Archive - August 2026

 Jacob Wirtschafter 

Drone attacks, an assassination and a central banker’s exit test Washington’s plan to open Libyan oil supply

What to know

• The Trump administration’s Libyan oil initiative faces significant challenges.
• Recent drone strikes targeted Libya’s energy infrastructure amid ongoing conflict.
• A blast at Zawiya oil complex cut power to several cities in Libya

The Trump administration’s push to open Libyan oil as a Gulf-supply alternative during the war with Iran is on the rocks after an assassination, a central banker’s move to quit and a week of drone strikes and explosions that ran into Sunday.

A blast over the weekend at an electrical substation at the Zawiya oil complex cut power to Tripoli, Zawiya, Sabratha, Surman and Gharyan, according to Libya’s General Electricity Co., and officials were investigating whether the incident is tied to a series of armed drone attacks.

The drone strikes in recent days have targeted energy infrastructure in western Libya, which the internationally recognized government in Tripoli controls. The eastern half of the country is controlled by a Benghazi-based warlord, Gen. Khalifa Haftar.

The same power plant hit Sunday was struck four days earlier by an explosive drone, cutting power and prompting General Electricity to suspend work and withdraw its technical teams from the nearby plant Chevron and ExxonMobil are counting on as they enter the Libyan market.

Over the last week, at least six drone strikes have hit a refinery, an electric plant, substations and storage tanks near the coastal city of Zawiya, about 30 miles west of Tripoli.

The attacks came on the heels of an Aug. 10 car bombing in Benghazi that killed one of Gen. Haftar’s top intelligence officers. 

A day earlier, the governor of the Central Bank of Libya, which answers to leaders in both halves of the split nation, submitted a letter of resignation that both Benghazi and Tripoli rejected. 

In less than two weeks, Libya’s energy infrastructure, security apparatus and main east-west economic institution all came under pressure — the same three pillars Massad Boulos, President Trump’s senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, set out in Washington in April as the basis for reuniting Libya and opening more of its oil to American companies.

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked a route that normally carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. Libya is part of Washington’s answer to Tehran. 

Mr. Boulos said in April that Libya would reach 1.6 million barrels of oil a day in the short term and 2 million to 3 million by the end of the decade. Chevron’s return to Libya was the biggest American oil move in decades. 

The company won a Sirte Basin contract earlier this year, followed by ExxonMobil signing an agreement covering four offshore blocks. Libya holds 41% of Africa’s proved oil reserves, more than any other country on the continent.

Libya pumped 1.44 million barrels a day in June, its highest since 2013 but still short of the 1.6 million produced before the 2011 uprising that eventually split the country. The Zawiya refinery near Tripoli processes 120,000 barrels a day carried roughly 450 miles from the Sharara field, operated by Spain’s Repsol with France’s TotalEnergies, Austria’s OMV, Norway’s Equinor and Libya’s National Oil Corp.

But the instability in Libya threatens American interests in the wider region, said Wolfgang Pusztai, an Austrian security analyst who served as defense attache in Libya and chairs the National Council on U.S.-Libya Relations advisory council. 

Washington’s aims, he told The Washington Times, are to stabilize the country, counter Russia’s military presence in Africa, increase Libyan oil production, control migration to Europe and counter Chinese influence over southern Libyan minerals. “The Boulos initiative is more an opportunity to further U.S. interests from where they stand now,” he said.

Mr. Boulos condemned the refinery attacks and the killing in a post on social media on Wednesday, calling for investigations and urging Libyan stakeholders to “redouble their efforts to overcome divisions.”

“We cannot deal with the three events as three separate incidents, nor can we jump to the conclusion that a single plot lies behind them,” said Hany El-Aasar, executive director of Egypt’s National Center for Studies. What matters, he told The Times, is that Libya’s security, energy and economic institutions came under pressure at the same moment Washington was trying to bind them together.

“In terms of the perpetrators, the three hits are not connected,” said Omar Khattaly, a Libyan American consultant who formerly ran the real estate fund of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund and visited Tripoli in late July. “But they are connected through the current weak structure of the Libyan state. This is all about money, power and control.”

Split country

Libya has been divided since 2014. Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah runs the west, the Government of National Unity in Tripoli. Gen. Haftar, an 82-year-old dual American Libyan citizen who lived for two decades in Virginia, commands the east and much of the south through the Libyan National Army. 

Neither man has faced an election. Turkey supports Mr. Dbeibah with troops and drones. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Russia have backed Gen. Haftar. Russia’s Africa Corps still holds positions in the eastern desert and Chinese companies compete for mineral concessions in the south.

The current division dates to the 2011 NATO intervention that toppled Moammar Gadhafi. Then-President Obama, whose administration joined France and Britain in leading the air campaign, later called the failure to plan for post-Gadhafi Libya his worst foreign-policy mistake. Fifteen years on, the Trump administration is attempting to assemble a bargain from the pieces the intervention left behind.

The arrangement under discussion would preserve Mr. Dbeibah’s influence in Tripoli through a central role for his nephew while elevating Gen. Haftar’s 35-year-old son Saddam Haftar to lead a new national executive council. Washington would offer American oil investment and press for the release of frozen Libyan assets. Elections would come later, if at all.

The clearest evidence the approach can work came April 11, when the rival eastern and western legislative chambers approved a unified national budget of 190 billion Libyan dinars, roughly $30 billion — the first since 2013.

***

Jacob Wirtschafter – Special to The Washington Times

__________________

Göktuğ Çalışkan

Türkiye is opening doors in both Tripoli and Benghazi, positioning itself at the center of Libya’s uncertain political future.

On Aug. 12, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan landed in Benghazi and was met on the tarmac by Saddam Haftar, deputy commander-in-chief of the Libyan National Army. Within hours, Fidan was standing beside Khalifa Haftar beneath the emblem of the eastern command that once tried to capture Tripoli. Türkiye had helped stop Haftar’s 2019-2020 offensive, yet its foreign minister was now received at his headquarters for their first public meeting in the eastern city.

The timing gave the visit added weight. Two days earlier, a car bomb had killed Maj. Gen. Fawzi al-Mansouri, the director of military intelligence under Haftar’s command. The explosives detonated near his vehicle in Benghazi’s Sayyida Aisha district. No group claimed responsibility.

This was therefore more than a photograph marking the end of an old quarrel. It came during a struggle over Libya’s next political order, the future of its divided military and the distribution of oil and reconstruction revenue. Ankara appears determined to enter that process with working channels in both Tripoli and Benghazi.

Assassination before diplomacy

Al-Mansouri was no ceremonial officer. As the head of military intelligence in the east, he belonged to the apparatus protecting Haftar’s command. His killing exposed a vulnerability in a system often presented as more tightly controlled than western Libya’s network of armed groups.

There’s no real point in guessing who did it. The guessing itself tends to crowd out the one thing that’s actually clear: even Benghazi, after all these years of Haftar tightening his grip, still isn’t fully secure. Yet the Benghazi leg went ahead as planned. Fidan arrived while the eastern command was still absorbing the loss of one of its most senior intelligence officers, signaling that Ankara’s engagement with the east was not contingent on calm.

Fidan offered condolences during his talks. His presence also carried the message that Türkiye can discuss intelligence cooperation, border surveillance, military training and institutional unification with an eastern command facing fresh security concerns.

