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Khaled Mahmoued

Libya’s Migration Dilemma Amid Escalating Protests and Political Divisions.

Irregular migration in Libya is no longer just a security concern or a demographic statistic. It has become part of the country’s deeper economic reality, an issue that quietly sustains key sectors while simultaneously fueling some of the most sensitive political and social tensions.

Today, migration sits at the center of a growing contradiction. On one side, there are rising public demands for deportations, driven by fears of demographic change and accusations of international schemes to “resettle” migrants in Libya. On the other, political factions continue to use the issue as leverage in their broader struggles for legitimacy and influence.

What makes the situation more complex is a basic but often overlooked fact: Libya’s oil-dependent rentier economy has become structurally reliant on migrant labor. Without it, several essential sectors would struggle to function, particularly in the absence of a strong domestic workforce willing to engage in manual and private-sector work.

The Resettlement Narrative

Recent protests in Tripoli, which culminated in crowds shutting down the headquarters of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), were not isolated incidents. They reflected weeks of rising frustration and public suspicion.

Many protesters view migration through the lens of sovereignty, believing that international organizations are indirectly facilitating long-term settlement plans that could alter Libya’s demographic balance. These claims persist despite repeated denials from the United Nations, which insists its work is limited to voluntary return programs or resettlement in third countries.

Still, official explanations have done little to ease public anger. Protesters continue to call for tighter controls and reject any form of migrant integration. Estimates of migrant populations vary widely. The Interior Ministry has spoken of figures reaching around three million, while the International Organization for Migration (IOM) places the number of registered and unregistered migrants at under one million, concentrated mainly in western Libya.

In an attempt to respond to public pressure without violating international obligations, Libya’s Presidential Council Chairman Mohamed al-Menfi recently toured central Tripoli, including Martyrs’ Square. His message tried to balance two positions: affirming humanitarian commitments while also stressing the need for organized and safe returns of migrants to their countries of origin.

A Distorted Labor Market

Behind the political noise lies a more structural reality. The majority of migrants in Libya—estimates suggest over 80%—work in economic sectors that are essential but largely informal. Construction sites in Tripoli, Benghazi, and Misrata, along with seasonal agricultural work in the south and desert oases, depend heavily on this labor force.

Libya’s economy shows clear symptoms of what economists describe as “Dutch disease,” where reliance on oil revenues distorts broader economic development. Public sector employment has expanded dramatically, absorbing roughly 2.2 million workers out of a population of about seven million.

In effect, the state has become the dominant employer, crowding out private-sector development. This imbalance has created a culture among many young Libyans that discourages manual or vocational work in the private sector.

As a result, migrant workers have filled a structural gap rather than a temporary shortage.

Most migrants work without formal contracts or legal protections, operating within an informal economy. This gives employers access to flexible and inexpensive labor, which helps reduce production costs. Over time, this arrangement has become embedded in the economic system, making migrant labor not just useful, but in many cases necessary.

At the same time, this dependency is reinforced by entrenched interests. Construction companies, agricultural businesses, and informal market networks benefit from the availability of low-cost labor. Any serious attempt to regulate this system, through work permits, fees, or enforcement, would likely face quiet resistance from those who benefit from the current arrangement.

World Bank studies indicate similar patterns in rentier economies with large public sectors, where citizens are often less willing to enter manual labor markets. Libya shares this pattern with several Gulf states and Mediterranean economies, where similar tensions between economic necessity and social resistance persist.

Instrumentalize Migration

As economic contradictions deepen, migration has increasingly become a political tool.

Competing authorities in eastern and western Libya often use the issue to shift attention away from domestic challenges such as inflation, electricity shortages, liquidity crises, and institutional fragmentation. In this context, migrants become a convenient symbol onto which broader frustrations are projected.

At the international level, migration has also become a bargaining chip. Libya’s geographic position on the Mediterranean makes it central to European migration routes, particularly toward Italy. As a result, migration control is frequently tied to financial assistance, security cooperation, and diplomatic engagement with European partners.

Meanwhile, the presence of large numbers of undocumented migrants creates indirect fiscal pressures. Many consume heavily subsidized goods and services—fuel, electricity, bread, and healthcare—without contributing to the tax base. In a system where public finance is already under strain, this deepens concerns about sustainability and fairness.

