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