Libya News and Interests

[dukkha]

Nigeria is flying out thousands of its citizens from Libya who face grave abuses such as rape and slavery as they attempt to reach Europe through the war-torn North African nation.

Large numbers of Nigerians have been trapped in Libya where they were trying to cross to Italy by sea, but were stopped by local armed factions and the Libyan coastguard.

Nigerian officials on a fact-finding mission to Libya expressed shock at what they saw and heard from victims.

"They talked about various abuse - systematic, endemic, and exploitation of all kinds," said Nigeria's Foreign Affairs Minister Geoffrey Onyeama. "There were obviously interests that wa

[dukkha]

As chaos and despair grow in Libya, Gadhafi son plans comeback
PUBLISHED: SUNDAY, JANUARY 7,

the fugitive son and onetime heir apparent of Libya’s late Moammar Gadhafi is planning a comeback.

Seif al-Islam “decided to run in presidential elections and I see a big chance for him because all the big tribes are supporting him,” said Abdel Majeed al-Mansouri, who headed Libya’s economic development board before 2011 and was close to him. “People are frustrated. Even those who were against the old regime will side with him as he’s not coming back representing the old regime. He’s coming with his plan for Libya’s future.”

Most Libya analysts disagree, dismissing Seif’s chances in a potential presidential election this year.
Yet the return of Gadhafi loyalists to the political arena six years after the NATO-backed uprising that killed him exposes the depth of public anger over insecurity and economic decay in the once-wealthy oil exporter. It will feed international concerns about the spread of Islamic State militants across North Africa and the tide of migrants clamoring to reach Europe.

“It’s a sign the Gadhafists are mobilizing, trying to have their say” for the first time since 2011, said Issandr El Amrani, North Africa Project Director at the International Crisis Group. “Libya’s getting more complicated. A breakthrough doesn’t seem imminent.”

Since Gadhafi’s ouster, Libya has been carved up among dozens of militias and rival administrations in the east and in Tripoli. Infighting crippled shipments of oil, Libya’s most important source of income, for nearly two years. While shipments have resumed, the economy has been devastated.

Libyans line up for hours outside banks to obtain paltry sums. The weakening of the dinar on the black market has fueled inflation that has impoverished wage-earners and enriched speculators.

A U.N.-brokered unity deal concluded in 2015 failed to heal the country’s divisions. The government it parachuted into Tripoli, led by Fayez al-Sarraj, struggled to impose its authority over armed factions and the administration in the east. A new U.N. envoy appointed in June, Ghassan Salame, unveiled a revised plan, but the Dec. 17 expiry of Sarraj’s mandate came and went without a final deal.

While Sarraj continues to be recognized internationally, the peace process has been declared a dead letter by Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the self-styled Libyan National Army who controls much of the oil-rich east. Haftar’s bid to become military ruler of Libya pending elections has faltered, though, as he labors to win support outside his base.

Something, Libyans say, has to give.

“We’ve lost confidence in all the political figures in parliament, in the two governments, east and west,” said Waheed Jabu, who works at the chambers of commerce in Tripoli. “Libyans now live in poverty. The banks are empty. People are unable to buy medicine, food or anything. There are gasoline shortages, electricity failures, water disruptions and general insecurity.”

Into this murky political landscape wades Seif. Nothing has been heard from him directly, but a man identified as the family spokesman told the Egypt Today magazine that he plans to run. Mansouri, now living in Turkey, confirmed the plan. He offered no details about Seif’s plan to reconcile Libyans and rebuild the battered economy, but said he thinks he will play an economic role if Seif wins.

[dukkha]

Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, son of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, attends a hearing behind bars in a courtroom in Zintan May 25, 2014

[dukkha]

At least 20 dead as clashes shut airport in Libyan capital


A plane, that was damaged during clashes, is seen at Mitiga airport in Tripoli, Libya, January 15, 2018

Fierce clashes broke out in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Monday, killing at least 20 people, shutting the airport, and damaging planes during what the government said was a failed attempt to spring militants from a nearby prison.

he attack triggered the heaviest fighting in Tripoli for months, undercutting claims by the internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) to have largely stabilised the city. The violence also undermines GNA efforts to persuade diplomatic missions to return there.

Automatic gunfire and artillery rounds could be heard from the city centre early in the day and authorities at Mitiga airport, which operates all civilian air traffic to and from the capital, said flights had been suspended until further notice.

he airport was empty in late afternoon, when the clashes had largely died down, though pilots flew several aircraft across the capital to the international airport - closed since 2014 due to damage from earlier fighting - in an effort to protect them.

A Reuters reporter saw one Airbus A319 operated by Afriqiyah Airways sitting in a hangar at Mitiga with a hole in its roof from artillery fire.

At least four other aircraft suffered what appeared to be lesser damage from gunfire, including two jets operated by Libyan Wings and two Buraq Air Boeing 737s that the airline said it was preparing to fly out of the country for maintenance.

The fighting pitted the Special Deterrence Force (Rada), one of Tripoli’s most powerful armed groups, against a rival faction based in the city’s Tajoura neighbourhood.