His message came only days after Haftar’s forces signed a contract with a Turkish company on July 20 for the first phase of a land-border management system covering 275 kilometers (170 miles). The project was placed under the supervision of Saddam Haftar, Khalifa’s son and deputy commander. It was announced as part of efforts to counter arms and drug trafficking, irregular migration and cross-border crime. Cooperation had moved from meetings to a security project on the ground.

Ankara’s channel to Haftar

The channel had opened the previous year, when National Intelligence Organization (MIT) chief Ibrahim Kalın met Saddam Haftar and Khalifa Haftar in Benghazi. Kalın returned to the city on June 23, 2026, for another round of talks with Saddam Haftar, this time focused on preserving peace and bringing Libya’s rival administrations and military structures closer together. Then, Fidan received Saddam Haftar in Ankara on July 24, moving an intelligence-led relationship onto the diplomatic stage.

Fidan’s Aug. 12 visit was the latest step in building relations. He met Khalifa Haftar as the final authority, Saddam Haftar as the security and diplomatic interlocutor, Parliament Speaker Aguila Saleh as the head of the eastern legislature, and Belqasem Haftar, who heads the Development and Reconstruction Fund.

One absence was equally revealing. Fidan’s official program contained no meeting with Osama Hammad, prime minister of the parallel eastern government. Ankara engaged the institutions and individuals holding real power without granting Hammad’s cabinet the same standing it gives the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity.

He made one more stop before flying out of Benghazi: the tomb of Omar Mukhtar, the anti-colonial fighter both sides of Libya’s divide still claim as their own. It’s an easy thing to read too much into, but the timing wasn’t nothing. A day built almost entirely around one family’s hierarchy – Khalifa, then Saddam, then Belqasem – ended instead at a grave that belongs to no faction. Whether that was calculated or just good instinct is not important. It let the visit close on something bigger than the Haftars.

Keeping both doors open

Ankara’s eastern outreach did not begin with a retreat from Tripoli. On Aug. 4, Fidan received acting Interior Minister Imad Trabelsi, acting Defense Minister Abdulsalam Zubi and national security adviser Ibrahim Dbeibah in Ankara. These are central figures in the western security structure that Türkiye has supported through its agreements with Libya’s internationally recognized authorities.

Fidan then started his Libya tour in Tripoli on Aug. 11. He met Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibah, Presidential Council Chair Mohammed al-Menfi and High Council of State Chair Mohammed Takala. He also held talks with security officials and visited the Turkish military mission.

This sequence of visits is carefully calculated: go west first to reassure those who already trust you, then head east. It is the kind of sequencing that signals to Tripoli that it is not being replaced, while assuring Benghazi that nothing on the western side needs to be disrupted for this new relationship to take shape.

This balance serves both Libya’s and Türkiye’s interests. Libya’s eastern and southern regions contain much of the country’s oil infrastructure. Benghazi and Derna offer major reconstruction opportunities. Any lasting agreement on a unified army will require Haftar’s command, while the future of the 2019 maritime memorandum will be more secure if it gains acceptance beyond Tripoli.

However, the last point requires caution. The eastern-based House of Representatives has discussed the maritime agreement and created expectations of a vote, but no confirmed ratification followed Fidan’s visit. Nor was a new maritime accord signed in Benghazi. The handshake improved the political environment around the issue, but it did not settle it.

From Benghazi to El Alamein

The Libya tour also fits Türkiye’s wider diplomatic efforts. In July, military representatives from east and west held unification talks in Sirte, including discussions on joint operations against smuggling and irregular migration.

Fidan traveled from Libya to Egypt for meetings with Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty on Aug. 13-14. He said the two countries’ views on Libya’s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity overlapped and that they had decided to turn this understanding into “joint action.”

That phrase gives the Tripoli-Benghazi-El Alamein route its full meaning. Egypt remains the eastern camp’s most influential neighbor, while Türkiye retains the deepest external security relationship with Tripoli. If Ankara and Cairo can coordinate electoral arrangements, institutional unification and security guarantees, they may reduce the room for Libyan factions to play foreign patrons against one another.

So the photograph isn’t really about an old enemy turned guest of honor. It shows Ankara protecting what it already has in Tripoli while preparing for a political order in which the Haftars may carry greater national weight. Whether any of it holds together is still an open question. The border contract actually has to be built. The unification talks in Sirte have to withstand Libya’s habit of talking for years without reaching any decisions. The Parliament in Tobruk has to vote on the maritime deal rather than just discuss it. And Cairo has to want the same thing Ankara wants, for as long as it takes.

None of that was settled on Aug. 12. But few powers, if any, have built the kind of access Türkiye now has across Libya’s divide, with intelligence channels in the east, defense agreements in the west, and Türkiye’s foreign minister welcomed in both Tripoli and Benghazi within the same 48 hours.

_______________

Türkiye will continue working to bridge Libya’s political and regional divides, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Wednesday after concluding wide-ranging talks in Tripoli and Benghazi aimed at strengthening cooperation and supporting stability across the North African country.

Fidan said his visit reflected Ankara’s “One Libya” policy, which treats the country’s western, eastern and southern regions without distinction.

“Our visit has been a concrete manifestation of our ‘One Libya’ policy, which makes no distinction between Libya’s west, east and south,” Fidan said, thanking Libyan authorities for their hospitality.

In Tripoli, Fidan met Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah of Libya’s Government of National Unity (GNU), discussing bilateral relations, Libya’s political process, regional developments and security issues.

He also held talks with Presidential Council President Mohammed al-Menfi and High Council of State President Mohammed Takala.

Fidan met several senior security and defense officials in Tripoli, including National Security Adviser Ibrahim Dbeibah, acting Defense Minister Abdulsalam al-Zoubi, Interior Minister Emad al-Trabelsi, Chief of General Staff Salah al-Din al-Namroush and military intelligence chief Mahmoud Hamza.

The talks focused on bilateral cooperation as well as current political and security developments.

Fidan then traveled to Benghazi, where he met Libyan National Army commander Khalifa Haftar, deputy commander Saddam Haftar, House of Representatives Speaker Aguila Saleh and Libya Development and Reconstruction Fund Director-General Belqasem Haftar.

The meetings included discussions on Libya’s political and security agenda and opportunities to expand bilateral cooperation.

Fidan described Türkiye’s security and defense cooperation with Libya as a strategic component of bilateral ties that contributes directly to Libya’s stability and broader regional security.

As part of his visit, he also met Turkish troops serving with the Turkish Armed Forces’ Libya Task Group Command in Tripoli.

“Türkiye does not consider Libya’s peace and stability separately from its own stability,” Fidan said, stressing that Libyans should be able to determine and build their future in freedom, security and prosperity.

Fidan said Ankara would continue supporting stronger dialogue and cooperation between Libya’s east and west under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s foreign policy vision.

Türkiye, he added, would maintain its efforts to contribute to Libya’s peace, stability and prosperity.

Meanwhile, the top Turkish diplomat also visited the Mausoleum of Omar al-Mukhtar, revered as Libya’s national hero for leading the resistance against Italian colonial rule, during his contacts in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan visits the Mausoleum of Omar Mukhtar, Benghazi, Libya, Aug. 12, 2026. (Foreign Ministry Handout)

Fidan paid tribute to al-Mukhtar at the mausoleum as part of his visit to Libya.

