By Wolfram Lacher

This paper analyses Haftar’s rise and the concomitant transformation of his forces. The prevailing view sees the LAAF as a “core of regulars, many from the Qadhafi era, surrounded by an informal coalition of militias”.

PART (I)

Abstract

In post-Qadhafi Libya’s fragmented security landscape, Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) stand out as the only faction that successfully consolidated power at the sub-national level.

Haftar started out with a loose alliance of armed groups in 2014, but warded off successive challenges from within his coalition and gradually centralized authority. Consolidation required gaining autonomy from the local loyalties and interests that defined many of the armed groups in Haftar’s alliance.

Key to Haftar’s success in disembedding his forces from local society was the foreign support he enjoyed, which dwarfed that available to any other faction. To concentrate power, Haftar combined coercion and cooperation, adapting his strategy to local conditions.

He enticed political and military actors into allying with him or supporting him, then used coercion to punish disloyal behaviour and eventually spread fear through widespread repression.

This way, he gradually transformed opportunistic support into a centralized power structure held together by a web of economic interests. At their very core, the LAAF are a family enterprise.

Introduction

In June 2020, Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) made a chaotic retreat from Tripoli and western Libya. Major support from Turkey had allowed forces affiliated with the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) to eventually defeat Haftar’s thirteen-month effort to seize the capital, and power.

The rout shattered the image of the ever victorious commander Haftar had cultivated during his seemingly inexorable expansion. Haftar’s popularity in eastern Libya, which had already suffered as the Tripoli war dragged on, plummeted further after his defeat.

Politicians or militia leaders who had opportunistically supported Haftar, hoping to sweep to power with him, now had reason to take their distance from him. But Haftar’s power structure in eastern Libya weathered the shock surprisingly well.

Political tensions in the east have been on the rise since Haftar’s defeat, and foreign states have tried to weaken Haftar by promoting the head of the eastern-based rump parliament, Agilah Saleh, as an interlocutor in negotiations. But across eastern Libya, Haftar remains very much in charge, exercising authority through the LAAF and his security apparatus.

That the core of the LAAF retained its cohesion despite Haftar’s misadventure in Tripoli demonstrates his success in building loyal forces. This is all the more remarkable since in 2014, Haftar had started out with a loose alliance of armed groups.

Over the following years, he warded off successive challenges from within his coalition and gradually centralized authority. His steady expansion has been the only notable effort to overcome post-Qadhafi Libya’s endemic political fragmentation.

Only two other armed groups succeeded in centralizing control over entire cities: the Islamic State in Sirte (2015-16) and the Kaniyat militia in Tarhuna (2015-2020).

Along with these two groups, Haftar’s LAAF have been unique among Libyan factions in their ability to wield despotic violence against communities under their control. But Haftar’s forces have to date been the only Libyan faction to consolidate authority over an entire region, eastern Libya, and become powerful enough to obtain a chance at seizing overall power.

This paper analyses Haftar’s rise and the concomitant transformation of his forces. The prevailing view sees the LAAF as a “core of regulars, many from the Qadhafi era, surrounded by an informal coalition of militias”.

Others go as far as dismissing the LAAF as a mere franchise for local militias. But a closer look shows that neither description adequately reflects the nature of Haftar’s forces, which underwent significant changes over the years.

The paper shows that Qadhafi-era officers initially played a much more limited role in Haftar’s forces than is often assumed. In its early years, the LAAF did indeed resemble a franchise for local armed groups, and this continues to apply to most southern and western Libyan LAAF units.

But from 2016 onwards, Haftar built units that form the core of the LAAF today. Most of these units’ members came of age after 2011, and the Qadhafi-era officers who joined them were often marked by revanchist sentiment that originated in the deep divisions of the 2011 war, rather than by an ethic of disciplined service to the country as a whole.

These units cannot be understood as formal or regular. What distinguishes them from other groups in the LAAF is their direct loyalty to Haftar’s sons, relatives and close confidants, at times compounded by a strong Salafist tinge or an association with particular tribal constituencies. Moreover, the core LAAF units are closely linked to the predatory economic activities of Haftar’s inner circle.

How did Haftar form a core of loyal units out of an initially fractious coalition?

Consolidating control over the east and centralizing authority over the LAAF required overcoming the capacity of armed local communities to resist, and gaining autonomy from the local loyalties and interests that defined many of the armed groups in Haftar’s alliance.

Key to Haftar’s success in disembedding his forces from local society was the foreign support he enjoyed, which dwarfed that available to any other faction. To concentrate power, Haftar combined coercion and cooperation, adapting his strategy to local conditions.

He enticed political and military actors into allying with him or supporting him, then used coercion to punish disloyal behaviour and eventually spread fear through widespread repression. This way, he gradually transformed opportunistic support into a centralized and authoritarian power structure.

While his Tripoli offensive ran into stubborn resistance from local armed groups, ultimately, only foreign intervention on a scale that matched the external support Haftar enjoyed blocked his continued progress.

Armed Group Proliferation in Post-Qadhafi Libya

Fragmentation has marked Libya’s political and military landscape since the 2011 civil war and subsequent collapse of central authority with the demise of the Qadhafi regime. By the end of the 2011 war, 236 revolutionary armed groups had formed in the coastal city of Misrata alone.