Rada acts as an anti-crime and anti-terrorism unit and controls Mitiga airport and a large prison next to it. It is aligned with the GNA and is occasionally targeted by rivals whose members it has arrested.

Rada said the airport had been attacked by men loyal to a militia leader known as Bashir ‘the Cow’ and others it had been seeking following their escape from a prison it controls elsewhere in Tripoli.

The GNA said the attack had “endangered the lives of passengers, affected aviation safety and terrorised residents”.

“This assault was aimed at freeing terrorists from Daesh (Islamic State) and al Qaeda and other organisations,” it said in a statement. The attack had been repelled, and an operation to secure the area was ongoing.
Slideshow (5 Images)

Rada posted pictures of streets around the airport, showing pick-up trucks mounted with guns, armoured vehicles and a tank.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-l...-idUSKBN1F410L

[Cypress]

Donald Trump: A Strong Supporter of the Libyan Military Intervention

Trump was a strong supporter of the 2011 military intervention in Libya, arguing "fervently" on a number of occasions that U.S. military intervention was necessary to advert humanitarian disaster in Libya and warning that it would be "a major, major black eye for this country [the U.S.]" if it failed to depose Gaddafi.

In a February 2011 video blog, Trump said: "I can't believe what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we're sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we're not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage ... Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick." Trump made similar comments in a March 2011 appearance on Piers Morgan Tonight. In 2011, Trump also advocated U.S. seizure of Libyan oil.

[dukkha]

^ already covered..
HRClnton had the full resources of the US State Dept, and chose to deal with known terrorists
( Libyan Islamic Fighting Group)a.k.a. NTC to overthrow a lawful Qadaffi who was respected as legitimate leader of Libya.

Trump was a lay person...which one has an excuse they got it wrong?

[dukkha]

UN envoy says military forces in Libya are flexing muscles

The U.N. envoy for Libya said Wednesday that military forces "are flexing their muscles in many parts of the country" and the oil-rich nation needs a competent government.

Ghassan Salame told the Security Council that "the specter of violence remains present," pointing to clashes between forces allied with two rival communities close to Libya's border with Tunisia, rival groups at a flashpoint in the eastern vicinity of the capital of Tripoli, and heightened tension around the city of Derna.

He said he was delivering the briefing by videoconference from Tunis and not Tripoli as he had planned "because bloody clashes at the airport have halted all flights in and out ... for the whole week."

Libya fell into chaos after the ouster and killing of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 and since 2014 it has been split between rival governments and parliaments based in the western and eastern regions, each backed by different militias and tribes.


Salame said Libya needs a government that can deliver desperately needed public services, unify the country's institutions, provide order and justice, and preside over elections that would end the current transition.

He lamented that civilians continue to be killed and injured "in crossfire and indiscriminate attacks" and "armed groups fight recklessly in residential areas, with no thought to the safety of civilians."

Libya already has "20 million pieces of arms" and the arms embargo on the North African nation "has never been more important," Salame said.

"It is for this reason that recent reports of a large shipment of explosives intercepted by the Greek Coast Guard are particularly alarming," he said.

Salame said the U.N. panel of experts monitoring the arms embargo on Libya is looking into the shipments
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/01...g-muscles.html

[anatta]

Libya's U.N.-backed government in Tripoli has condemned attacks against hundreds of displaced black Libyans known as Tawergha who are stranded in a camp while attempting to return home.

In a statement late Sunday, it says it is still working to ensure that the hundreds of families taking refuge in a camp near the town of Bani Walid can return to their home city, also known as Tawergha.

Local media had reported that the Tawergha, who were due to return on Feb. 1 under an agreement with neighboring Misrata, were barred from entry by militias who fired in the air and even shot up some cars.

Misrata militiamen blame the Tawergha for siding with Libya's longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi during the 2011 uprising that overthrew and killed him.

[anatta]

A Libyan woman displaced from the town of Tawergha stands at a camp in Tripoli, Libya, February 5, 2018. More than six years after they were forced to leave their homes in the civil war that toppled Muammar Gaddafi, tens of thousands of residents of the Libyan ghost city of Tawergha were finally meant to start going home last week. It never happened

[anatta]

Ninety migrants are feared drowned after a boat capsized off the Libyan coast, says the UN's migration agency.

Three survivors said most of those who drowned were Pakistani nationals. Libyans were also aboard.

TRANSIT

Libya has for years been a major transit route for migrants trying to reach southern Europe by sea.

EU countries have wrangled over both reducing migrant numbers and deciding which countries are responsible for processing migrants on arrival.

The EU struck a deal with the Libyan coastguard last year to help intercept migrants and return them to Libya.

But aid agencies and the UN accused European governments of taking an "inhuman" approach.

From a boat carrying more than 90, only three survivors are reported - two of whom managed to swim to shore, while the third was picked up by a fishing boat.

"Ten bodies are reported to have washed up on Libyan shores," the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a statement.

MIGRANTS

Unusually, there were also Libyans among the dead and survivors of the shipwreck, reports the BBC's North Africa correspondent Rana Jawad.

