A second terrorist enclave in Libya has fallen. Following the December defeat of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) and Al-Qaeda-allied forces in the northern coastal town of Sirte, a concentration of terrorists in the eastern city of Benghazi has been defeated after nearly two years of desultory street fighting.
The fight in Benghazi is, however, not yet over. There remain two small areas near the main port that are still in terrorist hands.
On the face of it, these terrorist defeats ought to be good news for Libya. Unfortunately, they are not. The terrorists have been defeated by rival forces that represent the deepening divisions in the country. Daesh in Sirte was overcome in a nine-month operation by a force largely made up of Misratans, whose militias have sought to dominate the west, including the capital Tripoli as well as southern Libya.
Meanwhile in the east, the victory has been won by the Libyan National Army, a force answerable to the elected parliament, the House of Representatives which fled Tripoli in 2014 and is now based in Tobruk, not far from the Egyptian border. The LNA is led by the controversial Khalifa Haftar, a former Gaddafi general who fell from the dictator’s favor and fled to the United States.
There is no love lost between the Misratans and the people of Benghazi, despite or perhaps because of the fact that some of the most prominent trading families in Benghazi originally came from Misrata. The Misratans in particular detest Haftar.
The Presidency Council government in Tripoli, installed 10 months ago with the backing of the international community and the local UN organization, UNSMIL, is seeking to push through the Libyan Political Agreement signed at the end of 2015 at Skhirat in Morocco. The problem is that the LPA must be endorsed by the parliament in the east and this it has consistently refused to do. A key sticking point has been parliament’s ceding of the power to appoint top military commanders to the PC led by Fayez Serraj. Haftar has come to dominate politics in the east and the Misratans and Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the west fear that he is intent on setting himself up as a new dictator.
It was one of the great ironies of the recent fight against the terrorists, that while they were assaulting them in Sirte, elements within Misrata were busy supplying the terrorists in Benghazi, running weapons, ammunition and reinforcements and evacuating wounded by sea.
LNA forces have already clashed with Misratan units in the center of the country and there is a very real fear of a full-blown civil war. The problem for the Misratans is that the LNA now controls most of Libya’s oil production, though it has thus far been content to allow the Tripoli-based National Oil Company to continue to run the oil infrastructure and receive part of the income via the Central Bank in the capital.
Haftar and the parliament in the east seem to hold most of the cards. The international community’s continued support for the largely ineffective Presidency Council no longer looks viable. Serraj has failed to fix power cuts, water shortages, a lack of cash in the banks and a rising crime wave in the capital. A new political deal seems essential but any role for Haftar will be anathema to the Misratans.
