Forces on the Libyan ground: Who is Who

Arnaud Delalande 

28 May 2018

On April 26, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar's plane landed at Benina airport, which ended speculation about his very poor health or death after his hospitalization in Paris for two weeks. At 75, Marshal Haftar is considered the strongman of eastern Libya. He is at the head of the so-called Libyan National Army. This army is actually a group of militias rotating around a regular army nucleus representing a force of about 25,000 men. It is not a solid and coherent block. Each militia has its own agenda and its ambitions. It is not uncommon for LNA units to clash with each other for various reasons (land holdings, arrest of one or more of their members, smuggling, etc.). The cohesion of the whole is so fragile that events such as the recent hospitalization of Marshal Haftar in Paris and uncertainty about his state of health threaten at any time to violently split this army apart.

THE "REGULAR" LIBYAN NATIONAL ARMY

Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s regular ground forces are composed of several dozen units – two mechanized infantry brigades, one tank brigade, three artillery brigades, one special forces brigade, two "Rada Deterrent Forces" grouping several brigades and about a hundred larger or smaller units of brigade type, infantry battalions, light battalions, border guards, security forces – with a total of about 7,000 members. In September 2017, the President of the House of Representatives, Ageela Saleh, ordered the creation of four military zones covering the central part and most of the west coast of Libya. These are: the military zone of the Gulf of Sirte, with its headquarters in Ajdabiya; the military zone of Misrata, with headquarters in Khoms; the military zone of Tripoli, with headquarters in Suq Al-Khamis; the military zone of Zawia, with headquarters in Sabratha. This announcement was quite symbolic since only part of the first, the area of the Gulf of Sirte, is in the hands of the LNA. It extends from Sirte in the west to Sidi Abdelati, about sixty kilometers north of Ajdabiya. Its southern limit is Zillah. There are two other military zones, one extending from the south of the central zone (Gulf of Sirte) to the southern borders of the country and the eastern zone from Benghazi to Tobruk.

AUXILIARY MILITIAS

Marshal Haftar can also count on some 12,000 auxiliary militia members, including several Sudanese units from Darfur, and Chad militias. The deployment of Sudan Liberation Army/Minni Minawi (ALS/MM) armed groups began in March 2015 in the Ubari, al-Waw and al-Wig areas. In March 2016, they gained their autonomy and played a key role in the capture and protection of oil installations by the LNA. The Sudan Liberation Army/Al-Nur is also engaged alongside the LNA with 1,500 fighters by mid-2016. The Chadian group “Rassemblement des Forces pour le Changement” (RFC) began operating in southeast Libya at the end of 2015. It was deployed in the oil crescent alongside the LNA. The Libyan National Army can also count on about 500 members of the Al-Furjan clan, as well as an indeterminate number of Petroleum Facilities Guards (PFG) dissatisfied with the replacement at their head of Ibrahim Jadhran by the new commander Idris Saleh Abu Khamada.

ZINTAN BRIGADES

The forces of the western city of Zintan played a crucial role during the 2011 war, and were deployed in both Tripoli and the southern region of Fezzan. Expelled from both areas in 2014, they built a well-trained and equipped force, with around2,500 soldiers, and control a former Gaddafi airbase at Al Watiya. The Zintanis are grouped mainly in the Jabal Nafusah mountains and in the Jafarah coastal plain. They have had a tense relationship with Marshal Haftar since 2012, although formally part of the LNA. The Zintan Military Council is neither an active opponent nor a close ally of Marshal Khalifa Haftar, but has benefited from the LNA's logistics network and arms procurement efforts.

TRIBAL ARMED GROUPS

After the 2011 revolution, the Awlad Sulayman tribal group took advantage of changes in the local tribal power structure to take over Sebha's security services and regional traffic activities. This led the group to conflict with the Toubou and Tuareg, who traditionally controlled cross-border smuggling routes. The result was an open war in Sebha in 2012 and 2014. One of the main commanders of Awlad Sulayman at the time was Ahmad al-Utaybi. In May 2016, the Awlad Sulayman brigade (now called the 6th Brigade) was engaged in the battle of Sirte alongside the militias of al-Bunyan al-Marsous. On February 20, 2018, al-Utaybi opposed the integration of the 6th Brigade to the LNA as desired by Marshal Haftar, declaring that the loyalty of his brigade went to the Ministry of Defense of the Government of Tripoli. A few days later, he was replaced by LNA Brigadier General Khalifa Abdulhafith Khalifa.

