Libya’s anti-terror victory

A blob of mercury when struck with a hammer breaks up into many smaller blobs that are sent in all directions. Mercury is dangerous. So are terrorists. The blow that has been delivered to Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) terrorists in Sirte, the hometown of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, has seen the killers crushed. But rarely is any such military action entirely successful in eradicating every part of the menace. Even before the Misratan-led forces of the Bunyan Marsous (“Solid Wall”) began their advance on Sirte in May, Daesh staged an unexpected preemptive attack, which seized a key crossroads between Misrata and their Sirte heartland. It is now clear that during the few days that the terrorists held this position, they were able to filter men and equipment, including senior operational leaders, away to the south of Libya. It has taken almost eight months for the Bunyan Marsous forces to crush the terrorists in Sirte. In the final stages, the battle was a house-by-house fight, with the attackers withdrawing as US helicopter gunships moved in to blast the remaining terrorist positions. As it is, the Libyans have paid an extraordinarily high price to defeat Daesh. At least 4,000 men have been killed and wounded. At least 1,000 terrorists have also perished. Given the appalling brutality of their rule and their summary execution of government prisoners, the Bunyan Marsous troops have given little quarter to those terrorists who have been captured. Only a few have been paraded alive. The huge loss of life on the part of the Libyan forces says as much about the naiveté of the majority of these part-time soldiers, whose massive expenditure in ammunition had much to do with ridiculous machismo and little to do with actually targeting the enemy. Moreover, the terrorists, nearly all of them foreigners, were desperate men fighting to keep themselves alive for just a little bit longer. Their greater discipline and their extensive use of mines, booby traps and suicide bombings enabled them to extort such a terrible level of dead and wounded among the Bunyan Marsous men. This was undoubtedly a great victory in Sirte. But now the task of defeating terrorism in Libya becomes a great deal more difficult because the targets are altogether smaller and harder to spot. When Daesh terrorists began to seize and hold ground rather than sneak up, attack, murder and then fade back into the scenery, the nature of the struggle against them was able to change, arguably for the better. The battle for Mosul, far from being the easy triumph that Iraqi premier Haider Al-Abadi suggested, will nevertheless end in victory, simply because as long as the security forces know where they are, the terrorists can be destroyed, eventually. The challenge comes when Daesh has been driven from all the territory in which it has raised its blasphemous standard and forced to go back and hide in the shadows. In Libya, as in Iraq and Syria, the dangers and the challenges will morph into classic anti-terrorist operations like those being waged elsewhere around the world. This battle will demand a new level of expertise and forensic investigative skills, such as those built up here in the Kingdom in our own battle with the terrorist menace.