“We visited the mausoleum of Omar al-Mukhtar, a leading figure in Libya’s struggle for independence who resisted colonialism with dignity and determination,” Fidan said.

Describing al-Mukhtar as “a revered hero across the Islamic world,” Fidan honored the memory of the resistance leader, who devoted his life to his faith and ideals and whose legacy continues to inspire generations.

_________________

Tahani Elmogrbi

Libyans are increasingly questioning where governance reforms fit into the agendas of Libyan elites’ engagement with the parallel UNSMIL 2025 roadmap and Boulos initiative.

Since 2011 and the death of Muammar Qadhafi, Libyan politicians have repeatedly promised the Libyan people that they would work toward state-building, justice, national reconciliation, and prosperity to transform Libya into “another Dubai.”

Likewise, international efforts to facilitate state-building and a unified Libya date back over a decade, with two parallel initiatives currently taking place in Libya to help mediate between the country’s rival eastern and western political camps.

The 2025 roadmap of UNSMIL, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya, and the Boulos initiative, proposed by U.S. Arab affairs adviser Massad Boulos in April, are the latest efforts to bridge this divide between Libyan elites from east and west. 

Yet Libya continues to look like an arena in which competing family businesses each claim to represent the best interests of the Libyan people, the country’s true stakeholders, while actually excluding them.

For most Libyans, the most tangible aspect of these processes has been the high-level international meetings they involve, which are often presented as signs of progress toward unification in and of themselves.

Increasingly, Libyans see this elite engagement in international mediation initiatives as performative rather than constructive. Moreover, they understand that elites stand to gain personally from the focus on international investment in the Boulos initiative. 

If discussions about the country’s future maintain public focus on a series of arrangements and business deals among powerful families, political networks, and international intermediaries rather than tangible progress toward elected institutions or popular participation, public confidence in these international efforts toward a unified Libya will continue to erode. 

A Tale of Two Tracks

The UNSMIL roadmap, announced in August 2025, is backed by the international community, including the United States and the UN Security Council. Led by Hanna Tetteh, the special representative of the secretary-general (SRSG) for Libya, the roadmap aims to end Libya’s prolonged political transition through a sequenced, three-pillar approach to be implemented within twelve to eighteen months:

1) adopting a technically sound and politically viable electoral framework for presidential and parliamentary elections;

2) reunifying Libya’s divided institutions by establishing a new unified interim government with a time-bound mandate to prepare the country for elections; and

3) a broad structured dialogue involving political actors, civil society, women, youth, and other stakeholders to address governance, security, economic reform, and national reconciliation.

Now running in parallel to the UNSMIL roadmap, the subsequently announced Boulos initiative is part of his efforts to broker a power-sharing arrangement among Libya’s rival factions and attract international investment, particularly from American companies. Boulos has described the initiative as a short-term, U.S.-facilitated roadmap intended to complement the UNSMIL process rather than replace it. 

A Question of Legitimacy

On the one hand, the UNSMIL roadmap has received buy-in from key Libyan political figures who have participated in previous versions of the UN mediation process. These include Mohamed Menfi, head of the Libyan Presidential Council (PC); Aguila Saleh, speaker of the House of Representatives (HOR); and Mohamed Takala, head of the High State Council (HSC).

However, the process has also been challenged since its announcement last year, primarily by Libya’s rival political authorities and the broader political fragmentation, with external backers also reinforcing resistance to the UN-led process.

The roadmap’s first two phases stalled amid competing interests and limited UNSMIL political leverage on the ground. This has led the SRSG to bypass the first two phases—”Unified Government Institutions” and “Electoral Framework”—and move directly to the “Structured Dialogue” phase in an attempt to achieve something before the roadmap’s end date. 

This phase included more than 120 Libyan participants and generated nearly 600 specific recommendations covering governance, security, the economy, and national reconciliation.

Although governance was addressed in the 600 recommendations, full consensus was elusive, and the recommendations were met with dissent rather than uniform endorsement. For example, one governance recommendation included the proposal of a new unified executive authority to replace the existing divided “transitional” executive structures over the subsequent 18–24 months. 

But participants clashed over whether creating another transitional arrangement would simply prolong Libya’s transition rather than help achieve the roadmap’s main objective of ending the transitional phase in Libya.

The dialogue participants later expressed concerns about the roadmap, stating that the recommendations showed that Tetteh was not serious about developing viable solutions by failing to require a finalized or unanimous agreement from the dialogue participants, leaving the recommendations without clear weight and with an outline only toward a new type of transitional government instead of the end to the transitional governments that the framework had initially promised.

Since Boulos announced his initiative in June, critics have also argued that Tetteh has found herself at an impasse due to the widespread attention on the Boulos initiative, instead using the dialogue to compete with it.

The Boulos initiative has also received buy-in from several key political actors in Libya, including Khalifa Haftar, who referred to it as a “unique” development. The weight given to outcomes of this initiative domestically demonstrates the critical role the United States can play given its influence.

But its status as a U.S. diplomatic initiative means it lacks the international mandate of the UNSMIL roadmap, and it has no formal endorsement from the UN Security Council. Its existence has also been understood as a challenge to the SRSG framework despite Boulos’s statements otherwise, putting pressure on the process. 

Moreover, it does not yet have support from both sides of the conflict: While Haftar’s side vocally welcomed the initiative’s attempt to unify government institutions, calling it unique, Saleh opposes it, saying that it bypasses legislative institutions.

Further, HSC members are divided on the initiative. As both the House of Representatives (HOR) and the High State Council (HSC) possess the legal authority to pass electoral laws and form a unified government, their agreement is essential to ensuring the legitimacy of any nationwide deal or political initiative. These complications have contributed to the Libyan public expressing skepticism about the legitimacy of both initiatives.

***

Tahani Elmogrbi is a Libya specialist, a MENA conflict-resolution advisor, and political analyst with extensive experience in democracy and governance, peace building, and foreign policy. She advises several European governments on security architecture, foreign fighters, and post-conflict recovery.

________________________

The Washington Institute

Elis Gjevori

As blackouts spark protests, a decade of fractured governance, under investment and corruption has left an oil and gas-rich nation unable to keep its lights on.

Earlier this month, Al Robyan, one of Tripoli’s most popular seafood restaurants, made an unusual offer: a table laden with seafood in exchange for “some fuel for the generator”. “We’ve run out of earthly solutions,” the restaurant wrote on Facebook.

The post drew thousands of responses, with some joking that the fuel would cost more than the seafood on offer. Over the summer, Libyans across the country have endured almost daily power outages lasting between six and 10 hours. That might sound unusual for a hydrocarbon-rich country that produces more than 1.3 million barrels of oil a day and has a population of just over 7.5 million.

“Since these massive shortages started, every business in Libya has been affected,” said Alaeddin Muntasser, a retired businessman in Tripoli, who described the situation as an “electricity disaster”. Muntasser told Middle East Eye of one water-bottling plant severely affected by the blackouts. “We had a shortage of drinking water for a couple of weeks. If they can’t pump or filter, they can’t bottle,” he said. “Many small restaurants have shut down; a few who can afford to have a generator to run their ovens managed to open.”