THE LNA AIR FORCE

The Libyan National Army Air Force has potentially twenty seven fighter-bombers in its fleet (eighteen MiG-21s, four MiG-23s, three Su-22s and two Mirage F1s), seven Mi-24/35 gunships, fourteen various Mi-8/14/17 transport helicopters and a few transport cargos (an Il-76 and a C-130 overhauled thanks to foreign technicians). Less than half of this fleet were aircraft and helicopters of the former Libyan Arab Air Force (LAAF), the most part was provided by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates between October 2014 and June 2015: eight MiG-21MFs, about sixteen helicopters, spare parts and technical support. In 2015, the UAE has also donated two of its Schiebel S-100 Camcopters UAV operating from Benina airbase. With the exception of the MiG-23s, which are all engaged in the fighting, and the Mirage F1s and Su-22s used for reconnaissance missions in western Libya, only a handful of MiG-21s is operational. As for helicopters, it is difficult to know their availability rate because many of them no longer have an identification number in order to mask their quantity. Haftar can only rely on around ten aircraft to carry out his "anti-terrorist operations". Since the Russian aircraft carrier Kuznetsov’s visit and the meeting with Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasimov in January 2017, Field Marshal Haftar could count on increasing Russian technical support with the delivery of former Russian MiG-23 spare parts the following weeks at al-Abraq airbase. In the same period, the LNA also took delivery of former Sudanese MiG-23 spare parts.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES AERIAL SUPPORT

Between May and June 2016, the United Arab Emirates deployed six IOMAX AT-802U Air Tractors and three Wing Loong II drones at Al-Khadim air field in al-Marj in eastern Libya. The first engagements of this fleet were performed the following weeks against the Benghazi Revolutionaries Shura Council (BRSC). Emirati aircraft were fully engaged in support of LNA ground forces in Benghazi. Between September and November 2016, the BRSC claimed that Air Tractors and Wing Loong drones were involved in about a hundred bombing missions. By summer 2016, extension work started on the airbase to increase its capacity. The existing parking area was equipped with a dozen hangars, half of them used to house aircraft and drones and a second parking area was under construction in the base’s southeast corner. A dozen large hangars were built and half of the new tarmac was completed on February 2017. It was fully completed in December after a six-month work break. The size of these infrastructures is large enough to accommodate fighter jets like F-16s, Mirage 2000s or even Rafales. Work was temporally stopped following the end of the battle for the liberation of Benghazi and it is unclear if the UAE fleet is still in Libya or not.

EGYPT AIR FORCE SUPPORT

Although Egypt had already performed airstrikes in Libya in February 2015 against ISIS in Derna in retaliation for the killing of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian migrant workers, aerial support for Field Marshal Haftar's forces almost became official in March and May 2017 with the retaking of the oil infrastructure by the Benghazi Defend Brigade (BDB) and especially with the supposed retaliation strikes against the alleged perpetrator of the monastery attack in Egypt’s Minya province claimed by ISIS. In fact, the Egyptian Air Force carried out air raids against BDB militants in Hun and Derna Mujahideen Shura Council (DMSC). The latest attacks by ISIS militants in a Sufi mosque in Bir al-Abed in northern Sinai that killed 305 people will certainly compel the Egyptians to reduce their support for the LNA to focus their forces against Sinai-based Islamist militants.

To date, the Libyan National Army has still not managed to secure Benghazi although the city was announced as being released several months ago. To this must be added the regular IS attacks in Ajdabiya, the threat that still hangs over the oil terminals and the retaking of the beleaguered city of Derna which is still waiting. This was a disappointment for all Haftar supporters, including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and even France, which no longer considers Haftar as a privileged interlocutor and also rely on the GNA.

https://www.ispionline.it/en/pubblicazione/forces-libyan-ground-who-who-20640

LYBIAN GHOSTS... Searching for Truth After Qaddafi

By Robert F. Worth

• https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2017-04-11/libyan-ghosts
• http://international.minbarlibya.com/2017/04/15/libyan-ghosts-searching-for-truth-after-qaddafi/

In the early summer of 2003, a few months after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I arrived at the door of a pockmarked building in Baghdad where many of the military and intelligence files of Saddam Hussein’s government were stored.

The street was full of dust, and Iraqis of all ages were streaming in and out, some of them clutching folders. A group of men was standing near the door in authoritative poses, and older women were yelling at them, pleading for information. I was new to the country, and a little baffled at first that these scraps of yellowing paper had provoked so much passion and excitement.

It did not take me long to figure out why.

For all the Iraqis publicly executed under Saddam, countless more had disappeared into his archipelago of dungeons. Their families had submitted to a familiar pattern: years of soul-sapping hope and dread, with regime officials cynically demanding money in exchange for information about the

disappeared that they never supplied. Some of these people told me they would have given almost anything for the peace of mind conveyed by a genuine death certificate.

This is the emotional terrain of Hisham Matar, a Libyan British writer whose career has revolved around the drama of forced disappearance under dictatorship.

His two novels, In the Country of Men(2006) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), are both disguised memoirs based on the 1990 abduction of his father, the Libyan dissident Jaballa Matar, by Egyptian intelligence agents in Cairo.

The Egyptians turned the elder Matar over to the security services of Libya’s vicious ruler, Muammar al-Qaddafi; he then entered the ranks of the disappeared.

His family never knew where he was being held; by the mid-1990s, they were no longer certain if he was even alive.

Capturing Jaballa Matar was a significant feat for the Libyan regime: he had been a leading figure in the opposition, using the considerable wealth he’d built as a businessman to organize a network inside and outside the country that aimed to overthrow Qaddafi.

