpoints or provocatively paint cats and dogs the colours of the revolution (red, green and black), which the police then shoot. The opposition is hampered by the blockage of internet access and text-messaging facilities. Yet protest networks such as the Free Generation Movement still hope to prepare the ground for a post-Qaddafi transition. “We have many allies, even in the government,” claims one of the group's leaders, who says he knows of ten other secret protest groups.

Some anti-Qaddafi people have left Tripoli for the Nafusa Mountains, only 100km (62 miles) south-west of the capital, where the rebels have tightened their grip and have been taking towns, such as Yafran, increasingly close to Tripoli. With the port of Misrata now also securely in rebel hands (though the colonel's forces still fire artillery into the town), the rebels are slowly advancing. Zliten is under attack. Though the oil-refinery town of Brega is still in the colonel's hands, it too is under pressure. Some youths from Tripoli say they will get weapons and military training in the mountains and then return home. “The time to fight here will come,” says one.

The Nafusa rebels have cut the oil pipeline that supplied Colonel Qaddafi's last working refinery, in Zawiya. Their next target is Gharyan, a town farther east which would let them block a key supply route to the colonel, from Algeria. The rebels are lobbying Tunisia's government to close its border and cut off another conduit.

Hundreds of lorries arrive from Tunisia every day, as well as private cars laden with scarce goods. The black-market price of petrol is now 30 times more than the official rate at petrol stations, where drivers wait in mile-long queues for up to a week. Bicycles, once a rare sight, have suddenly become popular—and expensive. Traders are trying to bring in more of them from Tunisia.

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Though Tripoli is now under a kind of siege, the government is still dug in. In Bab al-Aziziya, the colonel's fortified compound, buildings have been wrecked and bunkers punctured by NATO bombs. Yet the state machinery still functions. Visitors to the compound are carefully searched and bags X-rayed. The lawns in the inner sanctum are freshly mown and watered.

The colonel, it is presumed, hides in many places. Some say he sleeps in schools and hospitals, knowing NATO will not attack them. Or perhaps he spends nights in bunkers deep below his compound. On June 27th NATO destroyed a bus he is said to have used. Its charred chassis and a singed palm tree next to the colonel's white-tiled but wrecked villa were shown off to the foreign media.

The state propaganda tries to stiffen the people's resolve to resist NATO and defend their Brother Leader. Officials say they are handing out 1.2m guns to let ordinary citizens “defend themselves”. Foreign correspondents were invited to a conference centre to witness some 500 middle-class women and children brandishing their newly acquired weapons. After emotional speeches broadcast on television, the women, some with Giorgio Armani camouflage caps and high heels, took their AK-47s into the car park and fired them into the air. Male security guards joined in. “I want to save my leader,” says a fervent 14-year-old, Fatima Hassan, over the noise.

Such rituals may be effective—among some sectors of society. The poor do not, on the whole, seem to love the colonel. But in middle-class districts of Tripoli the mood is more mixed. In Abu Salim, a business area (and site of a jail where 1,260 political prisoners were killed in one night in 1996), many people have benefited from the colonel's rule. “I own a comfortable house and two cars and it is safe to leave them on the street,” says a 26-year-old trader. “What more do I want?”

Privately owned shops in Abu Salim sell badges showing Colonel Qaddafi in various heroic and sympathetic poses, including one alongside Saddam Hussein, and play songs with government jingles vilifying the rebels in the east. “Save our dear Misrata,” goes one. Streets and shops in the district are festooned with green flags. “They are Ali Babas,” says a resident of the rebels. “Thieves, terrorists.” Another refers to civil strife in neighbouring Algeria in the 1990s, when some 200,000 civilians were killed. “War is not freedom.”

But even in Abu Salim, people moan about inflation. Some food prices have leapt fivefold. Middle-class people say their children, especially, are suffering. “They're scared by the sound of NATO bombs,” says a father. Despite the relentless propaganda, morale is steadily being eroded. Reports of defections suggest that the regime is being whittled away. The latest renegades included 17 footballers.

To keep prices down, the government has restricted cash withdrawals at banks to about $800. Fear of instability has kept money changers busy. In darkened shops bundles of notes held together by rubber bands are stacked hip-high against the walls. Rich Libyans wheel suitcases full of dinars, worth 40% less than they were before the unrest, to change them into dollars at the al-Mushir Souk, near Green Square, where the colonel used to rally his faithful.

No more. There are few visible signs of a mass uprising in the offing. But there is a sense, under the surface, that people are waiting for the regime's end.