Meanwhile, people with the worst blackouts lost all the food in their freezers and fridges. The blackouts have sparked protests in Tripoli, Zawiya, Misrata and elsewhere in Libya. Demonstrators demanding a more reliable electricity supply have also called for the resignation of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah. Libya generates roughly 70 percent of its electricity from natural gas, leaving the power grid highly exposed to falling gas production and disruptions at fields and pipelines. Oil accounts for almost all the remainder.

“The electricity crisis and related protests is one of those problems that will not go away until Libya’s government can implement a longer-term strategy that ensures a more reliable electricity supply, whether that be through refined fuels or renewable energy sources,” Hamish Kinnear, principal Middle East and North Africa analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, told MEE.

Kinnear noted that Libya was not alone in facing such problems, “but for citizens of a country with the largest oil reserves and the fifth largest gas reserves in Africa, as well as significant solar power potential, blackouts are a particular source of frustration”.

A crisis decades in the making

The roots of Libya’s current electricity crisis go back years. The country has not recovered since it plunged into chaos after a Nato-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Since then, the country has split, with rival administrations in the west headed by the internationally recognised government of Dbeibah, and in the east backed by forces led by General Khalifa Haftar and foreign governments.

Years of underinvestment in the power grid and gas production, combined with this year’s heatwave, in which temperatures hit 50C, have all come to a head. “Oil wealth only becomes reliable electricity when institutions can convert it, and Libya’s institutions have been fractured for over a decade,” said Karim Elgendy, executive director of the Carboun Institute, a think tank focused on Middle East and North Africa energy and climate.

“Rival authorities issue competing decisions over the same grid and the utility recovers almost none of its costs. Years of deferred maintenance have left the network running on ageing equipment with no margin for error. So every summer becomes a stress test the grid is not ready for,” Elgendy told MEE. In January, Egypt and Libya signed a memorandum of understanding to deepen cooperation in the oil and gas sector.

In July, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and other Egyptian officials met with senior Libyan officials, including National Oil Corporation chairman Massoud Suleman, to discuss deepening energy ties between the two sides. Following Libya’s electricity blackouts throughout July, Tripoli turned in part to Egypt, which boosted electricity export capacity to Libya by approximately 43 percent, reaching 100 megawatts.

Despite the apparently sharp rise, the extra supply meets only a fraction of Libya’s electricity needs, covering less than a tenth of its recent generation shortfall. Libya also settled outstanding dues to Egypt totalling around $90m. On the surface, both sides stand to benefit from deepening energy cooperation. Egypt has a massive appetite for energy, and Libya has significant hydrocarbons sitting under its soil.

“The complementarity between the two economies is real: Libya has the hydrocarbons, Egypt has the refining, the generation fleet and the contractors,” said Elgendy. “But genuine integration begins when both sides commit to a long-term commercial framework with obligations running both ways.” And that shows little sign of happening.

Egypt’s own electricity needs run on burning gas, and lots of it. Where it once had enough production of its own to meet much of its energy needs, that production has been declining as reserves are depleted. “Egypt’s own power system leans heavily on imported gas it does not control, and recent supply interruptions showed how quickly that exposure travels down the chain. A country importing electricity from Egypt is, indirectly, importing Egypt’s gas risk,” noted Elgendy.

In recent years, Egypt has had to turn to Israel. Cairo signed a record $35bn gas deal with Israel in 2025, almost tripling its gas imports from the Israeli Leviathan gas fields and marking the largest export deal in Israel’s history. Jalel Harchaoui, Libya specialist with the Royal United Services Institute, says the attempts by Libya and Egypt to look to meet each other’s energy needs are “not to be taken seriously”.

Harchaoui is sceptical that energy needs were driving the outreach. “I think it would be very incorrect to say that the electricity situation is the reason for the meeting,” he told MEE. “There has been a pattern whereby Tripoli tends to say to Egypt: ‘Let’s talk. And by the way, I notice you’re suffering from energy shortages. Libya has a small population and a lot of energy, Tripoli is happy to help you, Egypt.'”

He described it as “more of a diplomatic trick than something really genuine, especially during a summer when Libya itself is grappling with a very serious electricity crisis”. Harchaoui says the deeper problem is one that Tripoli has been ignoring for a decade.

Libya sits on abundant natural gas reserves both onshore and offshore, “but the error that Libya made, and it’s a profound error with long-time consequences, is that it hasn’t kept up in terms of natural gas production capacity”. Gas still accounts for roughly three-quarters of the country’s electricity output, yet years have gone by “with no new natural gas project of any significance even being launched”.

The result, Harchaoui said, is that existing assets have been “shrinking in terms of output”, and even a new project greenlit today would take “at least seven or eight years” before producing results. On current trends, he warned, Libya could within a few years be “humiliated to the point of having to import natural gas”, a reversal that would undercut any framing of Libya and Egypt as complementary energy partners.

Part of the failure is cultural as much as technical, he argued. Libya operates with “the culture of a crude oil-producing country” that “just doesn’t think in terms of natural gas” as a priority, even though gas, not oil, is what actually keeps the lights on. Corruption has compounded the delay, not only by diverting money but by slowing decision-making itself.

“To do a corrupt project, you need more time than to do an honest project, because you have to make sure all the key officials are satisfied with their bribes,” Harchaoui said, alleging that some power plant units installed between 2022 and 2025 were purchased secondhand and passed off as new.

Political dynamics have also shaped the outbreaks of anger. Harchaoui pointed to years of unfulfilled promises by the country’s prime minister – who has claimed since 2021 to have “resolved” the crisis – as one reason unrest has concentrated in the west, where protest is easier to organise than under Haftar’s tighter grip in the east. Blackouts, he stressed, are hitting the east and south too, just less visibly and without the same political cost.

***

Elis Gjevori is a journalist based in Istanbul. He focuses on the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East.

________________

Wolfram Lacher

To many Libyans, the whole idea of the talks is offensive: they send the message that the country should be formally subject to family rule. On the Dbeibah side the negotiations are being led by Ibrahim, whose father, Ali, established the Dbeibah family’s reputation for graft by making a fortune leading a state body that managed large construction projects during the Qaddafi era. (One of the main contractors of this body was a state-owned company run by Abdulhamid).

For his part, according to a recent UN report, Ibrahim owes much of his influence to his “direct collaboration with armed group leaders,” a field in which he “largely operates without any checks or balances.” Saddam Haftar, in turn, owes his prominence first and foremost to his father’s violent rise over the past decade, in addition to his own ruthlessness.

The unit he has commanded has been accused by Amnesty International of a “catalogue of horrors” against civilians. UN investigators recently identified him as the kingpin of networks that siphon off billions of dollars in state funds each year, including by smuggling fuel—which is heavily subsidized in Libya—outside the country to foreign buyers, and by shadow-operating a private firm that struck a shady deal with the NOC to export vast amounts of crude from the east’s oilfields.

The capital, firepower, and political clout Saddam derives from these activities have helped him become his father’s anointed successor, bypassing his older brother Khaled, whom his father named chief of staff as a consolation prize.

Yet Saddam, like Khalifa’s other sons, is tainted in the view of many Libyans for benefiting from his father’s bloody successes. Sibling rivalries, moreover, have put further hurdles in his path: his brothers Khaled and Belgasem have, my sources told me, mobilized their political clients to oppose the Boulos plan.

