Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook
for fragile states
Tarek Megerisi
Domestication: How Russia taps into
weak-state opportunities
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The Dbeibeh debacle was undoubtedly a setback for Russia. Just as well Prigozhin had been cultivating a backup: the field marshal’s son, Saddam Haftar. And it was with him that Wagner worked to rebuild Khalifa Haftar’s shattered force and ensure it served Russian interests. Charting how this new beast grew shows how little Russia’s fundamental goals in Libya had changed over the years. They remained: establishing influence and a military foothold in the eastern Mediterranean; making money to fund Moscow’s adventurism; and developing a migration “trump card” against Europe.
Several driving forces led to the expansion and professionalisation of Libya as a smuggling hub, and Wagner as a likely partner for the Haftars in this development.
First, it seems that Wagner and the Haftars managed to find a common cause. Having withdrawn from western Libya, Wagner still needed to consolidate control over the central oil-gateway city of Sirte. And Khalifa Haftar needed foreign military support to maintain his position as eastern Libya’s leader, having lost political and tribal support in the east. The LAAF would have to end up in his family’s and Wagner’s hands.
But Libyans are fiercely independent—and the idea of the removal of all foreign forces contained in the ceasefire agreement was genuinely popular. Turkey had some cachet in western Libya, having saved the day, but the sight of Turkish flags on Libyan soil would likely have sat uneasy with many. In the east, long-running propaganda about Turkey’s intervention as a neo-Ottoman violation of Arab sovereignty provoked a sharp rejection of its presence.
Wagner, meanwhile, had sparked public outrage due to its forces’ Islamophobic attitudes and their abuses of civilians—not to mention the heinous crimes they had committed as they retreated from Tripoli, such as booby trapping homes and children’s toys. Even the LAAF officer class wanted Wagner forces to leave following their fallings-out during the war.
The atmosphere on the ground was tense: Haftar had promised the tribes of central Libya a new age of power and riches if they backed his assault on Tripoli. But their homes had instead become the front lines of a new conflict. Protests regularly broke out in Sirte and across central Libya calling for Wagner and its Sudanese mercenaries to leave.
New social movements also sprung up; the Sirte Reconciliation Committee, for instance, whose aim was to repair ties with western Libya in order to defuse tension and expedite demilitarisation. Wagner would need a local infrastructure to clamp down on such upstart attempts at Libyan self-determination.
Wagner mapping of mine and booby trap locations, UN panel of experts report on Libya, 2022
In Sirte the Tariq bin-Ziad (TBZ) brigade commanded by Saddam Haftar rallied the large Salafist and tribal components of its local deployment to control the city, even arresting the prominent head of the reconciliation committee. Another of Haftar’s praetorian brigades broke up protests across central Libya through a mass arrest campaign.
Second, Wagner’s and the Haftars’ mutual need to consolidate power seems to have dovetailed with another perpetual need: money. Following the post-war consolidation it was Saddam Haftar who gained oversight over key airports like Benghazi’s Benina, and seaports in Benghazi and later Tobruk. In 2020 Cham Wings started a twice-weekly commercial route from Damascus to Benghazi’s Benina airport, intermittently advertising these as “migrant flights” on its Facebook page.
The conditions of obtaining security clearances and entry visas from Cham Wings offices connected the company to the dark new network of human trafficking that was growing under Saddam Haftar’s management.Haftar exploited the cross-country nature of his TBZ brigade to create a human smuggling infrastructure that transnational trafficking and smuggling networks could rent. For the price of a “racket fee” these networks were granted the use of one of Haftar’s nine entry hubs into Libya.
And the smuggling continues to this day. On arrival, migrants hand over their informal visas to the LAAF, who detain them until they receive payment by the network. They are then held for between several days to several weeks, typically in inhuman conditions, before being taken to “launch points” where they board boats towards Europe. At this point, Saddam is paid again for his coastguard units to allow boats through: $100 dollars per migrant for “smaller boats” (of around 300-550 people) or an $80,000 flat fee for larger boats. Others are taken to western Libya. This demonstrates how Libyan armed groups cross political divides in pursuit of profit.
Africans usually arrive in Libya via land borders. But a range of other nationalities from as far afield as Bangladesh arrive through the Cham Wings network. South Asians, paying up to $9,000 for their “visa”, fly to a transit point (often Dubai) where they receive these tickets in exchange for their liberty. They are then flown to Syria, where they are joined by Syrian migrants (paying lower fees of around $2,000) and onto Benina airport where they enter Haftar’s network.
From January 2021 to March 2022, there was a 79% increase in Cham Wings flights. This was a period of relative military stasis in Libya, meaning this growth is likely attributable to smuggling. During this time Cham Wings ran at least 187 flights, carrying a maximum of 32,538 people, while migrant arrivals from Libya to Italy rose by roughly 21,000.
Wagner had been busy developing a close relationship with Saddam Haftar and his TBZ brigade since at least end of the war on Tripoli. And its operatives have been spotted alongside TBZ deployments across Libya, most notably around smuggling hotspots along Libya’s south-eastern and south-western borders. The involvement of Cham Wings, heavily used by Wagner for military purposes, sometimes running through Russian military airbases in Syria, also used to take migrants from Damascus to Minsk, is another indicator of how deeply Russia is likely involved in the Libyan operation.
The Kremlin has weaponised migration elsewhere too since the all-out invasion of Ukraine, notably via Belarus towards Finland and Poland. Russia even seems to have turned Libya’s migration weapon towards the US in its fractious 2024 election year. Reports indicate that an additional stop was added to the migration airbridge with flights heading from Benina to Nicaragua.
But the Saddam-Wagner smuggling nexus was not limited to people. From 2017 onwards Libya had developed into a centre for drug smuggling; largely of hashish and captagon from Syria. The relationship with Assad was initially managed on the LAAF side by another tribal relative of Haftar’s, Fawzia al-Ferjani. Logistics and transportation was overseen by Mahmoud Abdullah Dajj with a shipping company headquartered in Latakia in Syria (conveniently where Russia’s headquarters in the country was also located).
Daij is a Syrian-Libyan dual national who was sentenced to death in-absentia by a Libyan court for drug smuggling in 2019. That same shipping company, Al Tayr, is also the “exclusive” agent that started organising commercial Cham Wings flights from Damascus to Benghazi from October 2020.
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Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.
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