Urban centers are increasingly feeling this pressure. Public infrastructure—especially healthcare systems, water networks, and electricity grids—is already overstretched. This has contributed to a growing perception among Libyans that international attention and resources are disproportionately focused on migrants, rather than on struggling local communities.

The UN Framework and Structural

Blind Spots

Migration did not feature prominently as a standalone issue in the final outcomes of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) structured dialogue process.

Instead, attention was directed toward broader themes such as governance reform, economic restructuring, security stabilization, and national reconciliation. However, a closer reading of these recommendations suggests that migration is indirectly embedded within them. Issues such as labor market reform, private sector development, and human capital investment all address underlying drivers of migration dependence.

From this perspective, migration is treated less as an isolated crisis and more as a symptom of deeper institutional and economic dysfunction. The assumption is that without structural reform, migration pressures will persist regardless of border enforcement policies.

The Economic Contradiction

Libya’s migration dilemma cannot be separated from its economic model. The country is not only facing a migration challenge, it is confronting a structural imbalance in how its economy functions.

The central contradiction is clear: Libya depends economically on migrant labor while rejecting it politically and socially.

If public opinion demands the removal of migrants, a fundamental question remains: who will perform the labor that keeps the country functioning? Who will build homes, maintain infrastructure, work in agriculture, and sustain the informal economy that many urban areas depend on? Unless Libya undertakes serious structural reforms—redefining public employment, expanding private-sector opportunities, and encouraging young Libyans into productive labor—the system will continue to rely on migrant workers by default. Migration will remain both politically contested and economically indispensable.

Ultimately, Libya’s migration question is not resolved at its borders or detention centers, but in the structure of its economy itself. 

Until that structure changes, policy responses will continue to oscillate between political pressure and economic necessity, without resolving the underlying dependency.

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Center for Preventive Action

More than a decade after a U.S.-backed intervention toppled Libya’s authoritarian leader in 2011, political divisions and cascading security crises continue to threaten Libya’s stability. After a 2020 cease-fire ended the country’s six-year civil war between rival political factions, a UN-supported process led to the formation of a Government of National Unity (GNU).

Due to rival factions’ unwillingness to agree on rules overseeing national elections scheduled for December 2021, the vote was postponed indefinitely. Widespread frustration from actors on both sides of the political divide has put pressure on the GNU to hold the long-overdue elections without delay, but little progress has been made.

Reflecting the relatively low levels of violence since 2020, the humanitarian situation has eased in recent years. In 2023, approximately three hundred thousand people needed humanitarian assistance in Libya, down from 1.3 million [PDF] in 2016. But compounding threats have posed new challenges for the country, including the worsening effects of a precarious and oil-dependent economy, arms proliferation, climate change, and complex migration crises.

Background

Libya has struggled [PDF] to rebuild state institutions since the ouster and subsequent death of former leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in October 2011. Libya’s transitional government ceded authority to the newly elected [PDF] General National Congress (GNC) in July 2012. The GNC faced numerous challenges over the next two years, including the September 2012 attack by Islamist militants on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the spread of the Islamic State and other armed groups throughout the country.

In May 2014, General Khalifa Haftar launched Operation Dignity, a campaign conducted by the Libyan National Army (LNA) to attack Islamist militant groups across eastern Libya, including in Benghazi. To counter this movement, Islamist militants and armed groups—including Ansar al-Sharia—formed a coalition called Libya Dawn. Eventually, fighting broke out at Tripoli’s international airport between the Libya Dawn coalition, which controlled Tripoli and much of western Libya, and the Dignity coalition, which controlled parts of Cyrenaica and Benghazi in eastern Libya, escalating the conflict into a full-fledged civil war.

The battle for control over Libya crosses tribal, regional, political, and religious lines. Each coalition has created governing institutions and named military chiefs—and each has faced internal fragmentation and division. To find a resolution to the conflict and establish a unity government, then-UN Special Envoy to Libya Bernardino Leon, followed by Martin Kobler, facilitated a series of talks between the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR)—based in Libya’s east and a key supporter of Haftar—and the Tripoli-based GNC. The talks resulted in the creation of the Libyan Political Agreement [PDF] and the UN-supported Government of National Accord (GNA) in December 2015. However, the GNA faced obstacles to creating a stable, unified government in Libya.

Taking advantage of the widespread political instability, armed Islamist groups, including Ansar al-Sharia—the terrorist group allegedly responsible for the attack on the U.S. consulate in 2012—and the Islamic State, have used the country as a hub to coordinate broader regional violence, further complicating efforts to create a unity government.

