Armed Conflict Location & Event Data
Militias shift roles as allies, enemies,
and mediators amid power struggles
The incidents of infighting between Tripoli’s main armed groups reveal a set of dynamic and situational alliances in which yesterday’s enemy may become tomorrow’s mediator — or ally.
In January 2023, for example, the SDF and the 111th Brigade clashed with medium and heavy weapons in the Airport Road area, after which the 444th Brigade deployed in an effort to defuse the situation.
Just four months later, on 28 May, it was the SDF and the 444th Brigade that clashed, again using heavy weapons, in various areas of Tripoli. A few months on, in August — following another confrontation between the same two groups over Hamza’s arrest — the 444th Brigade commander was handed over to the SSA.
At the time, the SSA was still seen as a neutral actor. Less than two years later, it would be expelled from Tripoli.
These dynamics suggest a broadly transactional and tactical approach to alliances by the main armed groups in Tripoli, driven in part by a lack of institutional loyalty, temporary shared interests, prevailing power balances, and external pressures.
This logic often extends beyond the battlefield as well. In March 2025, a photo taken at a hospital in Rome where GNU Minister of State Adel Juma was being treated after surviving an assassination attempt in Tripoli, pictured, among others, Kikli and Ibrahim Dbeiba, Prime Minister Dbeiba’s nephew and a key power broker in Libya.
Just a few days later, Ibrahim Dbeiba hosted a Ramadan iftar banquet attended by several prominent militia leaders from Tripoli and nearby areas, including Kikli; Zubi; Trabelsi; the commander of Tajura’s Rahbat al-Dara Brigade, Bashir Khalaf Allah; and the leader of Zawiya’s First Support Force, Muhamad Bahrun.17 Many of them would clash in Tripoli just weeks later.
The swift intervention of leaders from Tripoli’s armed groups — including, at times, those directly involved in fighting — to mediate outbreaks of violence reflects well-established channels of communication and a shared interest in preserving a degree of stability.
By stepping in as mediators during moments of crisis, militia leaders can also accrue political capital by positioning themselves as stabilizing actors. In August 2024, amid heightened tensions following the dismissal of Central Bank Governor Sadiq al-Kabir, a broad meeting of armed group leaders from Tripoli and beyond played a key role in containing the situation in the capital.
The meeting included Trabelsi, Zubi, and Abdurrauf Kara from the SDF. In August 2023, at the height of the clashes between the SDF and the 444th Brigade, the decision to hand over Hamza to the SSA was reached in a meeting that brought together nearly all the major power brokers in Tripoli, including Prime Minister Dbeiba, Ibrahim Dbeiba, Trabelsi, Kara, Kikli, Zubi, Khalaf Allah, and Bahrun.
However, moving beyond these temporary and tactical understandings and resolving deeper-rooted tensions has proven far more difficult. In June 2024, 444th Brigade leader Hamza and the SDF commander Kara met in Tripoli’s Souq al-Juma district in an effort to reconcile.
That same month, additional reconciliation meetings paved the way for the TRB leader Ayub Abu Ras and Nawasi Brigade commander Mustafa Qaddour to return to Tripoli. Both left the capital in 2022 after their failed attempt to unseat Prime Minister Dbeiba and install his rival, Bashagha.
Even so, the intense clashes that have since erupted in the city, particularly between the 444th Brigade and the SDF, reveal the limited reach of these reconciliations within Tripoli’s fractured landscape.
Armed groups call in forces from
beyond Tripoli as clashes escalate
In the most serious incidents, particularly strategic offensives, armed clashes in Tripoli have mobilized allied forces from beyond the capital, with tensions also spilling over into nearby cities and feeding back into disputes in Tripoli itself.
This dynamic was most evident during the outbreak of violence in May 2025. In the days leading up to the clashes between the coalition of armed groups aligned with Prime Minister Dbeiba and the SSA, ACLED records significant movements of forces from outside Tripoli.
On the SSA side, this included the dispatch of forces from Zawiya, notably some 200 vehicles from Bahrun’s First Support Force. Reinforcements also arrived from Zintan, including around 40 vehicles carrying light and medium weapons, to bolster the ranks of Trabelsi’s Public Security Service. The Misrata Joint Force (MJF), allied with Dbeiba, sent troops into the capital as well, while forces from Tajura declared a state of general alert.