The Facebook page of the security directorate in the coastal city of Zuwara, where the bodies washed up, said a Libyan woman had drowned, but that of the three survivors two were Libyan nationals.

The majority of incidents of this kind involve migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

In this case, most of those on board were Pakistani. The IOM says this is becoming more common.

While Pakistanis were 13th on a list of the number of migrants trying to reach Europe last year by nationality, so far this year they are third, the IOM says.

DANGER

Perhaps aware of the danger, Libyans rarely attempt the boat journey from their country to southern Europe.

Some cases of illegal Libyan migration were documented last year, but they usually involved sturdier boats that were carrying few people.

Overall this year, the IOM reports that there have been 6,624 arrivals by sea to Europe, compared to 5,983 in the same period of 2017.

So the numbers are comparable but this year's figures still represent a considerable bounce-back following a dramatic fall over the second half of 2017, the IOM told the BBC.

Some of last year's decline can be attributed to the EU's controversial deal with the Libyan coastguard, but the IOM also believes there were difficulties within the people-trafficking industry.

"We think that there was a lot of pent-up demand in terms of migrants being held in warehouses by the smugglers," said the IOM's Joel Millman.

If the channels have been opened again, that might explain the sudden surge which has seen numbers increase again.

RESCUES

The latest deaths come just after the EU border agency Frontex announced the launch of Operation Themis on Thursday.

Unlike its previous mission, known as Triton, migrants rescued at sea will now be taken to the country that is co-ordinating the rescue, rather than just Italy.

Italy has increasingly vocally complained about a lack of EU solidarity in managing migration. It is also conscious of popular unease ahead of a March 4 national election.

However, as Italy undertakes the vast majority of sea rescues in waters between North Africa and its coast, Themis is unlikely to have more than a token effect on the numbers arriving in the country.

https://www.nation.co.ke/news/africa...jyz/index.html

[anatta]

http://www.defenseone.com/threats/20...-libya/145920/
TRIPOLI—As U.S. military forces hunt down the remnants of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, they are also waging a quieter campaign in the fractured country of Libya. Conducted primarily from the air and through special-operations personnel based in the western city of Misrata, the effort aims to eradicate cells of fighters who fled the group’s stronghold in the central city of Sirte before its fall to Libyan forces in December 2016.

According to Libyan officials I spoke with in December, these cells number around 500​. They include capable leaders and planners who comprise what ISIS calls its “Desert Brigade” and its “Office of Borders and Immigration,” a section responsible for external operations, logistics, and recruitment. Moving along the shallow valleys south of Sirte, the network has already conducted a number of attacks on checkpoints and convoys and, most recently, against an oilfield. It is also reconstituting itself. A burly 38-year old jihadist from the Libyan town of Bani Walid named Malik al-Khazmi reportedly helps lead the recruitment drive. Libyan officials believe he played a pivotal role in the rise of ISIS in Libya.

One of the Libyans he recruited is a young man I’ll call Ahmed who I met in 2016. In many ways, Ahmed’s path to jihad paralleled his country’s dissolution after the fall of dictator Muammar Qaddafi. And, when compared with the career of another jihadist 20 years his elder, it also underscored the recurring factors that continue to push successive generations of youths toward militancy.

Born in 1996, Ahmed grew up comfortably in Janzur, a seaside settlement on Tripoli’s western edge. Then came the oil boom, and along with it, a rush of migrants from the hinterland. Janzur soon expanded into a suburb of the capital, complete with gated “tourist villages” and an American school favored by diplomats.

In 2013, Ahmed entered the University of Tripoli to study engineering. He was not religiously observant back then. He smoked cigarettes and drank bokha, a potent home-brewed alcohol. His first semester in school was a time of dislocation and questioning, wrought by turmoil in Libya and across the region. The uprising in Syria gripped him; its parallels to the struggle against Qaddafi were obvious. “We’d suffered, and we knew the Syrians were suffering too,” he told me.

Ahmed watched the Syrian war from afar, on the Internet and on Saudi satellite stations. He recalled popular Saudi clerics beseeching their audiences to support the revolution. It was a religious obligation, they said, incumbent upon all believers. But these arguments alone did not persuade him—it took a horrifying atrocity to do that. In the pre-dawn hours of August 21, 2013, a Syrian Republican Guard artillery crew in Damascus launched volleys of sarin rockets into the city’s eastern neighborhood of Ghouta. U.S. government estimates put the civilian death toll at over 1,400. Ahmed was outraged. “After Ghouta, I really decided,” he told me.

Getting to Syria wasn’t hard. A Syrian man in Tripoli gave Ahmed the information for a contact in Turkey. “Call this guy,” he said, “he will tell you where to go.” Once he made it to Aleppo, Ahmed joined a small militia of Libyan fighters who had joined Syrian Salafist groups; some, like the Nusra Front, were linked to al-Qaeda. They encamped on farmlands dotted with grain silos and transmission towers, where Ahmed trained on a 14.5-mm gun.

