Manaf Saad
The family business
But all of this couldn’t buy his father victory. With his army routed and recriminations high, Haftar had to consolidate. Saddam was naturally one of the main beneficiaries of his father’s need to gather all military, financial, and strategic posts of the LAAF into his family’s hands to prevent any potential challenger from gaining independent military means.
This involved not only de-fanging eastern Libya’s tribes by limiting their access to senior military roles and military equipment but also removing anyone who could challenge Haftar. This was exemplified in the assassination of Mahmoud el-Warfalli, once one of Haftar’s most feared operatives in Benghazi, who had developed a cultish following and who needed to be removed for Saddam to subsume the city’s remaining forces.
From late 2020 Saddam gradually became recognisable as a new access point for the LAAF, and by extension eastern Libya. It wasn’t just because he, along with his brother Khaled, had the remnants of the LAAF and all their weaponry firmly under his control. But also because of the international contacts he’d developed since 2014, and particularly his new Russian friends that would help supercharge his illicit economic activities.
In the spring of 2021, Haftar predictably broke relations with Libya’s newly formed unity government to maintain the political division in Libya that he and his international backers required to remain relevant. But, with commercial bank branches in Libya effectively cordoned by the central bank to prevent further debts, he was in desperate need of financing. Saddam, alongside the then Wagner Group, would fill that gap. The Russian role in supporting this growth is deducible given how tightly it was tied to Russia’s other regional ally, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria.
In the late days of the Tripoli war, Wagner forces had quietly abandoned their positions on the front to redeploy to key oil facilities. This helped Saddam to allegedly export small amounts of crude and to exert influence over eastern subsidiaries of Libya’s National Oil Company (NOC), allowing him to increase fuel smuggling. Given the difficulties of putting smuggled Libyan oil or fuel on the global market, Syria also represented a useful new customer.
Going the other way are substantial amounts of cannabis and Captagon (an amphetamine allegedly manufactured by those close to al-Assad), which are distributed throughout Africa from ports in Tobruk and Benghazi. Alongside drugs, a burgeoning trade in people started with migrants from as far afield as Bangladesh being taken to Syria’s Hmeimim airbase, then to Benghazi, and on to Europe.
Alongside his growth in the shadow economy, Saddam also moved to take over more of what remained of the formal economy. Mimicking the model of the LAAF’s military investment authority, he started the TBZ Agency for Services and Production. This agency sought to hoover up public sector money through contracts for state services from road maintenance and refuse collection to reconstruction of public buildings in cities destroyed by the LAAF. He also used the power of the LAAF to push his way into key companies of eastern Libya, like the airline Berniq Airways and local commercial banks.
Here, Saddam’s brother Belgacem, who was building influence over the political institutions of eastern Libya, facilitated the TBZ agency’s acquisition of as many government contracts as possible. The TBZ Agency also opened up further diplomatic channels for the Haftars, as Saddam leveraged subcontracting these lucrative projects to European and regional companies alike.
This blending of the economic and diplomatic with good old-fashioned violence is what would make Saddam the standout successor as his father continued ageing. Not only did Saddam lead the diplomatic push to try and get his father elected president during Libya’s brief and doomed electoral period in 2021, he even travelled to Israel multiple times, promising to join the Abraham Accords if Tel Aviv lobbied for a Haftar presidency. On top of that, he deployed the TBZ to Sebha’s court building in an effort to block the candidacy of potential rival Saif-al-Islam Gaddafi.
Then, in the summer of 2022, Saddam agreed to lift the LAAF’s blockade on Libyan oil exports in exchange for replacing the long-serving head of the NOC with former Central Bank Governor Ferhat Bengadara. It was a move that took the final blocks off Libyan state corruption, facilitating the gradual breakdown of the NOC as new brokers for crude sales emerged, the system of transferring crude sales directly to the Central Bank was increasingly circumvented, and Saddam was able to take ever greater control of NOC subsidiaries, specifically those re-selling fuels.
As the Haftars rule has deepened, so too has Saddam’s terror. Not only are academics, activists, lawyers, and others being arrested, murdered, and intimidated, but other prominent personalities, like former defence minister Mahdi al Barghathi, who was assaulted alongside his family for simply returning to Benghazi, where he may have been considered a potential rival given his tribal and military roots.
Nowhere was the brittleness of Saddam’s character and the shape of Haftar’s rule clearer than in the city of Derna. In September 2023, a hurricane caused a long-neglected dam to burst, almost wiping out the city already devastated by the LAAF’s previous war.
Saddam’s chaotic response, more concerned about maintaining control than helping survivors, only worsened what was already a catastrophe. When survivors protested and begged for help, Saddam hit hard, arresting swathes of people and gradually locking the city down. Months later, his brother, Belgacem, was appointed the Executive Director of the Reconstruction fund. Much like with the TBZ agency, he has used this as a political vehicle to secure foreign support with lucrative contracts while citizens suffer ever-worsening neglect.
Not the leader Libya needs, but the leader everybody else wants
As the head of the LAAF’s largest force and the gatekeeper of access to Libya’s main oil fields and export terminals, Saddam sits atop the house of cards that represents present-day Libya. Despite his reliance on Russia for force projection and on illicit activities to stay financially solvent, he presents enough of a strong-man illusion to continue drawing support.
His control over migration flows has enabled him to domesticate Italy and other Europeans who once pursued a national political process. His role in charge of the TBZ has made him a conduit for American schemes to start building a unified Libyan force (despite the Russian paradox in place).
Saddam may have been an atypical revolutionary, but he typifies post-revolutionary Libyan politics and its international relations. Where convenience is prized over stability, and balancing the international web around Libya is the most important aspect of any Libyan political system.
Saddam is a living manifestation of Libya’s policy failures since 2014. His success and his rise are not because he built anything but because a role needed filling. Karama’s backers needed someone to manage their arms transfers. His father needed a Haftar to sit atop companies nominally. The Russians needed a local to work through to give their missions plausible deniability.
The only thing Saddam himself seems to have taken to—and excelled at—is violence. The illusion of Saddam as a strongman, a competent and independently powerful leader, only exists because that’s what everyone dealing with Libya today wants. If that support were to change, his strength would evaporate.
But this policy only validates and strengthens the activities that got him to where he is and in doing so, brews future crises. The transition from Saddam the useful, to Saddam the problem, could be seen in early August 2024, where he shut down Libya’s largest oil field, allegedly due to a slight from Europe after an arms shipment he tried to illicitly purchase from China (in a swap for oil) was seized.
Saddam Haftar is likely to be anointed Libya’s next leader, especially as his father ages badly. The ladders of international relations, proclivity for violence, and economic activity he’s used to scale Libya’s house of cards have given him a unique profile amidst Libya’s political elite. But eventually, the House of Cards will collapse, the illusion of Saddam’s strength will dissipate, and then the only question will be whether there is enough of Libya remaining to rebuild what those revolutionaries who first kicked him out of Benghazi hoped for.
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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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