After seizing territory [PDF] in Benghazi, Derna, and Ajdabiya, the Islamic State’s power in Libya peaked in 2016 when it captured the coastal city of Sirte—formerly the group’s most significant stronghold outside of Syria and Iraq. While in control, its members committed numerous human rights abuses for which they now face trial in Libya. In July 2018, Haftar announced that the LNA had recaptured the city of Derna, the last outpost of the Islamic State militants in eastern Libya. However, the group continues to operate throughout the country.

Though the Islamic State was largely defeated in Libya in 2016, the GNA and HoR remained divided on a path to unification. In August 2018, violence in Tripoli ended the relative calm maintained for over a year. However, the UN quickly brokered a September 2018 cease-fire between the involved militias.

Foreign states have also taken an interest in Libya, with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), France, and Russia backing Haftar’s LNA and Turkey, Qatar, and Italy supporting the UN-backed GNA. Egypt and the UAE have been particularly involved with military support for Haftar, as they fear the GNA’s connections to political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood. Russia also allows the Wagner Group to aid Haftar in exchange for favorable strategic access to ports and other transit centers. Meanwhile, Turkey supports the GNA because of maritime oil and gas deals they have brokered.

The other foreign backers have taken a more subtle approach, providing aid and diplomatic support to their preferred partner. Militarily, Turkey and Egypt have gone the farthest by approving troop deployments, though Russia also has a presence through the Wagner Group, and the UAE has conducted airstrikes for Haftar.

The GNA declared a state of emergency in Libya’s capital city of Tripoli in September 2018, less than a week after a UN cease-fire went into effect. Attempts to create a unity government failed as the HoR and the GNA continued to compete for power. Both governing bodies created their own central banks [PDF] and consolidated control over oil fields.

In May 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron convened a meeting between Haftar, GNA leader Fayez Seraj, and parliamentary leaders to discuss ending the conflict and future elections. Though the rival groups agreed to hold elections in December 2018, UN Special Envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame said elections would be postponed until spring 2019.

Meanwhile, rival armed groups, including militias loyal to Haftar and the GNA’s security forces, continued fighting over access to and control of Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) and regional oil fields. In December 2018, the NOC closed Libya’s largest oil field, El Sharara, due to security concerns; Haftar later declared the field secure and ready to restart operations but cut off all oil fields when fighting resumed.

On April 3, 2019, Haftar upended peace efforts by launching a campaign to take western Libya and Tripoli with the backing of Egypt, the UAE, France, and Russia. Haftar’s LNA made fast progress until stalling on the outskirts of Tripoli, achieving only small gains over the next year. At the GNA’s request, Turkey sent troops to Tripoli in early 2020 to reinforce the city’s defense and increase the size of the force ahead of the GNA counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the UAE conducted airstrikes in support of Haftar.

UN-led mediation efforts made little progress [PDF] as the war escalated and civilian casualties rose through May 2020. With Turkish support, the GNA-aligned forces achieved a breakthrough in June, pushing the LNA back to Sirte. Tensions escalated when Egypt warned that Sirte was its “red line,” and in July, authorized the deployment of troops to help prevent the GNA from taking the city.

In August 2020, violence eased as the GNA declared a unilateral cease-fire. Haftar ended an oil blockade shortly after, paving the way for a nationwide cease-fire signed in October. The 2020 cease-fire established the 5+5 Joint Military Commission (JMC), comprised of officers from the GNA and LNA, to work on implementing the cease-fire and other security issues. The JMC made progress, but it has struggled to achieve the withdrawal of foreign fighters. Most importantly, despite a lack of trust and a faltering cease-fire, levels of violence remained low following the 2020 truce, allowing for a reopening of political dialogue.

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BI Africa

What Imad Ben Rajab’s Return Could Mean for Libya’s Energy Sector.

Over the past decade, Libya’s energy sector has operated under conditions that would have tested even the strongest institutions. Despite political uncertainty and periods of disruption, the industry has continued to generate the revenues.

When investors look at Libya, they often focus on the country’s extraordinary natural advantages. Libya possesses Africa’s largest proven oil reserves, significant gas resources and a strategic location on the Mediterranean that places it within easy reach of European markets. Yet despite these advantages, the country’s economic recovery remains unfinished.