In October 2013, the Syrian army launched an armored blitz aimed at choking off Aleppo and cutting the rebels’ supply lines to Turkey. The Libyans fought in the battle of Brigade 80, an army base near the international airport, then retreated north to Tiyara, a hamlet of beehive homes and olive groves. Here, Ahmed manned the defenses of an old factory that the rebels had taken, just east of a hill where Hezbollah snipers and Syrian soldiers had the commanding heights. One day, a Libyan fighter next to him—a childhood friend from Janzur— fell dead after being shot in the head. And so in December of 2013, a shaken Ahmed decided to leave the front. But leaving Syria would prove much harder than entering.

In January 2014, the rebels fell into factional fighting. Ahmed barely escaped with his life, crossing west until he reached the Turkish border. By February he was back in Tripoli, safe and exhausted. But he wasn’t finished with war. In the summer of 2014, the capital was consumed by the civil war between the so-called “Dawn” faction, comprised of militias from western towns led by Misrata and some Tripoli neighborhoods and Islamists, and the “Dignity” faction, led by General Khalifa Hifter in the east, which included forces from the western mountain town of Zintan. Ahmed joined a militia from Janzur, fighting on the side of Dawn.

One day in October 2014, in the midst of the fighting, seven Libyans, some of them veterans of the Syria war, arrived at the abandoned headquarters of a Tripoli TV station that Ahmed and his fellow fighters were using as a camp. One introduced himself as Malik al-Khazmi and proceeded to pitch them to join the Islamic State, Ahmed told me. “The dawla [or state] is coming to Libya,” al-Khazmi told them. “Don’t you want to be the first? The nucleus?” He answered yes.

Around the same time that Ahmed was joining ISIS in Tripoli, another Libyan some 450 kilometers to the east was making the same pledge. Born in 1976, Fawzi al-Ayat is 20 years older than Ahmed, with a much longer record as a jihadist. Like Ahmed, though, he told me his career began when a foreign conflict compelled him to travel abroad to defend Muslims.

Fawzi grew up in Sirte, the city now famous as ISIS’s Libyan base, and as Qaddafi’s hometown and a bastion of loyalist sympathy. Long before that, the city boasted a rich and complex social identity, comprising multiple tribes and an ancient history. In the first century, it was “a large coastal city with brick walls … date palms and sweet-smelling springs,” as a visiting Andalusian geographer wrote. But in the centuries that followed, Sirte, a middling town linked by trade to the desert south rather than to the east or west, faded to the margins. Qaddafi would eventually change this, building it up as an enclave for his favored tribes and elites, dispensing funds on villas, a university, a hospital, and the iconic Ouagadougou Center, a staggering conference hall named for the capital of Burkina Faso.

Today, vast swathes of Sirte’s downtown are in shambles. Though the Libyan-led victory last year over ISIS dealt a serious blow to the group, the city faces a dubious future. On a visit to the city in December, I passed by block after block of flattened buildings and piles of ashen debris. Reconstruction has been slow and displaced residents are furious. “I am ready to swim to Europe,” a young man told me.

All this was a far cry from the city that Fawzi knew as a young man. Still, despite the attention Qaddafi lavished on them, Sirte’s residents were not exempt from his redlines. And in 2007, Fawzi crossed one of them.

At the time, Fawzi was 31, married, and working as an engineer at the national electrical company. Yet like other young Libyan men, the ongoing U.S occupation of Iraq seized him. He said he was never part of any organized jihadist or opposition group, but was planning to travel to Iraq on his own to fight the Americans, when the Libyan government arrested him. He spent the next 17 months in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Slim prison, the site of a massacre in 1996 where over 1,200 inmates died. Though torture in the prison was rampant, by the time of Fawzi’s incarceration, the Libyan regime was supporting a process of theological “revisions” to convince imprisoned jihadists of the illegitimacy of political violence.

It didn’t work for Fawzi. When he was released in 2009, he emerged more radical than ever, and in 2011 he fought against Qaddafi. Afterwards, he founded a jihadist militia called Ansar al-Sharia. By this time, Sirte had fallen into neglect and desperation—punishment, many said, for its long association with Qaddafi. Revolutionaries from the nearby city of Misrata took revenge on the city with detentions and executions, upsetting its social balance by repressing some tribes while favoring others. Crime, drug use, and bloody score-settling spiked. Without a police force, Sirte was open for someone to impose order, even a radical form of order.

Fawzi told me he helped form Ansar al-Sharia, or “the Partisans of Islamic Law,” to do just that. (It shares its name with several other al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist movements. An identically named and better-known militia had also formed in Benghazi, but Fawzi maintained his group arose spontaneously and independently from this one.) It quickly took over security in Sirte and won plaudits for battling drug dealers and mediating land disputes. Meanwhile, another foreign battlefield beckoned.

