On the road west from Benghazi to Tripoli, Colonel Gaddafi's Libya is being rapidly cleansed of his remnants. Just over a week into the revolution that few, even here, thought possible when it started, the eradication of a despot is well on the way to completion.

The town of Ajdabiya, 160km south of Benghazi, the regional capital, has long been one of the east of the country's most forsaken enclaves, a place where people were thought to have been tamed and cowed during Gaddafi's 42-year rule. No one seemed to get on in life from round here. This city has few heroes.

Now, the spoils of a remarkable victory are everywhere, along with the scars of an ignominious defeat. Every official building in town has been torched and ransacked, just like the state institutions to the east. Every image of the loathed leader has been torn down and defaced. The tired facades, the grim streets and hard-bitten locals are the only signs that a dictator once ruled here.

We stopped first at a town square where an effigy hung from a wire alongside the Libyan independence flag, last flown under the monarch Gaddafi ousted in 1969, King Idris. A small group of youths milled around an empty fountain, with a brand new feature – the wing of a fighter jet that plummeted to earth on Wednesday.

The story of that downed plane has quickly been etched into folklore here. Its pilot had been sent to bomb three oil fields to the south, all of which had fallen into the hands of the opposition, who had promptly turned off the taps to further strangle the regime.

"The pilot is in hospital in Benghazi and the man who sat behind him with a gun is in prison," said Ali Ramadan Mohammed, a civil servant from the oil town of Bregga that was one of the intended targets. "He didn't carry out this evil mission and he is now a hero of the country's liberation."

Back up the highway in Ajdabiya, men with Kalashnikovs who now keep order about town wanted to show us the spoils. At a former headquarters for Gaddafi's praetorian guard, a fleet of 4x4s had been torched and overturned. "Four men died here," said one of the town's new custodians, pointing at a spot on the road. "They were killed by Gaddafi's men and his mercenaries."

Next stop was the Qatibat Amin military base on the outskirts of town, a desert fortress with dank and dire looking buildings. Like every other base between here and Sirte in central Libya, which is still in the hands of Gaddafi's loyalists, it had been sacked and pillaged. We were shown into the armoury, an unassuming building set behind barbed wire and land mines.

Hundreds of boxes of heavy ammunition had been emptied and those that hadn't been carried away were scattered across the floor. Two anti-aircraft guns sat on in the corner looking like museum pieces. There was nothing derelict, however, about the dozens of artillery shells lying next to grenades and the odd claymore land mine. Every rifle had been taken, along with most uniforms and Kalasahnikov rounds. One of our hosts kicked at a bomb sitting in the open.

"Be careful, it will blow," a man yelled at him. "Doesn't matter, God has given us this victory," the host shouted back.

All around eastern Libya, there is a sense of cavalier euphoria – a collective sigh of relief. It may also be a time to draw breath before the next phase – an assault on one of Gaddafi's last two strongholds in the land: Sirte to the west and then the final prize – the capital.

"We have enough already to go to Tripoli, should we need to," said Ghaith Issa, leaning against a rocket launcher inside the armoury. "We haven't needed to yet, because the city is falling without us. We will go there, it is our destiny. Whether it's with the weapons we now have, or to celebrate there after Gaddafi leaves, it doesn't matter."

Another man, Faraj Ali, 44, joined us. "Everywhere is the same between here and Sirte and between Sirte and Tripoli. He is finished. He can never come back."

All along the red desert highway, the Observer encountered further evidence to support Faraj Ali's claims. We stopped next at al-Bregga, an oil enclave at Libya's southernmost coastal point. Gaddafi kept a house here and a row of guest homes either side. They have all been pillaged. The dictator's bedroom received the most attention. "We threw in an extra bomb for him," said Khaled Yousef, a local who now proudly walked through the scorched remains of the loathed leader, carrying a Russian machine gun that he looted from the army.

