"You have four kinds of customers now," said Sahaab, whose family's market is a modern, two-story building with groceries downstairs and household goods, diapers, and cookware upstairs. "You have the pro-Qaddafi people, very few, who carry a few things to their side. You have the anti-Qaddafi, there are very, very many of these. They come with euro, dollar, pound. Seventy thousand, one hundred thousand dollars, they buy a lot of things to take to Libya. I say sure, we make the order. Three you have the refugees who are living in Tataoine for now. And then you have the Tataoine people, the normal people."

Services for soldiers in Tataoine amount to medical care, and more often, rest.

"I come three days to see my family, then back to go with the army," said Malek Emhamed, an 18-year-old from Zintan, in Libya's Nafusa mountains, at the border crossing back to Libya. He was returning from a three-day liberty with a cousin, Aref Muhammed, and a half-dozen more young men waiting for a Tunisian immigration officer to process their exit stamps. Beside them was a line of pickup tricks filled with mattresses for barracks up the line, hay for goats the soldiers would eat, blankets, rice, and bottled water. A gasoline truck waited, preparing to make the 68-kilometer run up the ridgeline road to Nalut, the first town on the rebel line, within sight of Qaddafi's troops in a valley below.

At the end of that run, Nalut, which is still under shelling most nights, has two depots, one for food and one for gasoline. Anti-Qaddafi locals at Nalut gather the supplies sent from Tataoine, sending them on to 13 other towns under control of the anti-Gaddafi militias, according to Mohammed Omar, who runs the warehouse. "All this comes from Tunisia," he said as we stood in the hanger-like building beside the highway. "In Tataoine we have an office, and we ask to there, and it comes." Most of the tons of rice and pasta had no identification, but large sections came from charities, noticeably Islamic Relief. Much of the cooking oil, a quantity of pallets about five meters on a side, bore stamps from USAID and the World Food Program.

"Not our food," said UNHCR's Derich, in Tataoine, when I asked if UN food could be reaching Libyan rebels. "They're checking at the border." UNHCR's brief is to aid refugees, not run logistics for the rebels, and leakage from their supply line is a touchy subject. Derich has a $600,000 budget for refugee supplies in Tataoine and its environs, he said -- something that makes it easier for him to argue he is not involved in cross-border logistics. If Sahaab, of the supermarket, it telling the truth, he's moving more across the border daily privately than the UN would in a month, even if it spent every cent -- illegally -- on aiding soldiers. At the same time, Derich is optimistic about the inspections. In seven hours of interviews on both sides of the border last week, and again this week, I saw Tunisian soldiers search only a few cars coming from Libya to Tunisia, and none going from Tunisia to Libya. Flatbed trucks hauling tons of food were waved through with only the driver's passport formalities. On the Libyan side, none of the giddy, decidedly looser rebel guards -- they check you in on a computer, but don't stamp passports yet -- looked at anything at all. Five UNHCR staff on the border were there, but only to count people, and give the agency some idea of who is coming and going -- a picture that remains chaotic four months into the war.