On June 29 Boulos hosted Saddam in Washington for a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to press the deal; the following day he tried to persuade Belgasem, who had traveled separately.

Saddam, by all accounts, is strongly in favor of Boulos’s proposal. It would allow him to cast off his thuggish reputation and hand him the highest national political office without the need for elections he could not possibly win.

Far less obvious is what the Dbeibahs stand to gain. They would risk a rebellion from western Libyan forces who are not only opposed to the Haftars but understandably fearful that, sooner or later, Saddam will use his new position to monopolize power.

The Dbeibahs’ hometown of Misrata, about 130 miles east of Tripoli, is also the base of several armed groups that weigh heavily in Libya’s military balance, and virtually everyone I spoke with there told me that the city would openly mobilize against the deal if it was indeed formalized. When Boulos visited Misrata in early July, local dignitaries conveyed the same message to him.

Conscious of these risks, the Dbeibahs have sent conflicting messages to their constituencies, at times dismissing the Boulos proposal outright or suggesting that they have been playing for time. It is unclear whether they are negotiating in good faith or are simply wary of alienating an in-law of the US president.

They may not be unhappy about Misratan resistance to the proposal, which gives them an excuse for stalling. Yet advisers to the Dbeibahs certainly seem flattered that a senior US official considers them the Haftars’ equal and exclusive interlocutors, after years of convoluted, UN-led political processes led by bureaucrats with limited clout and involving a long cast of Libyan politicians of questionable relevance.

They could allow themselves to be coaxed into a deal they do not intend to implement. Having triumphed over numerous powerful challengers over the past five years, they may also believe they will outsmart Saddam once the agreement is in place (and in the meantime, like everyone else in Tripoli, wait for his father to die). Both would be dangerous gambles.

From Gaza to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Trump administration has shown a proclivity for announcing flashy peace deals and an utter lack of interest in implementing them.

There is no reason to expect that Libya, a country that matters little in Washington, will be any different. But in Libya the two sides have not fought directly for six years, which means that the Boulos initiative could do worse than merely fail to solve the conflict or further entrench its causes—it could unsettle the fragile equilibrium that has maintained the stalemate.

Saddam, eyeing the position of president, would suffer a serious disappointment if the talks fail, strengthening the position of advocates for a military alternative in the Haftar camp. If the negotiations do result in a deal, Saddam could use his official position to rally rivals of the Dbeibahs from western Libya around him.

One military commander in Tripoli likened that scenario to the temporary power-sharing arrangement that prevailed between two Sudanese generals before they turned on each other in 2023, provoking that country’s devastating, ongoing civil war. In that case, given the Trump administration’s record, nobody would expect the US to intervene and stop the deal from unraveling.

Even an agreement that remains a dead letter carries risks: Saddam could still claim the prerogatives offered to him on paper, and justify military action as necessary to take what is rightfully his.

Underpinning these scenarios are broader changes in Libya’s balance of power and regional relations. The Haftars and Dbeibahs both benefited from the informal arrangements they maintained over the past five years, but the former made out much better.

Each year billions of dollars washed into the Haftars’ coffers from oil exports, fuel smuggling, printing counterfeit currency, and pillaging state-owned banks. In Tripoli, these schemes caused widening fiscal and balance-of-payments deficits, as well as a slide in the dinar’s black-market exchange rate, all of which harmed the Dbeibah government politically.

The Haftars, meanwhile, went on a shopping spree, buying heavy military equipment from abroad, cultivating political loyalties across the country, and launching a grand reconstruction program run by Belgasem, who is said to hand out Rolexes to Western businessmen and diplomats. Many of the building contracts went to Turkish and Egyptian companies with close ties to their countries’ rulers, evidently in order to buy foreign support.

Over the past two years, meanwhile, Turkey has cultivated warmer relationships with the Haftars, above all because it wants the east-based parliament to ratify a maritime agreement it signed in 2019 with the government in Tripoli. The most alarming sign of those deepening ties has been a string of considerable Turkish defense deals with the Haftars.

In April, Reuters reported that Saddam’s forces seemed to have acquired Bayraktar TB2 combat drones—the very drones that Turkey has at times restricted the Dbeibah government from using in battle. The only plausible targets of these weapons are the western Libyan factions that have enjoyed Turkish military support since 2020.

The leaders of those factions are torn between the conviction that Turkey could not possibly have an interest in the Haftars seizing power—which would remove any need for a Turkish military presence in the country—and their suspicion that they can no longer count on their erstwhile protector.

In other respects, too, the international environment has become permissive toward renewed escalation. European states are mostly uninterested in Libya, with the exception of Italy and Greece, which have defined an EU policy that prioritizes migration control over everything else.

In practice, this has meant cultivating close ties both with Dbeibah and Zubi in Tripoli and with the Haftars in the east, ignoring the military buildup on both sides, looking the other way as fuel smuggling drains the state’s coffers, and implicitly condoning the brutal detention of migrants in prisons run by the Tripoli government and Haftar’s forces alike.

The latest illustration of European collusion concerned the EU naval mission Irini, formed in 2020 to inspect ships suspected of violating the Libya arms embargo—a task for which it had a mandate from the UN Security Council.

For months the Dbeibah government’s foreign ministry had demanded that the mission expand that mandate and also intercept ships believed to be smuggling fuel, but European diplomats cautioned that doing so would damage their relations with the Haftars. Instead, this past May, France and Greece—the current European members of the UN Security Council—allowed the council’s mandate for Irini to expire.

And in a country where the biggest and glitziest new structures are military bases and where military power serves private interests, the EU recently funded the construction of yet another base, for a unit reporting to Zubi. The likely European response to renewed war would be polite silence, in expectation of an accommodation with whoever the victors are.

As both sides of the conflict build up their arsenals and collude in defrauding the state, they are inexorably pushing Libya toward crisis. Boulos, seeking to cement the status quo by entrenching the rule of the two families, may turn out to be the harbinger of its collapse.

“If the Boulos initiative fails, the alternative will probably be war,” one person close to the Dbeibahs’ negotiators told me in July. War would also be the predictable consequence if Boulos succeeds.

***

Wolfram Lacher is a Senior Associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin and the author of Libya’s Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict.

___________________

Wolfram Lacher

For six years a fragile stalemate has kept Libya’s conflict frozen. A new US-brokered mediation effort risks upending that balance.

***

On my last visit to Tripoli, this past June, the city often felt as if it had left the protracted conflicts of Libya’s post-Qaddafi era behind. At night, families were out in the streets catching a respite from the heat of the day. The occasional blasts were not gunfire but fireworks at wedding celebrations.

Incoming flights were carrying foreign businessmen and engineers working on contracts for the state oil company or other public bodies. The last serious clashes in the city, in May 2025, seemed to lie in the distant past. If something was weighing down the public mood, it was the relentlessly increasing cost of living.

The inflationary shockwaves radiating out from Hormuz have compounded the dinar’s continuous slide against the dollar, leaving most Libyans unable to make ends meet with their public-sector salaries. Since I left, mounting temperatures have increased demand for electricity, and long power cuts—mostly caused by intentional load-shedding—have prompted sporadic protests. But that, after all, is a dynamic Libya shares with countries as varied as Bangladesh or South Africa.