In 1979, his family had left Libya for Egypt with him, and soon afterward, his sons had been sent to the even safer remove of European boarding schools.

Matar’s novels evoke and reference these events; in The Return, Matar fully lifts the veil, providing a mesmerizing, harrowing account of his return to Libya in 2012 and his long effort to grapple with his father’s fate and legacy.

“I envy the finality of funerals,” Matar writes early on in the book. “I covet the certainty. How it must be to wrap one’s hands around the bones, to choose how to place them, to be able to pat the patch of earth and sing a prayer.”

Matar has put together an artfully structured book that takes on larger themes and is ultimately more satisfying than either of his novels.

The author’s journey forces him to reassess himself and his origins and weaves together multiple characters and histories: an uncle who survived 21 years in a Libyan prison; the heroism of his young cousins during the civil war that began in 2011 after the overthrow of Qaddafi; and the larger, tragic arc of Libyan history, from the Italian conquest a century ago to the murderous chaos of the present.

Many fathers and sons are present here, including Qaddafi’s slick and self-deluded son Saif al-Qaddafi, who in 2010 approached Matar in London with dubious promises of information and friendship.

In some places, The Return resembles an elegy; in others, a detective story. It is also a meditation on art, mourning, and the human costs of dictatorship, which Libyans are still paying.

Although Matar’s narrative does not extend past 2012, it sheds more light than any other book I have read on the multiple tragedies that have brought Libya to its present shattered state.

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

Matar was reluctant to return to Libya after the revolt against Qaddafi began in February 2011. He was living in London at the time, awaiting the publication of his second novel; he had gone to college there and had become a British citizen.

He had also spent years on a public campaign to pressure Qaddafi’s government for information about his father, and suddenly the prospect of actually encountering him—dead or alive—seemed shockingly real.

I was in Libya during the 2011 revolt, reporting for The New York Times Magazine; I remember speaking to Matar once or twice on the phone from Benghazi and wondering why he was still in London. The reason, as he makes clear in the first pages of the book, is that his life had become premised, in a sense, on not returning.

The journey home “could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people that I love.”

Exile had become part of his identity, and he was afraid to trade the frozen images he had lived with for 33 years for up-to-date realities. 

He is also an emotionally vulnerable man who feared that if he visited the prison where his father was most likely murdered, he might be “forever undone.” But the temptation to solve the mystery of his father’s fate proved too strong. 

Matar is in fact undone by his visit, although not only in the ways he expected. Walking through Benghazi, he begins to feel unmoored from the exile’s anger that has sustained him for so long: “I could see the walls, so old I had never noticed them before, that stood between me and everyone I have ever known, every book and painting and symphony and work of art that had ever mattered to me, suddenly seeming impermanent. The freedom frightened me.”

He finds himself constantly revisiting his past, and the book shuttles accordingly from the present tense of the return journey to various earlier chapters of his life. 

In this way, The Return recalls Matar’s first novel, which projected a sensitive child’s consciousness onto a paternalistic culture that is suffused with violence. In The Return, Matar revisits this terrain, conjuring memories of his childhood soccer games and his first glimpse of a sheep being slaughtered. These memories are rendered with an extraordinary eye for detail and shaped by a heightened awareness of the gulf between child and adult perception:

The animal kicked furiously, snorting for air, which entered its nostrils and escaped through the open neck. The blood poured out black and thick like date syrup. Small translucent bubbles grew and burst around its mouth. I snapped my fingers, I clapped my hands beside its wide-open eye. When it did not respond, I began to cry. . . . Moments later, I sat around the table with the others and ate liver and kidneys sautéed with chili, onion, garlic, parsley and coriander, and agreed that the dish did taste better than at any other time because the meat was, as one of the adults had said, “unbelievably fresh.”

FATHER FIGURE

Much of Matar’s return journey involves rediscovering his relatives, whose bravery provides a striking counterpoint to Matar’s inwardness. His uncle Mahmoud and other relatives were released from prison just as the 2011 protests began, after 21 years of confinement and torture. (They had been members of Matar’s father’s dissident group.)

Mahmoud, it turns out, was sustained for years in prison by an obsession that is almost a mirror image of Matar’s: he followed news of Matar’s writings in radio broadcasts and press clippings, in the rare moments when he had access to them.

Another relative, Mahmoud’s irrepressible son Izzo, plays a major role in Matar’s poignant retelling of the 2011 uprising. Izzo fought with remarkable bravery on several fronts until he was shot and killed by a sniper during the liberation of Tripoli in late August, six months into the conflict.

Izzo’s brother Hamed kept fighting, despite his parents’ pleas, and later traveled to Syria to join a rebel group there in the fight against the Assad regime.

Matar yells at Hamed over the phone, exhorting him to come home, to no avail. Only after Hamed is wounded and removed from the Syrian battlefield does he agree to return to Libya.