"He was a criminal and a terrorist and he had one of these homes every 100km," he added. That may account for the modest furnishings – those that could still be made out amid the ashes. It was where Victorian England clashed with Arab chic. By all accounts it wasn't one of his favourites.

Nearby, the police station and governorate still smouldered. But up the road, the Sirte Oil Company was still safe and secure. The attackers clearly saw this as an overthrow of a regime, not a sacking of a country.

Oil is pivotal to which direction Libya post-Gaddafi heads. In the east of the country the presence of so much black gold under the soil has long been more resented than appreciated.

"We never see any of the profits from it," said Mohammed. "Gaddafi has all these compounds and offshore money and there are no jobs, not much health service and no way of improving ourselves. Now the people will decide how the money is spent, not him."

Abdul Salam Nagem, a petroleum engineer from Bregga, said that opposition groups – many using former military weapons – were now firmly in control of the levers at the refineries and oilfields and would not be letting them go until Gaddafi was finally ousted.

"The people are very safe there," he said. "The foreign workers, including the Britons, are under our full protection. As far west as Ras Lanuf [a further 150km west], the oilfields are now under our control." One oil engineer, Moustafa Raba'a, 44, said that around 120, 000 barrels of oil per day are now not making it to market, denying the Gaddafi regime millions of dollars in revenues from Europe.

"We all have solidarity with the opposition on this," he said. We will not let a drop flow until he is gone."

No one is working in the oil towns. There is next to nobody on the streets, or even in mosques, or markets. "We are all just waiting, said Nagem, as he drew me a map earlier last week of the road to Tripoli. Only Sirte is standing in the way of the push.

Sirte, a coastal city halfway to the capital, remains defiantly on the side of Gaddafi. His loyalist forces man checkpoints in and out of the town and there were confirmed widespread clashes there as late as Friday night. It is the one place where opposition groups know they will face a fight if they decide to move on Tripoli.

So staunch is the pro-government presence there that some organisers in Benghazi believe it might fall after the capital itself. On Friday, a convoy of Egyptian doctors set off for Tripoli and reportedly encountered trouble on the outskirts of Sirte. There are conflicting accounts of their fate, with several local media outlets reporting that they came under attack.

On the red desert highway leading to Sirte, there is now no such risk.

As we left Bregga for Benghazi, we turned left off the highway to a site in the desert, which will surely come to be seen as a landmark in this revolution. Along a soft sand track, past patches of coarse-grass, tumbleweeds and flocks of well-fed sheep and goats, we arrived first at a hamlet of timber huts. Children scampered about in vivid clothes in the distance. It looked very much like a long-abandoned gypsy town. "See, this is what oil money gets you in Libya," said Mohammed. "No water, no electricity, no future and no dignity. Haram [against God's will]. Does Gaddafi live like this?"

Another mile or so along the track we stopped at a moonscape of wind-blown sand and reeds. Wreckage was everywhere; small bits of shattered metal, a larger piece that looked like a tail fin, and then the two main impact sites. One was a giant crater, the other was part of a fuselage and a large bomb that had not detonated.

"The pilot and the other man landed nearby," a local shouted. "An old lady found this place yesterday."

Gaddafi now has next to no control over the arm of his military that he has long trusted most. The defection of the air force pilot on such a sensitive mission has lionised the opposition further. It has had the opposite effect on Gaddafi.

There are continuing reports of mass defections of senior officers at most towns and cities between here and the Tunisian border.

"I could take you to colonels and generals who are now with us," said Issa at the military base.

The state built over 42 years through iron-fisted rule is clearly now almost impotent. Gaddafi's hopes of hanging on to the Libya he once knew are finished. His only hope appears to be a partitioning of the land, with the east ruled by the opposition and him staying in power in the west.

But that notion is universally scorned on the road to the capital.

"He has had his turn and it's been a long turn," said Khaled Issa in the Ajdabiya town square. "We are the future now. We must take the capital."