By this time, a faction had begun developing within Fawzi’s group that wanted to abandon the gradualist approach of al-Qaeda ideologues and establish a territorial caliphate immediately—one that would include Libya. He recalled listening in 2013 to Turki al-Binali, a gifted Bahraini orator, deliver exhortations in Sirte’s Rabat Mosque; al-Binali would become one of the Islamic State’s most important preachers. Libya’s worsening political conflict also weighed on Fawzi: He worried that the Dignity operation, the eastern Libyan forces led by General Khalifa Hiftar, would soon attack Sirte—especially since Hiftar’s tribe, the Firjan, had a presence in the city. Pledging loyalty to the ascendant Islamic State would bring protection, he believed. And by the fall of 2014, he committed to travel to Syria to do just that.

But when Fawzi arrived in the Islamic State’s de-facto capital of Raqqa along with three other Libyans, the group’s leadership instructed him to return home. ISIS, they were told, had already dispatched three lieutenants to the North African state. So Fawzi and his group returned to Libya. And at the end of 2014 in Sirte, he took an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State.

Today, Fawzi sits in a makeshift prison at an air force academy in Misrata, where I met him in December. His cell is a converted dormitory room he shares with several other inmates, sealed by a heavy steel door with a narrow slit. He is tall with a shaved head. His once-luxuriant beard is gone. When speaking, he tilts his head to one side to compensate for the left eye he lost from an American airstrike on Sirte in the summer of 2016. All that remains is the sutured socket.

Fawzi was captured in Sirte that fall after fierce fighting, just after a close ISIS confidante named Walid Firjani killed himself in a suicide bombing. Fawzi said it was Firjani who appointed him to serve as a sharia judge during the Islamic State’s reign in Sirte, covering personal status law—hereditary matters and marriage and divorce.

The Misratan prison official who escorted me told me Fawzi and other ISIS fighters are awaiting trial. But Libya’s judiciary has been in disarray since the revolution and its prisons are, in many cases, the preserve of militias, with scant regard for due process. The official did not see any hope for rehabilitating the captured jihadists, along the lines of what Qaddafi tried. “They will never change,” he said.

This is not the attitude back in Tripoli, however. Here, a militia that passes for a counter-terrorism force is running an extensive re-indoctrination effort, rooted in Islamic scripture and jobs training. The program is run from a prison on the northern end of Matiga International Airport, where hundreds of ISIS fighters or suspected fighters are kept, along with common criminals and individuals caught on the wrong side of Libya’s factional divide. The prison is not controlled by the Libyan government but by a man named Abdelroauf Kara, the commander of the Special Deterrence Force, one of Tripoli’s most formidable armed groups. He has emerged as the city’s de facto counterterrorism czar.

Just shy of 40 years old with a gaze of severe remoteness, Kara met me in early 2016 a conference room in his fortified compound at the airport. In an adjacent office, wispy young militiamen in lizard-stripe fatigues and Diadora trainers lounged on a couch watching a wide-screen TV. A box-fed machine gun rested on a bipod. Growing up in the nearby Tripoli neighborhood of Suq al-Jumaa, or “Friday Market,” Kara told me he worked as a metal artisan before the revolution. He is also an adherent of Salafism, the literalist, conservative interpretation of Islam, and sports the ample beard and shaved mustache of a practicing Salafist. His rise as a militia boss is part of a nationwide trend of Salafists taking over Libya’s policing functions.

After the fall of Qaddafi, Kara founded a militia to ferret out ex-regime loyalists. Then, since the Libyan police had all but disappeared from the capital’s streets, he tackled the drug trade: With the collapse of Libyan border control after 2011, a torrent of illicit narcotics had flowed into the country from the south and west. All the while, Kara’s opponents feared the vast power he was accruing.

The arrival of ISIS in Libya proved a further boon to Kara’s authority. While the campaign against its stronghold in Sirte was chiefly a military one, the battle against the group in Tripoli demanded intelligence and police work, using surveillance, informants, and nighttime raids. And Kara’s militia was the closest thing to a security service.

Kara brought onto his payroll ex-intelligence officers from the Qaddafi era with a talent for interrogations. His militiamen raided suspected safe houses. Each new arrest led to more raids, he told me, after interrogations and the analysis of data from seized cell phones. ISIS hit back, attacking Kara’s base and killing several of his men. Still, he insisted he was winning, and presented himself to Western powers as a counter-terrorism ally, especially after aligning himself with the weak United Nations-backed government in Tripoli. Kara’s biggest coup came last year, when he arrested the brother of Salman Abedi, a 22-year old Briton born to Libyan parents who blew himself up in Manchester in May 2017, killing 22 people at a concert. Believing the brother to be an accomplice, British authorities have asked repeatedly for his extradition.

Yet Kara’s power has not gone uncontested: In mid-January, another Tripoli militia attacked Kara’s base, seeking the release of prisoners. A mix of personal, ideological, and political rivalries underpinned the assault, which left more than 20 dead and shut down the airport for days. Despite such clashes, Kara has denied using the pretext of the Islamic State to go after opponents. And he has further refuted accusations leveled by the United Nations of abuses inside his prison, insisting he acted with justice and humanity. The proof, he told me, was his program of prisoner rehabilitation.

