'I Am Not Leaving,' Says Gaddafi

Who carried Gaddafi's message?

As rebel fighters stormed Muammar Gaddafi's sprawling Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli on August 23, 2011, the Libyan leader's defiance reached the world through an unlikely messenger: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the Russian president of the World Chess Federation.

"I am alive and healthy, I am in Tripoli and do not intend to leave Libya. Do not believe the lying reports by Western television companies," Ilyumzhinov quoted Gaddafi as saying in a telephone conversation, relayed to the Interfax news agency. "I am sure that we will be victorious."

Why the chess chief?

Ilyumzhinov was one of the few outsiders known to have met Gaddafi since the uprising began — he had been shown on Libyan television playing chess with the colonel in June and had met Gaddafi's son Mohammed in Tripoli in July. A former president of the Russian Buddhist republic of Kalmykia, where he ruled for 17 years, Ilyumzhinov was a colorful figure in his own right, once ridiculed in Russia for claiming to have been abducted by aliens. "I am not a politician," he told Interfax. "I am just passing on the information that I have."

He also reported speaking with Mohammed Gaddafi, who had been reported captured by rebels and then to have escaped; Mohammed told him he was at his father's side and that loyalist forces were "beating the rats out of the city."

How did it end?

The defiance was hollow. The rebels overran the compound that day. Gaddafi fled Tripoli, and on October 20, 2011, he was captured and killed in his hometown of Sirte — two months after insisting he would never leave. The phone call to the chess chief stands as one of the last public statements of a 42-year rule: bravado broadcast through a friend, while the capital fell around him.