Matar’s family drama coincides, in many respects, with the brief modern history of Libya. His paternal grandfather was born around 1880, when the country was “a vast and nearly empty landscape,” as Matar writes, nominally under Ottoman rule.

After the Italians invaded in 1911, jockeying for a better position in the European race for colonial territory and hoping to gain a “fourth shore,” a fierce native resistance arose, guided by the Senussi, a mystical religious order. Its leader was Omar al-Mukhtar, a legendary guerrilla who remains Libya’s great national hero.

Matar’s grandfather fought in the first phase of the resistance, from 1911 until 1919. He lived a long life, and Matar knew him well as a boy. He recalls his grandfather unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a “small rosette just beneath the collarbone” where an Italian soldier’s bullet had wounded him. Matar’s grandfather probably would have died had he not fled to Egypt and avoided the bloodiest phase of the Italian war, after Mussolini took charge in 1922.

Airplanes bombed and gassed villages, and tens of thousands of Libyans were marched to concentration camps, where torture and starvation were common. Official Italian records show that the population of eastern Libya dropped from 225,000 to 142,000 during this period, Matar writes.

Matar’s own father remains a central (although spectral) figure in the book, and the grandeur and mystery of the elder Matar continue to expand during his son’s return journey. “I am the son of an unusual man, perhaps even a great man,” Matar writes.

Many boys are inclined to think this way about their fathers—and if a father disappears, the temptation only grows. But Matar’s father was clearly a person of immense charisma long before his disappearance.

During the 1980s, capturing the elder Matar became a top priority for the Libyan regime, which sent hit men abroad to find him. He gave his children pseudonyms to use when talking about him in public. At one point, during a trip to Europe, Matar chastised his father for being so paranoid. But shortly afterward, they passed two men on the street speaking Libyan Arabic. “So what does this Jaballa Matar look like anyway?” one said to the other.

Later, Matar’s brother, Ziad, narrowly escaped a careful of would-be kidnappers who chased him all the way to his boarding school in a Swiss mountain village. When the family urged Jaballa to withdraw from politics, they encountered an austere patriotism: “Don’t put yourselves in competition with Libya,” he told them. “You will always lose.”

On his return to Libya in 2012, Matar meets men who knew his father in prison, and revered him. He hears about how his father took an enormous risk by smuggling out a letter authorizing a loan to the family of a fellow prisoner.

When prison officials found out, he refused to name his accomplices and was tortured horribly for three days. One man shows Matar his father’s youthful fiction, published in a student journal, some of it relating to the desert war for independence against the Italians.

Another former prisoner who knew Matar’s father and admired him immensely clutches Matar’s hand and gazes into his eyes, unable to express his emotions except by repeating the same phrase again and again: “Are you well? Your health? Your family?”

These encounters are interspersed with Matar’s reports on the disgraceful efforts of the Libyan regime to placate him in the years prior to the 2011 revolt. The messenger was Qaddafi’s son Saif, who arranged to meet Matar at a London hotel in 2010. The British government was mending fences with Qaddafi at the time, and Saif seemed confident that he could buy Matar off and elide all the horrors of the previous decades.

Saif claimed that he knew what had happened to Matar’s father, but he refused to tell him, saying that he first had to reach some shadowy accommodation with the Egyptian security services and Qaddafi’s henchmen.

At one point during their correspondence, Saif texted Matar a quote attributed to the Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan: “Most important, don’t do anything you don’t want.” Matar texted back a quote from Gandhi; Saif responded with a smiley-face emoji. 

In the end, Matar’s quest to touch his father’s bones is thwarted. “For a quarter of a century now, hope has been seeping out of me,” he concludes. “Now I can say, I am almost free of it.”

He must accept the overwhelming likelihood that his father was murdered at the Abu Salim prison in 1996, during a massacre in which the Libyan authorities murdered 1,270 men. Their remains were scattered at sea or buried in a mass grave.

Fittingly, it was this atrocity that helped give rise to the 2011 uprising, which was sparked in part by a demonstration in Benghazi in support of a lawyer for the victims  of the Abu Salim killings.

FAREWELL TO THE BIG MAN?

Matar’s narrative ends in mid-2012, during his brief stay in Libya. At that point, Libyans were still recovering from Qaddafi’s overthrow and death in the wake of a NATO-led military intervention. The country had not yet begun its disintegration into militia-run fiefdoms, and Matar chooses not to narrate that catastrophe.

In a book so layered with tragedies, perhaps it would have been too much to add another one. Instead, Matar frames his return home as a brief moment of clarity, almost an idyll, when “anything seemed possible, and nearly every individual I met spoke of his optimism and foreboding in the same breath.” Those days are long gone. One can only hope that someday Libya’s national story will again be amenable to a narrator as sensitive, honest, and forgiving as Matar.

For the time being, Libya has become a tale so furious that it seems to resist all efforts at translation.

The outlines are familiar: two rival governments, each with foreign backers; a jihadist insurgency, now largely broken; and a fragmentation of authority among rival gangs. Is this the harvest of a misconceived NATO intervention? Is it the inevitable result of Qaddafi’s deliberate destruction of Libyan institutions? No one can be sure.