The challenge is not a lack of resources. Libya has no shortage of oil. The challenge is converting those resources into sustainable growth, attracting investment and building the institutional capacity needed to maximise long term value. That process requires more than capital. It requires experienced people.

Over the past decade, Libya’s energy sector has operated under conditions that would have tested even the strongest institutions. Despite political uncertainty and periods of disruption, the industry has continued to generate the revenues upon which the country’s economy depends. Behind that performance stands a generation of energy professionals who accumulated experience managing one of Africa’s most strategically important sectors during exceptionally difficult circumstances.

As Libya seeks to increase production, modernise infrastructure and attract international partners, that expertise is becoming increasingly valuable. The country enters this period with considerable opportunities. Rising global demand for energy, Europe’s continued search for diversified supply sources and Libya’s proximity to major markets create conditions that could support significant growth if the right policies and leadership are in place.

At the same time, Libya faces familiar challenges. Infrastructure requires investment. Production capacity must be expanded and modernised. International investors require confidence that projects can move forward predictably and efficiently. Meeting those challenges will depend not only on financing but also on the availability of experienced professionals capable of navigating a highly complex sector.

Recent developments involving former National Oil Corporation executive Imad Ben Rajab have therefore attracted attention beyond legal circles. Libya’s Supreme Court recently upheld the full exoneration of Imad Ben Rajab following a lengthy case that had effectively sidelined one of the country’s better known energy sector figures. The significance extends beyond the individual ruling itself.

The court’s review reportedly found that key technical evidence underpinning the original accusations was flawed. According to findings presented during the proceedings, the laboratory analysis that formed the basis of the allegations had been conducted by a facility that lacked the appropriate accreditation for the required testing. Investigators also concluded that fuel quality issues were linked to maintenance shortcomings and storage conditions rather than deliberate misconduct.

Technical assessments further found no evidence of the substantial losses that had previously been alleged. The fuel shipment at the centre of the case was reportedly treated through established blending procedures and did not result in the serious financial damage originally claimed. These findings led the courts to reach a markedly different conclusion from that reached during earlier stages of the case.

For many within Libya’s energy sector, the outcome is important because it opens the possibility that experienced professionals may once again contribute to an industry that remains central to the country’s economic future. This matters not only for Libya but for Africa more broadly.

Across the continent, resource rich economies continue to confront a common challenge. Natural resources alone do not generate prosperity. Growth depends on institutions, infrastructure, investment and the people capable of managing them effectively. Libya’s energy sector illustrates this reality clearly. The country already possesses the reserves. What it needs is the combination of expertise, investment and stability necessary to unlock their full value.

The return of experienced figures to public and professional life should therefore be viewed through an economic lens rather than a political one. Successful energy sectors are built over decades. Institutional knowledge cannot be replaced overnight, particularly in technically complex industries such as oil and gas.

Throughout his career, Imad Ben Rajab built a reputation as a knowledgeable and capable figure within Libya’s energy sector. Industry observers have frequently pointed to his understanding of the operational, commercial and strategic challenges facing the country at a time when maintaining production and exports often required navigating exceptionally difficult circumstances.

Many within the sector believe that professionals such as Imad Ben Rajab played an important role in helping the National Oil Corporation navigate periods of uncertainty while preserving operational continuity and protecting one of Libya’s most important sources of national income. That experience remains relevant today.

Investors evaluating Libya’s future prospects will naturally focus on production targets, infrastructure projects and export capacity. Yet human capital remains equally important. The ability to retain experienced professionals and draw upon their expertise may prove just as valuable as the next round of investment.

The recent exoneration of Imad Ben Rajab has also renewed discussion about the importance of experience and institutional knowledge within Libya’s energy sector. As Libya seeks to strengthen production and attract greater investment, the ability to draw upon seasoned professionals with a deep understanding of the industry could become an important advantage. Libya’s recovery remains a work in progress. Challenges persist, reforms are still required and political uncertainty has not disappeared.

Nevertheless, the country’s long term fundamentals remain among the strongest on the continent. Its vast energy reserves, strategic geography and proximity to European markets provide advantages that few countries can match. If Libya can combine those advantages with effective institutions, experienced leadership and sustained investment, it has the potential to become one of Africa’s most significant economic success stories.

