Erdogan arrived in Tripoli on the final leg of his mideast tour as Libya’s transitional council announced that its forces entered Sirte and Bani Walid

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in the Libyan capital on Friday on the final leg of his Middle East tour as Libya’s transitional council announced that its forces had punched deep into the heart of ousted strongman Moammar Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte and the town of Bani Walid.
  
"Our revolutionaries have entered Bani Walid," Mahmud Shammam said of the town 170 kilometres (105 miles) from the capital without elaborating, adding only that "the situation will be resolved this evening."
  
Erdogan arrived from Tunisia at Tripoli's airport, where he was greeted by Mustafa Abdel Jalil, number two in the new ruling National Transitional Council (NTC). The Turkish premier began his tour in Egypt.
  
Besides holding talks with the new leadership, Erdogan was to attend the weekly Muslim main prayers at an Ottoman-era mosque, an NTC official said.
  
On Thursday, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first foreign leaders to visit Libya pledging their full support for the country's new rulers.

At a news conference in Tripoli, Sarkozy and Cameron said that NATO airstrikes would continue against key Gaddafi strongholds in what has become a loosely interpreted U.N. mandate. But both were at pains to deny that they expected anything back from Libya in terms of preferential business deals or access to the country’s vast oil reserves.

“This is a very important issue, and I want things to be very clear to all the Arab world,” Sarkozy said. “There has been no prior agreement or entente. There has been no preference given or asked with respect to Libyan assets or Libyan resources. We did what we did without any hidden agenda. We did it because we wanted to help Libya.”