The movement of forces was even greater, and more decisive, in the subsequent clashes between the coalition of armed groups aligned with Dbeiba and the SDF. This time, the SDF managed to rally a broad coalition of militias from Zawiya, along with additional forces from Wershefana, home to a powerful armed group.
Their deployment in western Tripoli proved instrumental in opening a new front, especially against the Public Security Service, which was active in the area, thereby relieving pressure on the SDF, whose stronghold lies in the east of the city. The SDF’s ability to mobilize support from armed groups based outside Tripoli was a key factor that enabled it to mount far more sustained resistance than the SSA had. Meanwhile, the 444th Brigade was also backed by groups from outside Tripoli, like the Misrata Joint Force.
In the other major strategic offensive in Tripoli, during Bashagha’s 2022 attempt to enter the capital, unseat Dbeiba, and install his government, forces from outside the city also played a key role. Bashagha, a Misratan politician appointed by the eastern-based House of Representatives, had the backing of the eastern authorities.
During his failed push into Tripoli, he not only relied on local allies such as the Nawasi Brigade and the TRB but also forged support from key armed actors from outside the capital, including from Zintan, Zawiya, and Wershefana. Alongside groups like the SDF and the SSA, Dbeiba also counted on support from other forces from Zintan, Zawiya, and his native Misrata.
This pattern may even extend beyond western Libya, particularly if Haftar’s LNA, which controls the country’s east and much of the south, perceives vulnerabilities within the coalition of armed groups aligned with the GNU.
In May 2025, the mere prospect of LNA involvement was enough to shape dynamics in the capital. Amid rising tensions and armed clashes in Tripoli, the LNA declared a state of alert.
It deployed additional forces toward Sirte, located on the ceasefire line established in 2020 after the Second Libyan Civil War, and sent at least three mysterious military cargo flights to Sirte airport.
On the ground, its mobilization did not progress beyond these maneuvers, but its actions triggered alarm and were likely a key factor in deterring additional Misratan armed groups from deploying to Tripoli during the offensives against the SSA and the SDF amid concerns over a potential escalation on their eastern flank.
Stability on borrowed time
Since the establishment of the GNU in 2021, the trajectory of armed group dynamics in Tripoli points not to rupture, but to the emergence of a more concentrated yet fiercely contested armed order shaped by fluid alliances and intra-elite competition.
While the recent removal of the SSA and the offensive against the SDF may signal further consolidation, these shifts can also be viewed as recalibrations within a system in which short-lived but intense clashes, typically followed by rapid de-escalation, are a tactical means of renegotiating power and access.
Open violence does not appear to serve the shared interests of Tripoli’s main armed groups. This is not due to strategic coordination, but rather a mutual recognition of vulnerabilities, the risks of ungovernability, and external pressures.
These dynamics reflect how political change in the capital is shaped less by formal agreements than by the alignments and rivalries of armed actors embedded within state structures. In this context, the GNU’s ability to project power depends less on institutional reform than on its capacity to navigate a fluid and transactional web of armed group alliances.
This system has been held together by transactional arrangements and financial co-optation by the GNU, instead of sustainable institutional reform. Armed groups have been effectively accommodated into Tripoli’s security order through government-linked funding and power-sharing, a strategy that has helped defuse major confrontations.
Yet these arrangements remain deeply flawed. A significant drop in oil revenues, particularly amid the GNU’s deepening fiscal crisis, could swiftly unravel them, weakening the government’s ability to manage rivalries.
This risk is compounded by the latent threat that renewed infighting in Tripoli could invite interference by the LNA, whether directly or through allied groups in western Libya.
Turkey, which remains deeply embedded in Tripoli’s security architecture and has cultivated increasingly close ties with the Haftars, will also play a key role in shaping any future reconfiguration, whether through deterrence, mediation, or selective backing.
As Tripoli is once again attempting to recalibrate its security architecture following the SSA’s collapse and the confrontation with the SDF, the foundations of that order remain fragile and highly vulnerable to shocks. Its erosion, or collapse, would carry far-reaching implications for the national balance of power.
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