The conversation about Libya’s future should therefore focus not only on barrels of oil or levels of foreign investment. It should also focus on the people and expertise needed to transform those advantages into lasting prosperity. For Libya, the path to economic recovery will be shaped not only by what lies beneath the ground, but by the professionals capable of turning those resources into growth, opportunity and long term national development.

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Lviv Herald

Since the overthrow and death of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has become a cautionary tale of what happens when a state loses its monopoly on force but retains the outward symbols of sovereignty. Fifteen years after the revolution, Libya continues to possess ministries, embassies, a central bank, a national oil company and internationally recognised governments. Yet she remains a country in which armed groups often exercise more practical authority than the institutions they ostensibly serve. The result is a peculiar political condition: Libya possesses all the attributes of statehood while lacking many of the realities of a functioning state.

Foreign diplomats frequently describe Libya as divided between east and west. While this is true at the most superficial level, it obscures a far more complex reality. Contemporary Libya is not merely split between rival governments. She is characterised by overlapping sovereignties, competing sources of legitimacy and a continual struggle between formal institutions and informal armed power.
The most significant figure in this landscape is undoubtedly Khalifa Haftar, whose rise from exile to military strongman has shaped the political trajectory of eastern Libya and profoundly influenced the country’s prospects for reunification.

The Collapse of Central Authority

The fall of the Gaddafi regime created a vacuum that no national institution proved capable of filling. During his forty-two years in power, Gaddafi had deliberately weakened formal state structures. He feared the emergence of rival centres of authority and therefore concentrated power around personal loyalty networks, tribal relationships and revolutionary committees.

When the regime collapsed, Libya possessed little in the way of durable national institutions capable of maintaining order. The armed groups that had fought against Gaddafi rapidly evolved from revolutionary brigades into semi-permanent militias. Instead of being disarmed, many were incorporated into state payrolls. Rather than becoming servants of the state, they frequently became its masters.

The immediate consequence was fragmentation. Local commanders accumulated power, municipalities developed independent security arrangements and regional interests increasingly eclipsed national priorities. The central government retained international recognition but often lacked the capacity to enforce its decisions beyond limited territories.

The years following 2011 witnessed a succession of governments, constitutional experiments and internationally sponsored peace initiatives. None succeeded in establishing uncontested authority across the country.

Two Governments, Many Powers

Libya’s political geography is often presented as a contest between the internationally recognised authorities in Tripoli and the eastern administration centred around Benghazi.

The western government enjoys recognition from the United Nations and maintains Libya’s diplomatic representation abroad. It controls many of the country’s financial institutions and remains the principal interlocutor for foreign governments.

Yet the Tripoli authorities are themselves dependent upon a constellation of armed groups. Ministries function, budgets are allocated and public servants receive salaries, but much of the coercive power underpinning the system resides with militia organisations that possess their own leadership structures, economic interests and political ambitions.

In the east, a different model emerged under Khalifa Haftar. Rather than governing through a multitude of autonomous militias, Haftar sought to consolidate military authority under a hierarchical command structure known as the Libyan National Army, or LNA.

Whether the LNA constitutes a true national army is debatable. Critics argue that it remains heavily dependent upon tribal loyalties, regional alliances and personal patronage networks. Nevertheless, compared with the fragmented security environment of western Libya, Haftar succeeded in creating a significantly more centralised military apparatus. This distinction remains one of the most important fault lines in Libyan politics.

The Making of Khalifa Haftar

Understanding contemporary Libya requires understanding the remarkable and often contradictory career of Khalifa Haftar. Born in eastern Libya in 1943, Haftar was originally a loyal officer under Gaddafi. He participated in the 1969 coup that brought the young colonel to power and became one of the regime’s trusted military commanders.

His fortunes changed during Libya’s disastrous intervention in Chad during the 1980s. Following military setbacks, Haftar and hundreds of Libyan soldiers were captured. Gaddafi subsequently disavowed them, creating a personal rupture that would shape Haftar’s future political trajectory.

Following his release, Haftar entered exile in the United States. For many years he lived in Virginia, where he became associated with opposition movements seeking to overthrow Gaddafi. Various allegations concerning relationships with Western intelligence services have circulated for decades, although many details remain speculative and contested.

The 2011 revolution offered Haftar an opportunity to return to Libya. Initially, his role was uncertain. Multiple military figures competed for influence and the revolutionary movement itself lacked a unified command structure.

However the worsening security situation and growing public frustration with militia rule created an opening. In 2014 Haftar launched what he termed “Operation Dignity”, presenting himself as a military leader determined to restore order and eliminate extremist organisations.