The morning after we met, I went to see this program, housed on Matiga airport near a half-finished soccer field. At 7:30 a.m. sharp, the prisoners jogged from their cells to breakfast, followed by classes on Islam. Some of them, my escort told me, had come to the prison on the recommendation of their families, for alleged drug use or for an array of behavior problems. Then there were the jihadists. “The Islamic State guys need special treatment,” he said.

Seated on a plush carpet before a cleric, they hunched over Korans and pamphlets written by religious authorities in Saudi Arabia. This dose of Salafist principles seemed to comprise the core of their counseling and treatment, though Kara said he addressed more worldly needs as well. After lunch, the prisoners took vocational classes: cabinet making, computer literacy, house painting, and electrical repair. All of this would help them “rejoin society,” my escort said.

I walked through the hives of activity, past the whine of buzz saws and fumes of lacquer to a small cantina where some young men were frying hamburgers. This is where I first met Ahmed. He’d been captured by Kara’s forces a few months earlier. When he made the pledge to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Ahmed had hardly expected this. He’d wanted to join a project; the Islamic State’s recruiter spoke of a borderless state, where Muslims lived peaceably with one another, apart from the unbelievers. He said he was well aware of its brutality, but that the recruiters marshaled an array of theological justifications. “They showed us verses from the Koran and the Prophet’s sayings,” he said. “You see? It’s all here.”

Now, the prison clerics tried each day to purge him of what he’d been told. Earlier, Kara had given me an illustration. “We tell the Islamic State guys, ‘Westerners in Libya who buy our oil are people protected by an ahd,” or Islamic covenant, he said. “They are not kuffar”— unbelievers.

Ahmed gave me an even simpler explanation. “I didn’t know the stories behind the sayings and the verses,” he said. “The Islamic State never told me the stories.”

In the end, it was local context that blocked the expansion of the Islamic State in Libya. Libyans had their own stories, and the terrorist group found it hard to graft its narrative onto the North African state.

Still, the paths to violence are varied and personal, often forged from narrow communities and peer groups. Common threads bind them: political and economic upheaval, foreign wars, and, especially, repression, corruption, and the absence of rule of law. The latter afflictions bedevil Libya today, under the countless militias who rule with impunity across the country. With no effective Libyan government and no capable police or security services, the chiefs of these militias present themselves to outside powers as counter-terror partners, much in the same way they have done in countering migration to Europe. The real challenge, then, is dealing with extremism in a way that does not empower these men at the expense of an inclusive, civic state.

The factors that pushed Ahmed and Fawzi toward militancy remain. And the cycle of mobilization may yet turn again.

[dukkha]

http://aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/egyp...border/1064218
The Egyptian army on Thursday announced it had foiled a fresh "infiltration attempt" across the border with Libya.

“The air force succeeded in foiling an infiltration attempt by 10 4x4 vehicles loaded with arms and ammunition on the western [i.e., Libyan] border,” the army announced in a televised statement.

“The vehicles were completely destroyed,” the army asserted without providing a death toll or identifying the alleged infiltrators.

The border area between Egypt and Libya continues to witness sporadic clashes between Egyptian security forces and smugglers or gunmen, according to previous army statements.

In recent months, the army has reportedly foiled numerous attempts by “infiltrators” to enter Egyptian territory from neighboring Libya.

[dukkha]

General Khalifa Haftar, commander in the Libyan National Army (LNA), leaves after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, November 29, 2016.

Russia: Is Syria’s Fate Libya’s Future?
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs...bya-s-future-2
If the US exhibits the same reluctance for involvement that it did in Syria, Russia will have the opportunity to increase its efforts to meddle effectively in Libya.
On February 17th, Libyans will celebrate the anniversary of a revolt that ultimately toppled and killed Muammar Qaddafi This anniversary and others in the region are regrettable reminders of how the expectations in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring compare to the reality on the ground seven years later.

After the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya and the removal of Qaddafi, US involvement has been limited to air strikes on ISIS targets.
In fact, the abandonment of Libya by the international community is seen as one of the critical mistakes that contributed to the unraveling political and security crisis. The US and Europe supported UN-led diplomatic negotiations from the beginning, but no country has made Libya a top priority.
The lack of urgency in Western capitals to solve the Libyan crisis paved the way for Moscow to throw its weight behind strongman Khalifa Haftar, who controls the eastern half of the country with his self-declared Libyan National Army (LNA).
The presence of ISIS and other extremist groups gives Russia an opportunity to support military leader Khalifa Haftar in the name of defeating extremists. Indeed, ISIS is not as strong in Libya now as it was in Syria in 2015. However, there is no shortage of extremist activity in Libya.

ISIS conducted multiple sophisticated attacks in the second half of 2017. Benghazi, previously regarded as one of the safest cities in Libya, saw two separate attacks killing a total of thirty-seven and wounding 135 people over the past few weeks.
Last year’s attack on a concert in London was linked to an ISIS cell in Libya, demonstrating how Libya’s instability affects other countries.
The multiple terrorist organizations in Libya, including ISIS, could easily serve as a pretext for Russian backing of Haftar, who superficially resembles Assad in his military campaign of defeating terrorism as well as his authoritarian practices in doing so.
The continued attacks in Haftar’s territory bolster his narrative to undertake strong man approaches, which Russia can get behind without too much upset from Libyans who suffer from regular attacks.
The Kremlin’s actual interest in Syria is to anchor its influence in the region and to prop up an authoritarian regime. Its strategy may extend to Libya.