And yet the semblance of normality is deceptive. Since 2020, when Turkish-backed western Libyan forces defeated an attempt by Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces to capture Tripoli with support from Russia and the United Arab Emirates, a fragile stalemate has kept Libya’s conflict frozen.

Haftar’s forces control most of the country, including most of its oilfields, and sponsor their own government. Libya’s internationally recognized ruling body, however, is the Government of National Unity, led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, which owes its name to the UN-led process that created it in 2021, though it has long since abandoned any pretense of a unity government.

Dbeibah holds varying degrees of sway in the northwest, most noticeably in Tripoli, where the state institutions that manage the country’s oil wealth are headquartered. Any ambitions to alter this situation by force have been discouraged by, respectively, the Turkish military presence in the northwest and a Russian deployment in Haftar’s territory.

Even as Libya remains divided between two competing governments, the families that rule them have brokered notable deals that bind them to one another. The two main figures in this connection have been Dbeibah’s nephew Ibrahim—the éminence grise behind the throne—and Haftar’s son Saddam, his octogenarian father’s designated successor and the de facto leader of his forces. Saddam, mustachioed and taciturn, is in his mid-thirties and notorious for his brutality and rapacity. (Born during the first Gulf War, he was named after the Iraqi dictator.)

In 2022 Saddam and Ibrahim agreed on the appointment of a Haftar nominee as head of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) in Tripoli; in exchange, Haftar’s forces lifted a partial blockade on oil exports they had imposed in the months before. Since then, well-informed sources have told me over the years, the Dbeibahs and Haftars have carved up the boards of numerous state-owned companies and banks among themselves.

Today, however, there is growing uncertainty about whether that balance still holds. The Haftars have used the stalemate of the past years to vastly expand their arsenal, war chest, and foreign relations—far more than western Libyan forces have been able to do. Many close observers in Tripoli now see the endgame drawing close.

The latest threat to the country’s precarious status quo comes from a mediation effort led by Massad Boulos, Donald Trump’s senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos, a Lebanese Christian who moved to Texas as a teenager, had spent years working as a truck salesman in Nigeria before he joined the Trump administration in 2025, three years after his son Michael married Tiffany Trump.

Since assuming his current position, he has made Libya one of his priorities. In the process, he has brushed aside a decade of largely fruitless efforts by the UN to consult widely among the country’s political class and develop the legal basis for a unified democratic government. Instead, he has tried to broker a power-sharing deal directly between the Haftar and Dbeibah families. Whatever the outcome, that initiative may well hasten the return to war.

Tripoli is a microcosm of the unresolved conflict. Ever since the demise of the Qaddafi regime in 2011, the capital has been the site of a long, deadly game of musical chairs among the countless armed groups that filled the vacuum left by his forces. Each of their periodic clashes, in constantly changing arrangements, has resulted in the elimination of one or more factions, with the victors sharing the spoils and growing stronger.

Weak governments have relied on these groups for protection, according them official standing as state security forces and enabling them to gradually infiltrate—and eventually dominate—public institutions.

By the time Dbeibah took office in 2021, the participants in the contest over the capital had been reduced to around a dozen powerful armed groups. Dbeibah has excelled at playing these factions against one another, temporarily empowering some to eliminate others.

In 2022, when a competing government backed by Haftar and some of the capital’s armed groups tried to oust Dbeibah, he warded off the challenge by relying on two forces in particular: a faction led by a former baker who went by the nickname “Ghnewa,” and a unit that controlled Mitiga, the city’s only functioning international airport, led by a Salafi sheikh named Abderrauf Kara.

In the years after Dbeibah prevailed, Kara increasingly lost his favor. Ghnewa, meanwhile, became the most powerful militia leader in Tripoli, building an empire of shell companies through which he siphoned funds from state institutions under his control.

But his voracity inevitably brought him into conflict with the Dbeibah family, and on May 12, 2025, he was killed at the headquarters of the Tripoli-based 444th Brigade after imprudently accepting an invitation from its commander, Mahmoud Hamza, the head of military intelligence—and one of Dbeibah’s closest allies. Within hours Dbeibah’s forces had taken over Ghnewa’s territory.

The following day Dbeibah-aligned groups, emboldened by their success, tried to press their advantage against Kara’s militia as well. This time they met heavy resistance, and in a matter of hours forces hostile to the government from the neighboring city of Zawiya mobilized at the gates of the capital to join Kara’s side of the fight.

It quickly became clear that the clashes risked provoking a war that neither side could rapidly win. Less than twenty-four hours after the fighting had begun, a fragile cease-fire took hold that persists to this day.

Critical to this yearlong détente has been Turkey, which has had a military presence in the capital—including at Mitiga Airport—since it intervened in 2019 to stop Haftar’s Tripoli offensive. Hoping to keep the peace, Turkey prevented the government from using Turkish drones in the clashes with Kara’s forces and subsequently brokered arrangements that kept both sides frozen in their positions.

The underlying conflict remains unresolved, but for the past year most observers have assumed both that Turkey’s influence will help maintain the fragile balance and that Dbeibah and the commanders supporting him have no interest in resuming the fight unless they can be sure of winning quickly and decisively.

And yet throughout the past year both sides have been preparing for the next confrontation. Kara has rallied a motley crew of factions that had previously been defeated by Dbeibah’s current or erstwhile allies.

Among them are remnants of Ghnewa’s group as well as a unit commanded by Haitham al-Tajuri, a Tripoli militia leader who is widely known to have defected to Saddam Haftar after Ghnewa expelled him from the capital several years ago.

On my last two visits, people on different sides of the conflict told me that Saddam has sent al-Tajuri’s recruits to Belarus for training, then deployed them under Kara’s protection in Tripoli.

The buildup has been going on for months: last November one contact recounted to me that his son had sought his permission to escape the boredom and lack of economic opportunities in Tripoli by joining al-Tajuri’s soldiers for a stint in Belarus.

In Dbeibah’s camp, political and military leaders downplay the threat posed by Kara and his allies, questioning their loyalty to Saddam Haftar. But on Dbeibah’s side, too, preparations for the next round of fighting are unmistakable.

His two most powerful commanders, Hamza and Deputy Defense Minister Abdulsalam Zubi, have learned from past experience and, I was told, have bought large numbers of drones they can operate on their own, without needing Turkish approval.

They also control the capital’s official international airport, which has been closed since two competing militia coalitions fought over it in 2014 but is expected to reopen in the coming months. When that happens, interlocutors in the Dbeibah camp believe, their adversaries in Mitiga will lose much of their leverage and either slide into irrelevance or be contained more forcefully.

Such talk will be familiar to anyone who has followed the prolonged elimination contest among armed groups in the capital. Few military commanders or close observers doubt that the next round will happen eventually. Now that the government’s adversaries are looking to the Haftars for help, however, the struggle over Tripoli has the potential to reignite conflict across the country as a whole.

These are the fraught circumstances under which Boulos is angling to secure another peace deal for Trump. Boulos first arrived in the country in July 2025, focusing on deals for American energy companies. This required securing funding from the Dbeibah government so that the National Oil Corporation could honor its commitments to its US partners.