His campaign coincided with widespread fears regarding jihadist groups operating in eastern Libya, particularly in Benghazi and Derna. By portraying himself as a bulwark against terrorism, Haftar attracted support from segments of the population exhausted by years of insecurity.

Haftar’s State-Building Project

Haftar’s ambitions extended beyond military operations. Unlike many militia leaders whose influence remained localised, Haftar sought to create an alternative centre of national authority. His project combined military consolidation with institutional reconstruction.

Eastern Libya gradually developed parallel governance structures. Administrative agencies, security institutions and political bodies emerged that functioned independently from Tripoli. While not universally recognised abroad, these institutions increasingly exercised real authority over territory and populations.
Support from foreign powers strengthened Haftar’s position. Egypt viewed him as a partner against Islamist movements.

The United Arab Emirates provided substantial backing. At various moments support also arrived from Russia, whose involvement added a further geopolitical dimension to Libya’s conflict.
These external relationships enhanced Haftar’s military capabilities and contributed to his emergence as the dominant figure in eastern Libya. Yet they also reinforced the country’s fragmentation by encouraging competing centres of power.

The Battle for Tripoli

Haftar’s greatest gamble came in 2019. Believing that military victory was within reach, he launched a major offensive against Tripoli. The operation sought to unify Libya under his authority by force.
Initially some observers predicted success. Haftar controlled extensive territory and possessed superior organisational coherence compared with many western militias. However, the campaign ultimately failed.

The decisive factor was foreign intervention. Turkey intervened on behalf of the Tripoli authorities, providing military assistance, advisers, drones and Syrian auxiliary forces. Turkish support transformed the battlefield balance and halted Haftar’s advance. By 2020, his forces had retreated from western Libya.
The failure of the offensive altered Libya’s political landscape. It demonstrated that neither side possessed sufficient strength to impose a nationwide settlement. Instead the country entered a prolonged stalemate.

Oil, Money and Practical Sovereignty

One of Libya’s most intriguing characteristics is that rival authorities continue to share critical economic institutions. The country’s vast hydrocarbon reserves generate the overwhelming majority of government revenue. Despite political divisions, the National Oil Corporation has generally maintained a degree of institutional continuity. Oil revenues ultimately flow through central financial structures whose operation requires at least limited cooperation between rival factions.

This arrangement creates a paradox. Political leaders denounce one another, maintain separate administrations and occasionally mobilise armed forces against each other. Yet they remain financially dependent upon mechanisms that presuppose a unified Libyan state. The system survives because all major actors derive benefits from its continued operation.

Consequently, Libya experiences periodic crises without complete institutional collapse. Rival elites compete fiercely for influence while simultaneously preserving the economic framework upon which their own power depends.

The Mirage of National Unity

International diplomacy continues to focus on elections, constitutional reforms and government formation.
These initiatives rest upon the assumption that Libya’s fragmentation is primarily a political problem that can be resolved through institutional design.
The reality may be more complicated.
Libya’s challenge is not merely the absence of agreed constitutional arrangements. It is the existence of multiple centres of practical sovereignty. Militias, tribal networks, regional authorities, business interests and foreign sponsors all exercise varying degrees of influence.

Creating a unified government on paper does not automatically eliminate these competing power structures. Indeed Libya has repeatedly demonstrated that formal political agreements can coexist with profound fragmentation on the ground.

Haftar’s enduring significance lies precisely in this context. He represents not simply a rival politician or military commander but an alternative model of governance. Supporters view him as the architect of order and stability in a country overwhelmed by militia rule. Critics regard him as an aspiring autocrat whose military ambitions threaten democratic development. Both interpretations contain elements of truth.

Haftar has unquestionably imposed a degree of security and institutional coherence in eastern Libya. Equally, his concentration of power around military structures raises fundamental questions about pluralism, accountability and civilian control.
Libya’s Uncertain Future

The central question confronting Libya today is whether competing sovereignties can eventually be reconciled within a single political framework. The answer remains unclear.

The country has avoided a return to full-scale civil war, yet she has also failed to achieve genuine national integration. Ministries continue to function. Oil exports continue to flow. Foreign embassies remain open. Governments come and go.

Nevertheless, beneath these outward manifestations of statehood lies a more ambiguous reality. Libya remains a nation where power is distributed among multiple actors whose interests frequently diverge. Formal sovereignty exists, but practical authority remains fragmented.