Matar has said little about Libya’s descent into chaos, perhaps wisely. One of the few hopeful notes I have heard from revolutionaries in the Middle East is the idea that the Arab revolts of 2010–11 were part of a broader shift away from paternalism. The younger generation, some say, is slowly turning away from the traditional Arab reverence for a “big man” in politics, culture, and religion.

They hope that this reorientation of social life will eventually erode the pillars of autocracy and the ills that came along with it.

The potential for such an outcome provides little comfort in the present moment. But taking a long-term perspective may be the best way to view the Arab world’s current mayhem.

It also gives added meaning to Matar’s preoccupation with a legendary father figure, the man whose terrible shadow is so difficult to escape. “I am no different,” Matar writes of his filial obsession. “I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.”

Are Libyans abandoning democracy in search of stability?

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/10/libya-abandoning-democracy-search-stability.html#ixzz4NBbzixya

10.10

Mohamed ELJARH

It has been nearly five years since Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed by Libyan rebels near his hometown of Sirte on Oct. 20, 2011. Sadly, Libya remains a deeply divided country, both politically and institutionally, and does not have a functional representative government in place. Tragically, Libya’s democratic transition process failed to create an environment conducive for democracy and the rule of law. Instead, Libya became a country where militias ruled, extremist groups flourished and living conditions deteriorated significantly. The country also suffers from a major political crisis, with various competing governments each claiming legitimacy and control over key institutions such as the Central Bank, the National Oil Corporation and the Libyan Investment Authority.

Today, Libyans are forced to choose between two extremes: either chaos with militias and Islamist extremists as the dominant forces, or military rule. No other convincing options are on offer. The choice is quite clear in Libya’s eastern region of Cyrenaica (Barqa in Arabic), where the military is now the dominant armed and political force on the ground, expanding its control over democratically elected and civilian institutions without any public opposition and with clear public support for their actions. On June 19, the president of the Libyan parliament in Tobruk, in his claimed capacity as supreme commander of the armed forces, declared a state of emergency and appointed the Libyan National Army Chief of Staff Abdulrazaq Nadori as military governor for the eastern region. Nadori now has the power to appoint civilian and military committees and can replace local municipal councils with military governors. He also can prohibit demonstrations that do not have prior written consent from his office.

In Libya’s eastern region, Nadori started a campaign to replace largely dysfunctional but democratically elected municipal councils with military-appointed governors. The step represents yet another setback for democracy in post-Gadhafi Libya. So far, military governors have replaced eight municipal councils, including those in the cities of Benghazi, Shahaat, Ejdabyia in the northeast and Kufrah in the southeast. 

Otman Gajiji, the chairman of the Central Committee of Municipal Elections of Libya, expressed great concern over what he called the “military takeover” of democratically elected authorities. “There is no legal framework or justification for these appointments,” he told Al-Monitor.

Indeed, there is no existing legislation or emergency law in place to legally justify Nadori’s actions. It is also clear that there is no accountability mechanism for oversight from the parliament in Tobruk.

However, such concerns do not seem to be shared by the head of Libya’s parliament, who authorized Nadori’s actions. Also, the mayor of Tobruk in eastern Libya requested that the military appoint a governor for the city, citing a lack of resources and city officials' inability to provide services and fight crime. Similarly, local community leaders in the municipality of Soloug south of Benghazi demanded that the military appoint a governor for the municipality. Local communities in the southern and western regions of Libya are discussing the idea of military governors for their own municipalities, showing the potential for the militarization trend to spread nationwide.

To understand this shift in Libya’s political and governance landscape, one must look into the dynamics that gave rise to this trend and also local perspectives about it. Activists in the city of Benghazi, the first to have its municipal council replaced with a military governor, told Al-Monitor that many civil society and democracy activists were strong supporters of the army’s war on extremist Islamist militias in Benghazi. The activists explained their support by pointing out that since 2012, Benghazi has witnessed a terror campaign at the hands of extremists in which more than 500 civil society activists, politicians, journalists and military and security personnel have been killed. Most of these cases were perpetrated by “unknown assailants,” with successive governments failing to bring those responsible to justice. Furthermore, the security situation and living conditions have deteriorated significantly. The Libyan National Army and its leader, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, capitalized on these failures.

Residents of Benghazi and other major cities in eastern Libya celebrate the Libyan National Army’s advances and gains in Benghazi. Younes Najm, an activist from Benghazi, said the Libyan National Army "has recognition in the eyes of the people because it was the only institution that dealt with people’s concerns over the rise of extremist groups, militias and the deteriorating security situation.” Indeed, under the Libyan National Army, security has improved and criminal activities are being addressed, garbage collection seems to be working and there is better control over the prices of goods and services. All of these are quick wins that were badly needed and that previous governments failed to deliver. Undoubtedly, all this gives the military more public legitimacy than democratically elected but dysfunctional institutions.