According to Libyan officials involved in the talks, Boulos soon found himself confronted with the tug-of-war over state finances between the Dbeibahs and the Haftars, whose parallel government has spent vast sums in total opacity by taking out debt from banks in the east covered by dubious treasury bills, printing counterfeit currency, and changing vast sums into dollars on the black market (which did much to push down the dinar’s value). 

In September Boulos brought Ibrahim Dbeibah and Saddam Haftar together in Rome for talks on a unified government. Making little headway, he instead pursued an agreement on a unified budget that, according to people with knowledge of the deal, would both provide funding for the NOC and send billions of dinars from Tripoli to construction funds run by the Haftars—in exchange for an end to their parallel spending.

(The Haftars’ irregular financing schemes cannot work indefinitely, which gives them some incentive to agree on a joint budget.) Boulos brokered two such expenditure agreements, in November 2025 and April 2026. Neither shows any signs of being implemented.

This did not discourage him from pushing a more ambitious proposal. The details are blurry and constantly evolving, but its core is the formation of a unified executive that would appoint Saddam Haftar as president while Dbeibah would remain prime minister; several knowledgeable sources told me that Zubi and Saddam Haftar would jointly lead the supreme military command.

It is tempting to dismiss the plan as a hopelessly superficial scheme that will evaporate at first contact with Libyan realities. But Boulos’s proposal should be taken seriously, if only for the extent of the damage it could do.

***

Wolfram Lacher is a Senior Associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin and the author of Libya’s Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict.

__________________

Ferhat Polat

Türkiye’s outreach to the east complements rather than competes with its ties to Tripoli. This approach is part of a consistent effort to keep channels open with all actor capable of shaping the country’s political future.

***

Fifteen years after the 2011 uprising, Libya remains politically divided between the UN-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli and the eastern-based administration supported by Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA).

As international efforts to resolve this protracted stalemate continue, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s recent meeting with Saddam Haftar, deputy commander of the LNA, illustrates Türkiye’s evolving engagement with Libya’s rival centers of authority.

The evolution of Turkish-Libyan relations

Ankara, having long supported the internationally recognized government in Tripoli, has gradually expanded its political, security, and technical engagement with eastern Libya’s political and military leadership. This approach reflects a comprehensive strategy to engage all major Libyan stakeholders in pursuit of political reconciliation and institutional reunification.

Following Khalifa Haftar’s offensive against Tripoli on April 4, 2019, Türkiye became the principal external supporter of the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA).

Turkish support extended beyond the defense of the capital to include defense cooperation, military training, and capacity-building initiatives designed to strengthen Libya’s security institutions and facilitate the eventual unification of the country’s armed forces. By halting Haftar’s advance and altering the military balance, Türkiye’s intervention contributed to ending large-scale conflict and enabled the ceasefire that has largely persisted since 2020.

Since the 2020 ceasefire, Türkiye’s engagement with eastern Libya has expanded from initial humanitarian assistance and reconstruction efforts to encompass closer political, economic, and defense cooperation. Saddam Haftar has played a central role in this rapprochement through multiple visits to Türkiye and meetings with senior Turkish officials.

Ankara’s outreach to eastern Libya has not diminished its longstanding partnership with Tripoli. Turkish President Recep Tayyp Erdogan has reaffirmed his commitment to cooperation with Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, while Turkish officials have simultaneously deepened engagement with eastern leaders, including Intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin’s recent visit to Benghazi and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s meeting with Saddam Haftar.

By maintaining dialogue with both sides, Türkiye is positioned as one of the few external actors capable of supporting Libya’s political reconciliation and institutional reunification.

Türkiye’s growing engagement with eastern Libya should not be viewed as a challenge to Egypt’s longstanding influence or as a departure from its Libya policy. Long before the 2011 uprising, Turkish companies were active across both eastern and western Libya, reflecting Ankara’s longstanding view of Libya as a single, undivided state.

Today, Türkiye’s outreach to the east complements rather than competes with its ties to Tripoli. This approach is part of a consistent effort to keep channels open with all actor capable of shaping the country’s political future.

It also coincides with an unprecedented period of regional coordination between former rivals, creating new opportunities for Ankara and Cairo to use their respective influence to encourage reconciliation.

A stable Libya would primarily benefit the Libyan people, while also serving the long-term strategic and economic interests of regional actors that once backed competing factions.

Economic and energy cooperation

Libya’s strategic significance extends beyond its political context. Oil remains central to Libya’s economy, as the country possesses Africa’s largest proven oil reserves and derives the majority of its export earnings and government revenues from hydrocarbons. However, prolonged conflict and political fragmentation have severely damaged infrastructure and reduced foreign investment, disrupting production and hindering Libya’s ability to fully exploit its energy resources.

As Libya works to revitalize its energy sector, Türkiye has increasingly supplemented its security engagement with expanded economic and energy cooperation.

A key development in recent years was the 2019 maritime delimitation agreement signed with GNA, which redefined the geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean by establishing maritime boundaries between Türkiye and Libya.

This agreement advanced Türkiye’s strategic interests and simultaneously strengthened Libya’s maritime claims and sovereign rights over its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), laying the groundwork for future offshore energy exploration and enhanced bilateral cooperation.

Although Libya’s eastern-based House of Representatives initially rejected the agreement, its recent decision to review and potentially ratify the accord indicates a broader improvement in relations between Ankara and eastern Libya. If ratified, the agreement would strengthen bilateral energy cooperation and serve as a clear indicator of increasing convergence between Libya’s rival power centers on a matter of strategic national significance.

The US’ renewed efforts to broker a power-sharing agreement between Libya’s rival eastern and western administrations represent a positive development. Massad Boulos, adviser to US President Donald Trump on the Middle East and Africa, recently stated that Washington is working to help reunify Libya’s fragmented institutions under a single national authority. However, previous mediation efforts, particularly those led by the UN, indicate that achieving a political settlement remains highly challenging.

Current situation in Libya

Although the GNU is internationally recognized and supported by the UN, its authority does not extend throughout the entire country, leaving eastern Libya under separate administration. Consequently, efforts to conduct national elections have remained stalled since the postponement of the December 2021 vote. Ongoing disagreements over the constitutional framework, electoral laws, candidate eligibility, and the fragile security environment continue to impede progress toward reunifying Libya’s institutions.

Libya’s future will ultimately be determined by its own citizens. Nevertheless, Ankara’s recent efforts to engage both eastern and western Libya constitute a constructive step toward dialogue during a period of deep division. Although these initiatives alone may not resolve the political deadlock, they could help establish the conditions necessary for institutional reunification, security sector reform, and, ultimately, a more stable, sovereign, and unified Libya.

***

Ferhat Polat is a senior researcher and analyst specializing in North African geopolitics and security.

_________________

Driss Rejichi 

Mounting opposition to the rival leaders backed by Washington, the Dbeibah and Haftar families, has fuelled distrust of American envoy Massad Boulos’s initiative.

One month after what may have been the most significant diplomatic mission to Libya since taking up his post in the region, US envoy Massad Boulos continues to raise questions about Washington’s objectives.

Earlier this month, the senior adviser to Donald Trump on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs met dozens of Libyan officials across the country’s rival factions during a diplomatic tour that was widely expected to pave the way for major announcements.

