Alyssa Sims & Peter Bergen
An Overview of the Air Campaigns
in Libya since 2012
A poem about the “suffering” of Sirte, Libya, accompanied a photo of two dead children that Khaled Alkhwaildi uploaded to his Facebook page. Hamad al-Sayeh Hambali’s home was flattened by airstrikes on Zafaran, a district in eastern Sirte, on March 9, 2016, and local Facebook accounts like Alkhwaildi’s contained the only reporting of the incident. Hambali’s young daughters, Isra and Wafaa, lay side by side in the graphic photo, their Minnie Mouse and Hello Kitty pajamas dusted with rubble, one covered in a pool of blood.
Photographic evidence shows that a strike occurred on Hambali’s home that day, but there were no Western media reports of the event, and no country or local militia claimed responsibility for the strike. The deaths of Hambali’s children weren’t acknowledged outside of social media. This is characteristic of the aerial conflict in Libya.
New America and Airwars have documented more than 2,000 airstrikes that were reportedly conducted between September 2012 and June 10, 2018 in Libya, which resulted in at least 242 civilian deaths using the low-end estimate, and as many as 395 civilian deaths using the high-end estimate.
In 2011, during a national uprising in Libya, NATO intervened to protect civilians from the forces of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, a military action that significantly contributed to the regime’s defeat. Though the United Nations sanctioned campaign ended on October 31, 2011, several countries and local militias have continued to conduct airstrikes and drone strikes intermittently with scant accountability. New America and Airwars have documented more than 2,000 airstrikes that were reportedly conducted between September 2012 and June 10, 2018 in Libya, which resulted in at least 242 civilian deaths using the low-end estimate, and as many as 395 civilian deaths using the high-end estimate.
Some organizations have attempted to produce an accurate death toll of civilians in Libya and identify the responsible parties. However, a lack of reporting and self-reporting of strikes has enabled those responsible to go largely unnoticed. The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) consistently provides figures for civilian casualties of the hostilities in Libya. However, according to its press releases, UNSMIL is usually unable to “determine with certainty” which parties contributed to the casualties, with the exception of the Libyan National Army.
Human Rights Watch also reports casualties from “unidentified aircraft,” due to an inability to identify the country or militia group responsible. With some exceptions, no party typically claims responsibility for these airstrikes or their outcomes. With the aid of a team of Libyan researchers, New America and Airwars have found 2,158 reported airstrikes in Libya from September 2012 to June 10, 2018.
As outlined in the methodology section, those reports were collected from wide variety of sources. Because this study seeks to fill gaps in English-language reporting on civilian casualties in Libya, the vast majority of our sources are in Arabic.
Some of the strikes in the database include allegations of civilian casualties against the following parties: Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA), which is recognized by the United Nations; the Libyan National Army (LNA), a rival military force led by Gen. Khalifa Haftar; the air force of the first post Gaddafi Libyan government, the General National Congress (GNC); as well as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, France and the United States.
Meanwhile, on March 10, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president at the time, met in Paris with Libyan rebel group representatives Mahmoud Jibril and Ali al-Esawi. The same day, France became the first Western nation to recognize a ragtag organization of Libyan rebels—dubbed the National Transitional Council—as the only legitimate government in Libya.
On March 15, President Barack Obama met with his National Security Council, and intelligence officials warned him that Benghazi would fall to the regime in 24 hours. Convinced by his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, that a no-fly zone would make little difference to this outcome, President Obama directed U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to strengthen the language of the proposed French-British resolution on Libya at the Security Council, which would give member states latitude to bomb Gaddafi’s forces.
The Security Council on March 17 authorized Resolution 1973 to protect Libyan civilians and for the first time in history invoked the U.N.’s Responsibility to Protect to authorize military action. French aircraft struck Gaddafi’s columns advancing on Benghazi late in the afternoon of March 19, followed by British and American cruise missile attacks on air defense sites and Libyan government targets along the Mediterranean coast.
Out of a desire not to “own” the Libyan conflict, the U.S. strategy was to use air power to cripple Gaddafi’s air defenses. The United States, chastened by the failure of the Iraq occupation, elected to pursue an aerial campaign in Libya without significant political or diplomatic engagement with the rebel factions on the ground. This created gaps in U.S. understanding of the internal dynamics of the rebellion.
The relationships between the loose factions of the anti-regime rebels were fraught, even before the uprising, creating the foundations for the predictable postwar power struggle that ensued. French aircraft, directed by surveillance from U.S. Predator drones, on October 21 struck a convoy of regime vehicles as Gaddafi was spotted trying to flee his hometown of Sirte. He was removed from his vehicle and killed shortly after by rebel fighters on the ground.
On October 27, the U.N. voted to end foreign intervention in Libya, just a week after the dictator’s death, ignoring a request from the interim government to extend the NATO presence to the year’s end. NATO officially ended its mission in Libya on October 31, 2011.
Much like after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, militant jihadist groups moved into the vacuum left by the fall of the Gaddafi regime.
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