Frederic Wehrey
In eastern Libya, Khalifa Haftar had close ties with the Syrian dictator, and has now lost a soulmate.
In the wake of the momentous developments in Syria, Libya has inevitably been mentioned, though most often in the context of misinformed and inappropriate comparisons to its fracturing and descent into civil war following the 2011 overthrow of dictator Muammar Gadhafi.
What is missing in this commentary is an appreciation for how the fates of the two countries have been intertwined and shaped by similar forces in the decade since the Arab uprisings and, more importantly, how the recent, stunning collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime will affect the political, economic, and military standing of Libya’s factions.
Over the past few years, those Libyan factions have been locked in a stalemate that has kept their country largely free from major conflict, but that has depended largely on a modus vivendi between the two foreign powers with significant military forces on the ground—Russia and Türkiye.
Assad’s downfall, by changing the respective strategic positions of those powers in the region, and especially by complicating Moscow’s ability to channel fighters and weapons into Libya, could affect this fragile equilibrium.
Nowhere will the aftereffects be felt more acutely than in the eastern part of Libya. There, the largely autonomous and deeply repressive administration of militia commander Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and his sons had long been bolstered, both directly and indirectly, by the Assad regime through a common ideology of authoritarian kleptocracy, networks of illicit businesses that enriched the two regimes, and mutual military aid from Russia.
Not long after he consolidated his rule in eastern Libya, following a bloody struggle for the city of Benghazi that lasted from 2014 to 2017, Haftar realized that Assad could provide both a template for political legitimacy and a source of military and economic support.
In 2020, Haftar’s eastern-based government reopened an embassy in Damascus with the encouragement and facilitation of his longtime political and military backer, the United Arab Emirates, which at the time was spearheading the Arab world’s rehabilitation of the Syrian dictator.
The symbolism of this move wasn’t lost on citizens in both countries. The post-2011 counterrevolutionary and anti-Islamist wave, led by Abu Dhabi and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, had prevailed and with it the narrative that only iron-fisted dictators such as Haftar and Assad could guarantee stability.
Concurrently, when Türkiye deployed thousands of Syrian mercenaries who had long fought the Assad regime to Tripoli and its environs—part of a broader military intervention to support the internationally recognized Libyan government which Haftar’s militia forces were trying to topple—Haftar turned to importing thousands of pro-Assad Syrian fighters, whose travel to Libya was facilitated and coordinated by Russia and authorized by the Syrian regime.
While the battlefield impact of these militants was ultimately minor, their arrival hastened a burgeoning logistical cooperation between Moscow and Damascus that manifested itself in more substantial military and economic support for Haftar’s regime, which persisted until the recent dramatic events in Syria.
Beyond politics and arms flows, eastern Libya has been tied to Syria through robust and intersecting networks of illicit trade, reflecting two extensive organized crime ecosystems whose connection benefited both sides.
For years, aircraft operated by Cham Wings Airline, a private Syrian carrier that has long supported the Assad regime by transporting cash, narcotics, materiel, and fighters, including Russian mercenaries, ferried irregular migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and India into eastern Libya.
Here, their perilous journey onward across the Mediterranean toward Europe was facilitated and overseen by Haftar-linked militias, led by his most ambitious son Saddam, who reaped exorbitant profits from the business.
Despite various European Union deals with Haftar intended to curb human flows, the transfer of migrants courtesy of Cham Wings from Damascus through northeastern Libya remained uninterrupted. These commercial flights become integral to the Mediterranean’s human-smuggling industry—at times accounting for nearly half of all arrivals into the EU via Libya. This generated millions of dollars in annual revenue, with a chunk of the income accruing to the Haftars’ armed coalition.
In addition to human smuggling, Haftar’s rule in eastern Libya has also benefited from narcotics cooperation with Syria. Under Assad, Syria evolved into a multi-billion-dollar hub to produce Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant, which flooded Libya’s market through the Damascus–Benghazi corridor, enriching Saddam Haftar and his associates.
From Libya, these addictive, dangerous tablets, which are banned by many countries, spread further south and west, reaching Sudan, the Sahel, Algeria, and beyond. In parallel, the same Cham Wings flights were regularly employed to transport weapons sourced from Syria’s black market into Libya’s thriving arms trade.
A maritime route between the two countries also emerged, enabling a range of illicit shipments, including fuel smuggling—an activity that expanded markedly in eastern Libya over the last two years under Saddam Haftar’s authority.
A large portion of the fuel imported by Libya’s National Oil Corporation was illegally reexported, and some of it ultimately made its way to Syria. According to experts at The Sentry, an international investigative organization, the overall volume of illicit trade between Libya and Syria amounted to about $300 million in annual revenue.
A key node in all of these elements of the Syrian-Libyan organized crime pipeline was Maher al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother and commander of the Syrian Army’s elite Fourth Armored Division and Republican Guard, who oversaw production of Captagon and orchestrated money laundering operations that enriched core loyalists and helped the regime evade international sanctions.
In March 2023, he flew to eastern Libya to meet with Saddam Haftar and discuss furthering their cooperation on illicit activities, highlighting the very personal and high-level ties that cemented Syrian regime support to Haftar’s rule.
The sudden disappearance of those linkages has thrust Haftar and his clan into new and uncomfortable territory. This is evidenced by the scant media coverage devoted to the events in Syria by Haftar-aligned media outlets and the absence of significant public reactions in eastern Libyan cities, which contrasted sharply with the noisy celebrations in the western cities of Misrata and Tripoli.
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Frederic Wehrey – Senior Fellow, Middle East Program
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