Manaf Saad
While he never underwent any real military training, he has been crucial to his father’s bloody power struggle. He is now being backed by a range of powers to be Libya’s next leader.
It was spring 2012, the height of Libya’s revolution against their dictator Muammar Gaddafi. As the intrepid revolutionaries trickled into Benghazi’s operations centre one morning, something was different. Clustered in a corner were a few surly young men sipping coffee, scrolling Facebook on their laptops.
Thinking they were perhaps new recruits whose zealousness allowed them to stumble into this sensitive location, the revolutionaries marched towards them to teach them a thing or two about operational security in wartime. An older officer blocked them: “Leave them alone, they’re General Haftar’s kids”.
General Khalifa Haftar—Gaddafi’s one-time co-putschist turned frenemy—had just returned to Libya, offering (in a very demanding way) to lead the revolutionary forces. So, his sons were to remain ‘inside the tent’ until issues with command were sorted. But the opposition to the general—who was then best known in Libya for crimes against his own people during the Chadian war of the 1980s—quickly grew. As it did towards his sons, who incensed those in the operations room by refusing to help. Instead, they aggressively flexed their impunity, spending all day browsing the net on insecure computers. Until, one day, smiles went round those same revolutionaries. They got permission to chuck out the Haftars.
One of these kids, Saddam, was not notably seen again until later that year. Amidst the chaos of the fall of Tripoli in October 2012, he was wounded trying to storm the al-Aman bank.
Almost 15 years later, that surly young gangster Saddam Haftar is a brigadier-general, chief of staff of the land forces of the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF).
Like most success stories of modern Arab politics, Saddam’s surprising rise is deeply rooted in nepotism. While he never went through any real military or officer training, he has been a crucial lieutenant to his father’s bloody power struggle—alternating between being a diplomat, a brutal suppressor of dissent, and overseeing an extraordinarily lucrative multinational business operation that smuggles everything from scrap metal to people.
This is why, despite never finishing school, having no noticeable signs of charisma, and a political toolbox limited to blunt violence, he is now being backed by a range of regional and international powers to be Libya’s next leader.
The Karama Kid
Having been unceremoniously rejected by the revolution, General Haftar left Libya, only meaningfully returning to Benghazi in 2014. Shooting amateur video from a military base, he launched “operation Dignity” (Karama in Arabic)—an operation painstakingly crafted to look like a local fightback against Islamist extremism. When it was really a multinational operation to return Libya’s chaotic revolutionary republic to a state of military authoritarianism.
What followed were years of messy, destructive, urban warfare before Haftar conquered Benghazi from a ramshackle alliance of revolutionaries, Islamists, extremists, and poor young men who had simply ended up on the wrong side of his conflict. Despite initially claiming he would retire after ‘liberating’ Benghazi, Haftar’s multinational coalition unsurprisingly pressed on to take the rest of eastern Libya, violently subduing the city of Derna through a series of foreign-supplied air strikes and a suffocating siege.
Haftar gradually traded the gun for gold and seized Libya’s lucrative oil crescent and eventually large swathes of southern Libya by promising key tribes’ prestige and riches if they became the local franchisee of the military enterprise he now presented as a national project.
While most attention during these years was on the battlefields in Libya, Saddam kept his father’s military machine lubricated with the weaponry, ammunition, financing and support it needed to proceed, cutting his teeth as an international operator. Saddam served as Karama’s de facto chief ambassador, managing the material support directed to his father’s campaign. According to the United Nation’s Panel of Experts responsible for investigating violations of Libya’s sanction regime, these military re-supplies were usually managed by obscure aircraft chartering companies.
As the military operations continued growing, so too did the amount of munitions and additional equipment required, as it became clear that Haftar would need overwhelming material superiority to win a war. So, Saddam had to start building additional procurement channels to supplement the largesse of his foreign partners.
As later confirmed by Haftar’s Airforce chief Saqr al-Jaroushi, it was Saddam who sourced the arms his father depended upon “from secret partners and foreign states” alongside his brother-in-law Ayoub el-Ferjani. And war is tremendously expensive. In early 2016, the parliament speaker, Aguileh Saleh, called for an investigation into Haftar’s diversion of state funds and material, given that the procurement was managed by his clan and distributed according to who was loyal to them.
Once upon a time in Benghazi
At this time, Haftar’s operation Karama was formally under what was dubbed the interim Libyan government appointed by the House of Representatives whose seat was in Tobruk, in Libya’s far east.