Russia’s interests in Libya are varied. On the economic side, Libya’s vast oil reserves generate enormous wealth. Regaining any portion of the billions of dollars of contracts—some signed as recently as 2008—Russia had in Libya under Qaddafi is enticing. Reconstruction efforts could also be highly profitable, and Russia may have interest in participating, provided someone else pays the bills. In terms of the foreign policy chessboard, Libya’s placement along Europe’s southern border gives Russia the opportunity to create trouble a few hundred miles south.

Russia has begun inching toward Libya recently by cozying up to neighboring Egypt. In March 2017, Russia quietly deployed troops to Egypt; then in November, the two countries signed a draft agreement for Russia to use Egypt’s airspace and military bases, including one on the Mediterranean coast only fifty miles from Libya. Egyptian and Russian officials met this week in Cairo to discuss cooperation on security efforts in Egypt. Direct flights between Russia and Egypt are resuming after a two-year hiatus and military ties between the two countries are growing.

Egypt’s long-time support of Haftar aides Russia’s initiative in Libya. Cairo often provides air support to Haftar against his enemies in eastern Libya.
Over the past year, Egypt has tried to position itself as a mediator to integrate various factions into a united Libyan army by facilitating discussions in Cairo.
Egypt’s long western border hems the eastern border of Haftar’s stronghold in Libya.
Egypt provides a trustworthy, nearby location from which Russia can run its base operations while Egypt benefits from Russian support and weapons.
Russia has already taken advantage of Egypt’s proximity and shared economic, strategic, and security interests in Libya. The Russian-Egyptian friendship bolsters each side’s goals in the region, among which is to side with Haftar. Russia’s involvement is growing.
With Egyptian help, Russia could impact the outcome of the Libyan crisis, as it did in Syria.

The situation on the ground in Libya is stalled and the strongest actor, General Haftar, is too weak to control the country alone.
On the one hand, given the unwieldy situation, involvement in Libya may be costly for Russia.
Russia’s economy is not booming at the moment and supporting Haftar's army would be a substantial investment. On the other hand, the fact that no actors in Libya present an equal threat to Haftar may in fact augment the appeal to Russia.
Additionally, due to its small population, the price of influence in Libya is smaller than in Syria.
Finally, if the Syrian conflict winds down in favor of Russia’s ally Bashar al Assad, the Kremlin will have a newly expanded capacity to focus elsewhere.

Western powers severely underestimated Russia’s willingness to support Syrian president Bashar al Assad and the geopolitical consequences of doing so.
Given similar favorable conditions in Libya, Russia’s opportunistic style of foreign policy, and Russia’s success in saving the Assad regime, it would be a flawed assumption that the Kremlin will stop in Syria.
The current US administration says it is disinclined to repeat the same policy mistakes made by its predecessor in Syria or elsewhere.

[dukkha]

Libyan Dinar 40 percent appreciation leads to 15 % food price fall January to February:
he latest market monitoring report by REACH confirms reports that the sudden and drastic drop in the black-market exchange rate against the Libyan dinar in January and February has been reflected in a decrease in food prices. The report assessed 33 items in 305 shops over 23 Libyan cities.

The sudden appreciation of the LD was most likely linked to the Central Bank of Libya’s (CBL) roll out of this year’s family dollar allowance: Each Libyan family is eligible to buy 500 USD at the official exchange rate of roughly 1.350 LD per USD. By early January, the CBL had reportedly paid out 2.8 billion USD to Libyan citizens claiming the allowance. This move increased the dollar supply in the parallel market, as many recipients exchanged their family allowances for Libyan dinars, and thus strengthened the Libyan dinar, the RACH report explained.

The report added that the recent boost of the Libyan dinar occurred amid promising macroeconomic data, increased oil production and a rising oil price, which has given the CBL more room to grant letters of credit at the official exchange rate to importers. This, in turn, decreased the demand for US dollars in the parallel market. Food prices decreased by 14.6%. Libya is heavily dependent on food imports.

Since Libya is heavily dependent on food imports, the report said that many importers are forced to resort to the parallel market to obtain foreign currencies, which meant that the recent changes had a significant impact on food prices.
https://www.libyaherald.com/2018/02/...bruary-report/

[anatta]

When Khalifa Haftar flew to Tunis in September, the veteran commander and possible future leader of Libya brought masked troops armed with automatic rifles and grenade launchers in a show of force that drew censure from UN experts.

In France, Italy and Tunisia, he also shook hands with ministers and presidents in gilded reception rooms, projecting a different image: that of a man preparing to convert the military gains of his Libyan National Army (LNA) into civilian power.

Haftar casts himself as the person who can bring stability to Libya after years of conflict, ridding the OPEC member of armed groups and reining in migrant smuggling to Europe.