“This is not what we had hoped for Libya, but Libya’s chance to establish a democracy has been sabotaged by narrow-minded interests and hijacked by Islamist groups with a transitional agenda,” said Monem Alyaser, who served in the General National Congress, the 2012-2014 transitional legislature. “Somehow, we will have to start over by establishing stability and building democratic institutions capable of upholding the rule of law and protecting human rights,” he added.

Despite the threats, challenges and the long road ahead, civil society activists and democracy advocates in Libya should be ready to push against the militarization exercise unfolding in the country in a way that does not help extremists or their enablers but rather defends the principles of rule of law, human rights and democracy.

The Hifter effect on the battle for Libya's Sirte

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/10/libya-battle-sirte-isis-general-hifter.html#ixzz4NBZFRcjX

14.10

JASON PACK

For months now, the ouster of Islamic State (IS) forces from Libya’s coastal city of Sirte has been touted as imminent, yet like the light at the end of the tunnel that is within sight but out of grasp, complete victory against IS continues to evade the Misratan-led, Bunyan al-Marsus (BM) forces, and their US allies.

There is still little doubt that a victory of some sort will be eventually won. In fact, before President Barack Obama leaves office, the United States may be able to claim that its aerial and training support have proved instrumental in ousting IS from Sirte. However, without a unified political solution in place through which Sirte’s battered infrastructure, public services and civilian way of life can be restored post-IS, any such victory may turn out to be very superficial. IS emerged in Sirte out of a Misratan occupation following the defeat of an al-Qaeda-linked jihadi group, Ansar al-Sharia, in 2013. The post-conflict stabilization was botched and both civilians in Sirte and Ansar al-Sharia fighters chafed under the Misratan yoke, the latter defecting wholesale to IS in 2015.

Is Sirte closer to being liberated?

IS forces are currently entrenched within the third residential area in northeast Sirte, and despite their limited numbers, the remaining IS fighters continue to inflict casualties on their Misratan opponents through sniper fire and explosive devices. On Oct. 7, BM forces, who are nominally aligned with the UN-brokered Government of National Accord (GNA), launched a fresh assault, which culminated in splitting the enclave. A BM media official, Ali al-Mabrouk, said, "The forces of Bunyan al-Marsus made some advances and completely [cut off] the 600-block area in Sirte." Nevertheless, at least 8 BM fighters were killed in this latest advance, while IS fighters still appear able to conduct attacks outside of their stronghold; on Oct. 2, a Dutch photojournalist was killed by sniper fire in an area of Sirte already supposedly "liberated" from IS forces. Furthermore, reports of fighting between BM forces and jihadis south of Sirte in recent weeks seems to confirm fears that IS fighters have been able to seep out of Sirte, and may therefore be able to regroup or assimilate into other jihadi groups elsewhere.

Have US airstrikes really helped?

The United States has conducted 210 sorties since Aug. 1, when it launched Operation Odyssey Lightning — its campaign of airstrikes in support of BM forces fighting IS in Sirte — and has twice exceeded its planned time frame with operations now entering their third month. The low levels of ordinance dropped and the need for such extensions speak volumes about the ineffective military phasing of this operation. Airstrikes should have been used to soften up IS positions long before BM fighters had begun the urban warfare that has turned IS into a guerrilla enemy. This approach was not adopted because the GNA only requested US assistance after its own forces got bogged down. It should come as no surprise then that the Misratan Military Council — which is coordinating military efforts on the ground in Sirte — has indicated its discontent with the US air support, calling it ineffective.

Due to this incorrect phasing, airstrikes may not have lowered allied casualties or accelerated the battle’s time frame. Since the assault on IS in Sirte began in May, Misrata has suffered heavy losses for a city of only 500,000 inhabitants — at least 560 BM fighters have been killed and 2,750 injured. Rifts and tensions within Misrata have magnified and Misrata’s role as Libya’s most powerful city-state has diminished.

As Misrata gains a Pyrrhic victory, Hifter rises

While the Sirte campaign has dragged on in the east, Khalifa Hifter, the commander of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), has steadily been amassing power and territory through his militarization of the governance of much of eastern Libya, which now extends to within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of Sirte. On Sept. 11, he seized the oil crescent ports from the federalists, allowing the resumption of much-needed crude exports, and firmly tipping the country’s balance of power in his direction.

Hifter’s actual victory in the oil crescent has pre-empted and overshadowed Misrata’s anticipated victory in Sirte, shifting power away from the GNA and western Libya, toward Hifter in the east. Oil production has reached 554,000 barrels per day and its continued flow is essential to stymie OPEC attempts to cut production and raise prices. These new realities on the ground mean that Hifter now has greater leverage within the international community as well as with many towns, tribes and militias on the ground. It is too early to say what impact this will have in the ongoing fight against jihadism in Libya.

De-facto separation?