After meeting with their inner circles in Malta on 6 July, Boulos held face-to-face talks with Libya’s rival leaders: Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah in Tripoli on 7 July, and Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in Benghazi the following day.

Notably, the US president’s envoy also met numerous powerful actors not aligned with either camp, such as Central Bank of Libya governor Naji Issa and members of the Council of Elders in the influential western city of Misrata.

Yet, no clear roadmap has emerged for what the US diplomat repeatedly described as “unification efforts” during his visit, a plan now referred to as the “Boulos initiative”.

Last September, Boulos publicly stated that Washington would actively seek to promote the unification of Libya’s institutions, which have been divided since the outbreak of the country’s second civil war in 2014 following the Nato-backed overthrow of long-time ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Eastern Libya is controlled by Haftar and his allies, while a UN-backed government led by Dbeibah in Tripoli governs the west of the country. Since the end of the civil war in 2020, the peace process has been led by the UN Support Mission. Although large-scale battles have not resumed, the country remains divided.

After almost a year of negotiations and regular meetings with Libyan officials, Boulos’s only tangible achievement was the adoption of a unified budget for the two rival governments in April.

Since then, no further progress has been made. On 19 July, Speaker of the House of Representatives Aguilah Saleh confirmed that the legislative body, based in the eastern city of Tobruk and aligned with Haftar’s positions, had “so far not received anything official regarding [Boulos’s] initiative”.

One of the reasons why the US envoy has been slow to advance is growing criticism from several Libyan factions.

Haftar’s appointment to key position

Tensions escalated in June after the Financial Times, citing “people familiar with the matter”, reported that Washington was pushing for an agreement under which Saddam Haftar would lead the Presidential Council, Libya’s highest executive body, currently chaired by relatively neutral figure Mohamed Menfi.

Saddam, one of the six sons of Khalifa Haftar, is widely seen as the frontrunner to succeed his 82-year-old father.

As Boulos began his visit on 7 July in Misrata, 100km east of Tripoli, he was met at the airport by dozens of protesters opposing his visit and denouncing what they described as a “suspicious deal”.

Misrata, Libya’s commercial hub, and its business and military elites have long been hostile to the Haftar family. The city’s militias were at the forefront of the resistance against Haftar’s offensive on western Libya in 2019-2020.

“The criminal Haftar is responsible for everything happening today,” Younes al-Salabi, spokesman for the Misrata Military Council, one of Libya’s largest units of fighters, told Middle East Eye, arguing that “this is reason enough to reject a solution” where Saddam would get an official position.

The latest report by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya reiterated allegations of widespread human rights abuses and corruption involving armed groups and factions aligned with the Haftar and Dbeibah families.

Haftar in particular has been accused of war crimes by organisations such as Human Rights Watch, and a US court ruled that he is responsible for the acts of torture and extrajudicial executions committed by his troops.

Misrata is not the only faction opposing the Boulos initiative on the grounds that it would strengthen the Haftar family.

Hidden in Libya’s southern desert, rebel leader Mohamed Wardago, whose armed group has been waging an insurgency against Haftar’s forces since January, told MEE that “nobody can accept that Haftar and his sons should hold key sovereign positions within the Libyan state”.

“Unfortunately, we have also heard about this US initiative to make Saddam head of the Presidential Council,” Wardago added.

Jalel Harchaoui, an analyst focusing on North Africa, confirmed this is “the main element of the deal”.

Harchaoui argues that although the powers of the head of the Presidential Council have never been clearly defined by a constitutional framework, Saddam’s appointment could expand the office’s influence and “reshape the role”, given the “power he already wields, with units under his command”.

Calls for resignation

However, Saddam Haftar’s potential appointment is not the only source of tension brought by the Boulos initiative.

Reports, including the Financial Times piece in June, suggest that Prime Minister Dbeibah would also remain in office in Tripoli.

Despite Washington’s long-standing ties to Khalifa Haftar, a US citizen, the State Department has also maintained direct contacts with Dbeibah. Their latest phone call, held on 26 July, was described by Boulos as “productive”.

The prime minister, who was appointed by the UN-backed Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in 2021 rather than direct elections, has come under increasing scrutiny over the years.

Since May 2025, protesters have repeatedly called for his resignation. Tensions peaked again at the end of July, when protesters in western Libya, initially mobilised over power cuts, turned their anger towards the prime minister and attempted to storm his office in Tripoli.

In recent days, protesters have closed the offices of five ministries and the anti-corruption authority to denounce the deterioration of public services, the ongoing electricity crisis and the worsening living conditions.

This makes the prospect of a US-backed deal that would keep Dbeibah in power even more politically sensitive in the eyes of the public, while offering the prime minister a lifeline.

“Dbeibah would gain recognition across the country and would, for the first time, be able to travel to Benghazi,” Harchaoui told MEE.

“Both Saddam and Dbeibah would acquire national legitimacy, with the possibility of remaining in power without elections for at least a year, probably longer.”

Oil and security sideline democracy

Although elections remain an official UN priority, with the Security Council reiterating last month its call to hold them, they have rarely featured among Boulos’s stated objectives and do not appear to form part of his initiative.

Salabi stresses that Misrata supports a solution based on “the organisation of a constitutional referendum and elections”, while protesters who took to the streets in Tripoli in July repeatedly called for “the fall of all political institutions, without exception”, and their replacement through an electoral process.

Boulos, an Arabic speaker, has given a series of interviews to regional media in recent weeks to promote Washington’s efforts in Libya.

In an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat on 27 July, the US envoy stated that “unity is the basis for legitimacy and democratic elections”, suggesting that his roadmap envisions elections only after a deal to unify the institutions has been reached.

This is because the White House’s objectives in Libya require stable and reliable partners rather than democratic institutions.

Since January 2025 and announcements of the opening of Libya’s first oil licensing rounds in nearly two decades, the US has sought to push its companies to invest in the country’s oil sector. Libya holds Africa’s largest proven oil reserves.

Meanwhile, another major US objective has been to strengthen security cooperation with Libya’s fragmented military, particularly the Libyan National Army (LNA) commanded by Haftar.

The LNA has received direct support from Russia and its paramilitary companies since the second Libyan civil war.

In return, Moscow gained access to airfields and ports in the east and south of the country, areas controlled by the LNA, facilitating its military operations across Africa.

“The Pentagon believes that unifying the military commands would make it harder for Russia to maintain its presence,” Harchaoui told MEE.

One of the few tangible US successes in recent months has been the Flintlock 2026 exercise, held in April, the first time that the LNA and Tripoli units trained together on Libyan soil.

During his July visit, Boulos was also careful to meet the country’s key security actors: not only the Haftar family in Benghazi, but also Interior Minister Emad Trabelsi and Deputy Defence Minister Abdul Salam al-Zoubi in Tripoli, both of whom command powerful armed groups in the west.

However, several months of high-level diplomacy have so far failed to articulate exactly what his initiative would deliver, including on military reunification.

Above all, this lack of clarity has fuelled growing scepticism over Washington’s plans, despite broad public support for the reunification of Libya’s institutions.

***

Driss Rejichi is a freelance journalist based in Tunisia, covering North Africa and the Sahel. His work focuses on security, migration and geopolitical dynamics in the region, with a particular interest in Russia’s growing presence in Africa.

___________________