Gun battles erupt in Tripoli, Libya A year after the fall of Moammar Gaddafi, rebels-turned-militia continue to dominate the country's quest for security. The state's fledgling police force is mostly unarmed and lacks training and resources, local officials said. And the Libyan army is almost nonexistent; the chief of staff is a lame duck, according to Tripoli's top militia commanders. Clashes broke out in Tripoli's Bab Bin Ghashir neighborhood late Saturday night after residents said they confronted the Support Unit Number Eight militia for abducting and torturing two of the area's residents. "The problem is that the revolutionaries still think they're revolutionaries, not employees who march to orders," said Mohamed Abu Shkiwa, an official in the Tripoli Supreme Security Committee (SSC), a powerful union of militias that runs most of Tripoli's security, and which was leading the assault on the rogue militia. Shkiwa said the militia fell under the SSC's umbrella until commanders revoked its "legitimacy" on Sunday. Bystanders watched Sunday afternoon as militia and police exchanged periodic machine-gun fire with the Support Unit Number Eight militia, which was holed up in one of the ex-regime's intelligence headquarters. Plainclothes fighters armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades blocked side streets in the neighborhood and paced alongside trucks, shouting instructions into radios. Shkiwa said his forces knew of three injured so far in the clashes. Residents said they believed the son of the rogue militia commander Mohamed Warfalli had been killed. By late afternoon, SSC fighters had set fire to the militia's building and residents reported looting in the area, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the General National Congress, the country's only elected body, carried on its first session of the week, debating plans to inaugurate a new cabinet, seemingly oblivious of the clashes about a mile away. The absence of a centralized Libyan security force and a clear chain of command has left Tripoli and other Libyan cities at the mercy of their most powerful militias, most of which claim loyalty to the government but which officials in Tripoli have said they have little control over. The security vacuum also has hindered national efforts to investigate an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in September that left Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead. In the eastern city of Benghazi, where residents say security conditions are markedly worse than in Tripoli, a car bomb exploded in front of a police station early Sunday morning, injuring three, according to Reuters. No group claimed responsibility. Meanwhile SSC commanders in Tripoli said their forces had not previously gone after rogue militias like Warfalli's, or even blocked extremist groups from acting on a recent mosque demolition downtown, because they didn't want to set former revolutionaries against their peers. "We feel so sad if we kill any revolutionaries, because they are revolutionaries who were with us from the very beginning," said Saad Garsallah, a high-ranking SSC commander. Ayman al-Kekly contributed to this report.