On the one hand, given that there is no longer a third force separating the LNA and Misratan forces — a role the federalists and IS had previously occupied — and that both Misrata and the LNA are fighting IS and other jihadi groups, albeit in different locations, this could theoretically strengthen the logic of partition and tacit compromise between eastern and western Libya in the event of the collapse of the UN-mediated peace process. Indeed, there are likely to be many battle-weary Misratan fighters who are willing to tacitly accept Hifter’s gains so long as the LNA does not advance further west or tries to keep oil revenues for themselves. That said, although Hifter's influence is strong in eastern Libya, he is struggling to exert his control over his allies elsewhere, with LNA units in both southern and western Libya rebelling against his rule in recent days. Although a rebellion by ex-Moammar Gadhafi regime commanders in Sebha was quashed last week, this shows that Hifter does not yet have the power or influence to take the rest of Libya by force.

On the other hand, anti-Hifter sentiment remains sky high and is already fueling a backlash that could stimulate further jihadi recruitment. Islamist hard-liners from across Libya appear to be rallying their forces to Tripoli, fearful that current negotiations with Hifter will lead to him being given a security role within the UN-mediated political process. Kidnappings and assassinations between pro-GNA and Islamist militias in Tripoli have been on the rise in recent weeks, and if a new "grand bargain" is struck that reflects Hifter’s power on the ground, it is highly likely that these anti-Hifter hard-line Islamists will respond with violence, possibly spawning a newly rebranded jihadi network.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/10/libya-battle-sirte-isis-general-hifter.html#ixzz4NBZhH78q

GNC and HoR to announce unity government

14.10

The former head of the National Salvation Government, in Tripoli, Khalifa Al-Ghuwel, and some members of the General National Congress (GNC), including the deputy head, Awad Abdul-Qader, as well as security officers convened, Friday evening, in Tripoli.

The meeting was held in the headquarter of the GNC in hospitality palaces in Tripoli, to agree on forming a national unity government under the leadership of Mohamed Boker.

According to close source in Tripoli, the sides of the agreement would include the head of the House of Representatives (HoR), Ageela Saleh, Khalifa Al-Ghuwel, the head of the GNC, the head of the Interim Government, Abdulla Al-Thinni, and Nuri Abusahmain. The agreement would be provided to the HoR to endorse it.

The source said that the two deputies of Boker would be Al-Ghuwel and Al-Thinni. The proposed government will start working in all of the areas in Libya. The meeting is expected to announce a statement, Sunday night.

The Presidential Council (PC) of the Government of National Accord (GNA) hasn’t commented on the matter.

http://libyaprospect.com/index.php/2016/10/14/breaking-news-gnc-and-hor-to-announce-unity-government/

Militiaman who became Libya’s oil kingpin

Eastern militiaman’s support for the central government could end Eastern militiaman’s support for the central government could end the conflict.

By  ADAM NATHAN 

25.08

RA’S LANUF, Libya — Ibrahim Jadhran has gone from an alleged car thief imprisoned in Colonel Muammar Qadhafi’s most notorious prison to a warlord in charge of a powerful militia sitting on billions of dollars of oil money.

Now he’s one of the most important players in an effort to end the chaos that has torn Libya apart since Qadhafi’s overthrow in 2011: He has thrown his weight behind the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), signing a breakthrough deal to reopen Libya’s oil ports.

Jadhran is the chief of the Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG), a militia force of more than 20,000 men that is supposed to protect the country’s vital oil industry. Speaking in the large boardroom of his office complex in the deep-water port of Ra’s Lanuf, in the oil crescent of central Libya, he spelt out his supposed conversion.

“I am a Muslim but I consider myself a moderate,” said Jadhran, who had shed his normal military uniform for a dark suit. “And it is because of that I chose the middle … The area where we sit now is in the middle of Libya. It is my country’s security valve and it is the beating heart of Libya’s wealth.”

His voice matters both because of the men and the money he controls. Jadhran has been an extremely skillful player in the turmoil of post-Qadhafi Libya as militias, tribes and rival governments — an internationally recognized one in the eastern city of Tobruk, and a more Islamist one called the General National Congress (GNC) based in the capital Tripoli in the west — battled for control.

In mid-2013, Jadhran closed two major oil export terminals, demanding the GNC government give eastern Libya more autonomy, particularly over oil revenues, and branded the former management of the National Oil Company corrupt.

His brand of maverick separatism increased and, in March 2014, he allowed an oil tanker named the Morning Glory to set sail from the eastern port of Sidra under the North Korean flag. It was promptly stopped and boarded by the U.S. Navy.

Jadhran claims the Morning Glory crude oil shipment had been authorized by the Tobruk government, but the Tripoli government tried to stop the tanker, and the incident led to the ousting of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan.

Jadhran is also critical of the eastern legislature in Tobruk, which he claimed was seeking a military dictatorship under General Khalifa Haftar, who led an assault on the GNC government and remains a powerful warlord.

“We stood by the government, but at the time the National Congress started to lean toward the Islamists and then the parliament [House of Representatives in Tobruk] leaned towards the militarization of the state and the return of a dictatorship. So we saw that we were the only ones standing in the middle,” said Jadhran.