Some of those who have worked with him describe him as a divisive military man with little time for politics, who could try to reinstate authoritarian rule and bring more violence to a country with many armed groups.

A former ally of Muammar Gaddafi, Haftar, 75, returned to Libya seven years ago from the United States, to join the Nato-backed revolution that ended four decades of one-man rule.

After a protracted military campaign in Libya’s second city, Benghazi, he has promised to “liberate” the capital Tripoli, split from the east since 2014. Elections, which the United Nations says could be organized by the end of the year despite major obstacles, may provide another route to power.

Haftar seems to be hedging his bets. The LNA, he said last month, has “sleeper cells” it could activate to take full control of Libya while prioritizing a political solution to avoid bloodshed.

“But our patience has limits”, he said in the interview published in French magazine Jeune Afrique, before adding that Libya was not “ripe for democracy”.

Mohamed Buisier, a US-based engineer who served as an adviser to Haftar from 2014-2016 before falling out with him, said Haftar wanted absolute power.

“He wants to get to one of the big palaces in Tripoli and rule Libya - that is it,” he said.

Haftar’s office said he did not immediately have time for an interview.
Journey

Among the officers who supported Gaddafi when he seized power from King Idris in 1969, Haftar was disowned by Gaddafi after he was captured leading Libyan forces in Chad in 1987.

He settled outside Washington D.C. in Virginia and returned to Libya only as the revolt against Gaddafi was gathering pace.

“He was there at the beginning with Gaddafi … he was abandoned by Gaddafi, he left Libya for decades. He would like to see the arc of history corrected,” said Jonathan Winer, a former US special envoy to Libya who met Haftar in 2016.

After Gaddafi was overthrown and eventually killed, Haftar dropped from view, resurfacing in February 2014 with a televised statement pledging to rescue a country mired in instability.

In May that year, he launched “Operation Dignity” in Benghazi, merging his irregular forces with army troops and pitting himself against both Islamist "militants" whom he blamed for a wave of bombings and assassinations in the port city, and an armed alliance that took control of Tripoli soon after.

But it was not until early 2016, amid reports of support from foreign states including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, that Haftar started gaining the upper hand in his Benghazi campaign.
Tripoli government rejected

Haftar has rejected the United Nations-backed transitional Government of National Accord (GNA) set up in Tripoli in 2016 as fighting raged in Benghazi, dismissing it as unelected and beholden to the capital’s militias. “I‘m reaching out to General Haftar once every week to ask him for a meeting,” former UN Libya envoy Martin Kobler said in an interview in July 2016. “But it takes two to dance a tango.”

The GNA stalled amid political splits and Haftar gained ground from the east, seizing and reopening several key oil ports southeast of Benghazi in September 2016, and replacing elected mayors with military appointees.

By 2017, his international profile was firmly on the rise.

In January he was given a tour of a Russian aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. In July, two weeks after appearing on TV in a starched white uniform to declare victory in Benghazi, newly elected President Emmanuel Macron hosted him in Paris alongside GNA head Fayez Seraj. Senior Western officials began regular visits to Haftar’s base at Rajma, near Benghazi.
Limits of control

On the ground, however, things were more complicated.

The oil ports were briefly retaken by Haftar’s rivals, and fighting in Benghazi dragged on for months after the victory declaration.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a special forces commander attached to the LNA, for allegedly overseeing the summary execution of several dozen prisoners.

Derna, about 250 km (155 miles) northeast, remains under the control of a coalition of Islamists and other local fighters, despite LNA encirclement and air raids.

Rivalries have surfaced between the special forces, mainstream army units, local youths who fought alongside the LNA, and ultraconservative Salafist brigades that have gained power and influence under Haftar, said Mohamed Eljarh, an analyst based in eastern Libya.

“These people don’t see eye to eye,” he said. “After Benghazi has been declared liberated, basically the common enemy has gone. So now, these differences are coming alive.”

UN monitors said in a confidential report seen by Reuters that Haftar’s display of armed muscle in Tunis amounted “a serious violation of the arms embargo” on Libya.

Western officials say he has the formality of Soviet-trained officers of his generation and question his engagement with politics.

“His script is basically security comes first, politics comes later,” said one foreign visitor who was received several times by Haftar, and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“He is not a convinced democrat,” said one foreign envoy, adding that Haftar had told him that he intended to run for elections. “He accepts elections as an acceptable way to do it, provided he will be the winner.”

Buisier said Haftar had surrounded himself with ultra-loyal advisors and relatives, including two of his sons, Saddam and Khaled, who were given military ranks and a brigade to command.

Some of the commander’s inner circle accused Busier of supporting Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the late leader’s most prominent son, whose whereabouts are unclear but is viewed by Haftar as a potential rival, the former adviser said.

Several other Haftar allies have defected, including a former spokesman and the GNA’s defence minister.

Ahmed al-Mismari, the LNA’s spokesman, said 90 percent of the force was made up of regular soldiers, denied reports that it was dependent on foreign support, and asserted that the armed escort brought to Tunis was for personal protection and was cleared with Tunisian authorities.

The LNA supported elections, and had declared its “full readiness to secure them”, he said.