After the war, the revolutionary factions grew further and countless new armed groups formed across the country, as factional leaders nurtured them with state funding, and furnished official cover through newly created security institutions such as the Supreme Security Committee and the Libya Shield Force.

Because competing factions vied for influence in state security institutions, state funding and state legitimacy for such units did not lead to the re-establishment of central authority.

Quite the opposite: rivalries over the control of security institutions were a key driver behind the escalation into the second civil war (2014-15), during which state institutions split in two.

Governments in Tripoli have since continued to juggle multiple competing factions, while in the east, the faction of Khalifa Haftar progressively centralized authority over the coalition of armed groups he mobilized from 2014 onwards.

Even with Haftar’s gradual expansion, military fragmentation in Libya has been such that it is difficult to narrow down the number of armed groups even approximately.

In Misrata, at least several dozen – likely over a hundred – armed groups continued to operate in post-2011 conflicts. In Tripoli, a process of consolidation reduced the plethora of post-revolutionary factions to around fifteen main militias by 2018, of which four dominated central Tripoli and its institutions. In the coastal city of Zawiya, at least a dozen armed groups continued to exist but remained mostly dormant between 2015 and 2019.

One study from 2018 identified 122 armed groups across Libya, but that list was far from comprehensive. The UN Panel of Experts on Libya in 2019 counted 49 groups fighting for the GNA and 61 groups fighting for the LAAF.

But the list was incomplete even when taking into account only those groups that participated in the conflict, and it did not include the many militias that were not fighting.

We should assume that several hundred armed groups were active or dormant across Libya at any given moment since 2014. This number may appear high in comparison with many other conflicts. But most Libyan groups are hardly comparable to the factions in a civil war between a state and insurgents.

Very few Libyan armed groups explicitly raise their weapons against the government. The vast majority claim the mantle of official legitimacy of the interior or defence ministries, and many receive salaries from one of the two rival governments, despite not being under effective government oversight.

The fact that we are not dealing with a state-insurgent conflict has implications for the analysis of militant fragmentation and consolidation. Analyses of fragmentation emphasize the role of state action or battlefield developments in causing splits or alliances.

But most of the time, Libyan armed groups have not been exposed to threats or incentives from a government or a rebel group that were serious enough to cause them to fragment, ally or merge.

Under most circumstances, they did not have much of an incentive to distinguish themselves with a corporate identity, a pronounced ideological stance to facilitate recruitment or cohesion in battle.

Local-level concerns often drove recruitment, such as community protection or financial incentives, whether in the form of state salaries or predation. In fact, Libya’s armed groups often are not easily identifiable organizations with clearly defined boundaries. Many have repeatedly changed their names and institutional affiliation in search of the seal of state legitimacy and funding.

The composition of their foot soldiers might fluctuate as they move from one iteration to the next, while the networks of leading figures remain more constant. Others are not standing armed groups and not on the state payroll; their leaders and members are demobilized most of the time.

This latter type of armed group generally relies on tight-knit networks of friends, neighbours and relatives, and new recruits generally come from such social networks.

In cohesive communities, such as the city of Misrata or the Amazigh towns in the Nafusa mountains, multiple – and mostly dormant – forces co-exist, but often do not act as discrete armed groups that would only follow their leaders’ narrow whims.

Clashes between them are extremely rare. Most only mobilize in response to serious external threats.

For example, after the 2011 war, a large proportion of Misratan forces only mobilized during the 2014-15 and 2019-20 civil wars as well as the 2016 campaign against the Islamic State in Sirte. A small fraction of Misratan forces also mobilized for other operations whose aims did not enjoy widespread backing in the city.

Typically, commanders do not take unilateral decisions to mobilize, but are part of complex, informal negotiations and consultations with influential businessmen, politicians as well as their immediate social surroundings. Misratan forces cannot be treated as one armed group, but neither does it make sense to analyse each of the city’s dozens of factions as if they were distinct militias.

It is impossible to clearly pinpoint the membership and leadership of these forces, since their boundaries with society are highly permeable. Overcoming such forces to consolidate control would require subduing local society as a whole.

But far from all of Libyan armed groups correspond to this type of a socially embedded force. Many are more clearly identifiable militias defending more parochial interests. Where social cohesion is weaker, groups from the same community can occasionally clash with

each other. Zawiya, for example, has seen several internal skirmishes, but in April 2019, the city’s armed groups united against Haftar’s Tripoli offensive.

Analysing the organizational fragmentation of armed groups is therefore insufficient to capture the nature of fragmentation in Libya. Fragmentation has an important social dimension. The violent conflicts since 2011 have inflicted deep rifts on Libyan society, pitting entire communities against each other.

They have promoted social cohesion in places where communities united to fight against external threats. In other places, they provoked internal cleavages, distrust and violent local power struggles.

Social cohesion in communities makes political and military fragmentation more durable, since factions are linked to their local rivals by a dense network of social ties and cannot move against them ruthlessly. Social cohesion therefore impedes efforts at consolidation.

Tellingly, the Haftar faction emerged from a context marked by a deeply divided local social fabric: the conflict in Benghazi.

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Wolfram Lacher is a Senior Associate in the Middle East and Africa Division at SWP.

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Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

 

 

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