Jadhran supported a national political dialogue and it was this process that led to the December formation of the new U.N.-backed government in Tripoli. “We released a statement of support three hours after the GNA was formed despite the fact it was almost political suicide to support its newly-born presidential council,” he said.

Call to arms

Others point out that Jadhran’s loyalty to the GNA came at a price, the payment of his 20,000 plus PFG forces of all their back salaries.

Mattia Toaldo, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, is critical of what he called Jadhran’s “opportunistic choices” but is pragmatic about his importance to Libya’s political future.

• 

  
  
  

  ALSO ON POLITICO

  Italy’s search for a new Libyan savior

  ALBERTO MUCCI

“Jadhran remains in the eyes of many Libyans a very controversial figure,” he said. “Yet, the truth is that along with Defence Minister Mahdi Al-Barghathi, he’s the only easterner who supported the GNA from day one and the GNA needs not just the oil he sits on but his loyalty.”

That support for a new and internationally recognized government, complete with a signing ceremony — attended by tribal leaders — to reopen the ports is something of a change for Jadhran. He’s been embroiled in his country’s violent politics since the war that ousted Qadhafi.

The son of an army officer, the muscular 34-year-old had spent the previous six years in the notorious Abu Slim prison, where he was sent at 22 for a life sentence for what he says was his political activism, but which records suggest was for car theft. However, Qadhafi never called anyone a political prisoner and inmates were branded pretty thieves, traitors or spies.

“I was released three days after the spark of the February 17th revolution,” said Jadhran. “Because the demonstrators calling for change were met with live fire and mortars from the Qadhafi regime, peaceful protest was not possible and we were forced to take up arms. Young men found themselves forced to carry arms and return fire on an enemy.

He formed a battalion of volunteers to defend Libya’s oil crescent around Ra’s Lanuf and Ajdabiya, his hometown. “I managed to gather 16 battalions under the one flag, all of which participated in the revolution.”

In a deeply divided country, Jadhran defended Cyrenaica, the east of the country that has traditionally been hostile to the Tripoli-dominated west and slowly took over Libya’s oil infrastructure.

Now he controls the four main oil ports of Ra’s Lanuf, Zueitina, Sidra and Brega, many oil wells and hundreds of miles of pipelines and says that his goal is to protect the oil wealth that accounts for 97 percent of Libya’s economic output

His forces helped oust ISIL fighters from key oil terminals and in recent weeks have led assaults on key ISIL locations along Libya’s coast. He has also followed through on his promise to allow for renewed oil exports under a unified National Oil Company.

“The issue of selling and marketing oil is strictly the business of the National Oil Company, it has been entrusted to carry out this mission by the government and the people of Libya,” he said.

This week, the House of Representatives voted against the GNA in a no confidence motion. The vote means that Jadhran’s commitment to the GNA, together with his influence in the east and control over the security of oil exports, are even more vital to Libya’s future.

So the question is, what does Jadhran want? The answer seems to be political respectability and to present the PFG as an example of good governance to encourage investment back into Libya.

“There is no doubt that I have high expectations in assuming a high and honorable position and that this position should be for the good of the people,” said Jadhran. “If Libya becomes independent, its institutions secured within a real democratic and good governance blueprint, then this will enable international investment companies to re-enter Libya.”

http://www.politico.eu/article/ibrahim-jadhran-libya-separatist-gna-qadhafi/

 

8/25/16, 2:35 PM CET

A New Conflict in the East? Jadhran, Haftar, and the Battles over Benghazi, Tripoli, and Sirte

15.08

Paradoxically, the moment of the GNA’s approach closer towards victory against IS in Sirte is also a moment of a key defeat in its legitimacy. The political process in Libya remains derailed, and the UN-mediated Government of National Accord continues to lose legitimacy despite the successes achieved against IS in Sirte in its name. This observation was recognised by the UN envoy Martin Kobler in a recent interview, saying that popular support for the GNA is crumbling with much of the early support for the GNA evaporating due to worsening economic and security woes. What Kobler didn’t mention is that it is largely his failed implemenation of Leon’s flawed plan which has gotten us towards this point.  Kobler has shown a German dogmatism for sticking towards the letter of the law of the LPA without understand that it was meant to bring Libya’s key power blocs on board which it has failed to do.

A War between the LNA and the PFG in Zeuitina remains a high risk as the LNA is trying to bleed away support from Jadhran and undermine GNA influence in the East.

Politically the GNA is unlikely to receive any significant boost in legitimacy or governance effectiveness until a total victory is achieved by Banyan Marsus-affiliated Misratan forces in Sirte. However, this may make or break the GNA, as pro- and anti-GNA factions (especially hard-line Islamists) begin to jostle already in the capital to position themselves to take advantage of the outcome.

After Sirte is declared liberated, serious rifts within GNA-affiliated militias are highly likely, between those supporting a full attack against Haftar, and those wishing to oust Islamist militias from Tripoli. Although it ought to be a boost for the GNA to liberate Sirte, it is likely that the victorious militias will defy GNA rulings and expose the fact that the GNA is not actually a unity of anything.

http://www.libya-analysis.com/