The diversion of state resources along with Saddam extorting commercial banks to fund his procurement through locally issued debt were a growing cause for concern. Not just because of what was spent, but more because of what it had bought.
Three years into the war for Benghazi, Haftar had shed his ‘counter-terror’ pretensions: offering safe passage to Islamic State (IS) fighters towards western Libya but no surrender for Libyan opposition; Haftar’s forces were detaining or intimidating parliamentarians, activists, judicial staff and anyone else of influence; and civilian mayors were being replaced by military governors.
This synched up with Saddam’s gradual transition from Yuri Orlov impersonator to leading the domestic terror of Haftar’s counter-revolution. Saddam was appointed de facto head of the Tariq bin Ziad (TBZ) brigade, largely composed of Madkhali Salafists who had fought on Benghazi’s frontlines. This unit became Haftar’s version of Gaddafi’s feared revolutionary committees, making a spectacle of arresting and punishing anyone who publicly criticised the new regime. From TBZ’s base at Sidi Faraj, east of Benghazi, Saddam has set up his own fiefdom. Here, he oversees a parallel prison system where he can not only violently re-educate civic activists but also put pressure on businessmen or members of prominent families for ransom.
Alongside his brother Khaled, he also helped institute the 106th Brigade, which operates as a de facto praetorian guard for the Haftars and is amongst the best-equipped units of the LAAF.
At the end of 2016, Saddam’s military future was clear to see as he was pictured in a captain’s uniform attending a military ceremony for LAAF recruits. Despite never attending a military college or spending any time on a battlefield, he was promoted to Major within a year. Soon after, a now clearly subordinated Aguileh Saleh humiliatingly appointed him a Lieutenant Colonel, as the seasoned military officers who had joined Karama at the start looked on in dismay and disgust.
The road to perdition
At the end of 2017, Saddam Haftar marked the nominal end of the war in Benghazi in a similar way to the nominal end of the 2011 revolution by robbing a bank.
Having arrested the Deputy Interior Minister of the interim government, who was responsible for securing banks. Saddam used Brigade 106 to storm the Central Bank of Libya’s eastern headquarters, trying to seize an estimated 640mn Libyan dinars, €159mn, $2mn, and almost 6,000 silver coins – though some of the cash was damaged beyond use after a broken pipe spewed sewage water around the vault.
Interestingly, it took only six months for the seized Euros to begin showing up in Europe, usually in the hands of those linked to mafias.
At this point, the rise of the Haftar’s seemed inevitable. The Libyan Arab Armed Forces nominally controlled most of Libya’s land mass; it had fully domesticated the national parliament, its international backing had swelled to include most major powers, and even the UN’s ‘national conference’ designed to reboot Libya’s political transition was bending to empower them. Then, Haftar decided to attack Tripoli.
Just over a year later, the LAAF was in disarray; its tribal support had melted, and many in the east were so aggrieved over the young men tricked into fighting with promises of a quick victory and plenty of plunder that Haftar had to stagger the return of body bags. Haftar and the LAAF as entities were saved by the Russian mercenaries his other backers had bought in to try to salvage the operation. Haftar had survived, but only just, and he was now entirely dependent on a Russian mercenary group.
Despite his impressive rank, Saddam was mostly distant from Tripoli’s battlefield. He was putting his talents to use elsewhere, maintaining the money supply needed to fund his father’s war. Like in his previous conflicts, Haftar’s army was undisciplined, prioritising destruction and outfiring their opponent. According to a Russian military analyst on the ground, LAAF fighters showed their unprofessionalism through “indiscriminate” fire. Keeping the LAAF profligate kept Saddam busy.
From the start of the conflict, two Ilyushin cargo planes arrived each day, carrying up to 500 tonnes of Russian munitions each. Occasionally, a French Air Force C-130 Hercules would also land in Benghazi, likely with more munitions for the forces besieging Tripoli.
To keep this multinational war machine liquid, as debt became harder to obtain due to the spiralling liabilities of eastern Libya’s banks (which one day would almost crash Libya’s entire banking system), Saddam tried to step up the activities of the LAAF’s Military Investment Authority. This involved everything from stripping Benghazi’s infrastructure and the rubble of his father’s previous wars for scrap for sale, illicit sales of crude and fuel, and even taking over agricultural projects in Libya’s south. By 2020, Saddam was even said to be organising flights of the Haftar’s private jet to Venezuela, exchanging duffel bags of US dollars for gold to pay his creditors.
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Manaf Saad – A journalist residing in the Middle East, whose real name is withheld for security reasons
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