Fifteen years after Gaddafi’s fall, the dream of a unified democratic Libya has not disappeared. Yet neither has the reality of militia power, regional rivalry and competing legitimacy. The result is a state that appears united on maps and in diplomatic communiqués but remains divided in practice. Libya’s tragedy is not that she lacks institutions.

It is that the institutions she possesses are insufficient to command the loyalties, monopolise the force and reconcile the interests necessary for genuine national unity.
For now Libya remains suspended between statehood and fragmentation, between ministries and militias, between sovereignty and its illusion.

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BI Africa

In early December 2023, the National Oil Corporation of Libya sent its chairman to Dubai. The occasion was COP28, the UN climate summit, and Farhat Bengdara arrived not to defend Libya’s fossil fuel record but to launch an environmental programme. Not the most obvious move for the head of an oil company.

The initiative, called “Think Tomorrow“, set out a plan to eliminate gas flaring across NOC’s operational fields, address waste oil contamination accumulated over decades of extraction, and generate renewable electricity for the fields themselves by harnessing Libya’s 3,200 annual hours of sunlight.

Libya’s Other Crop

What makes the COP28 moment more than a corporate communications exercise is what exists alongside it. Since 2019, Farhat Bengdara has run Sohoul Agriculture, an integrated farming venture in Libya that operates one of the world’s largest hyper-intensive olive oil farms. Hyper-intensive cultivation plants trees at densities sometimes exceeding 1,500 per hectare.

Traditional Libyan methods average around one-tenth of that. The approach is capital-intensive and agronomically precise, producing dramatically higher yields per land area while requiring less water than conventional planting.

Libya is not a country that most people associate with olive oil. It absolutely should be. The country’s coastal and pre-Saharan zones have been producing olives since antiquity, and the crop accounted for a substantial share of agricultural output long before oil revenues restructured the national economy.

Average olive production reached 173,700 tons annually in the 2017–2021 period, up from 132,400 tons in the early 2000s. Productivity per hectare, though, has fallen sharply over the same period, from 1.28 tons to 0.61 tons.

A halving. In twenty years. That gap between what Libyan land can produce and what it currently produces is the opportunity hyper-intensive farming addresses directly. Bengdara founded Sohoul against that backdrop. The thinking behind it was the same he had applied across decades of banking and finance.

The asset class was not. The project also incorporates water treatment infrastructure, a direct response to a country where agricultural water management has historically been inadequate and aquifer depletion is an accelerating concern.

One Philosophy, Two Very Different

Investments

There is a coherent investment logic connecting the oil sector’s environmental commitments to the agricultural venture.

It runs something like this: economies that depend on a single exhaustible resource need institutional infrastructure, financial, agricultural, environmental, and built in parallel, not deferred until depletion forces the issue.

Development economists have made this argument for decades. Few executives with genuine operational authority over a country’s primary revenue source have chosen to act on it personally. Bengdara has done both.

Bengdara spent years on the board of the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the Kuwait-based regional development institution that finances infrastructure and investment projects across the Arab world. That exposure gave him a granular view of what agricultural investment, water infrastructure, and energy transition actually cost. And what they return over a 20-year horizon.

The result is a framing that differs from a purely commercially-minded investor. Long-term capital allocation over short-cycle return. It is a perspective more common in sovereign wealth management than in private agricultural investment. Rarely do you find both in the same person. Rarely does that person also run an oil company.

Solar Makes Economic Sense

The Masdar partnership that Bengdara explored during his NOC chairmanship was not a gesture toward green credentials. Masdar, the Abu Dhabi state renewable energy company, has projects in more than 40 countries across six continents. Its involvement signals commercial seriousness, not symbolism.

Oil field power in Libya is overwhelmingly generated by burning the same hydrocarbons being extracted, a practice that adds operational cost, increases emissions, and consumes product that could otherwise be exported. Solar generation has been shown to cut those costs substantially in comparably sun-rich environments. Libya’s 3,200 annual hours of sunlight make the unit economics work in a way they simply would not in less sun-rich regions. The switch is being pursued because it makes financial sense. The environmental case is secondary.

The Think Tomorrow initiative’s gas flaring target sits in the same category. Gas flaring, the burning of associated natural gas at the wellhead when no infrastructure exists to capture and sell it, is standard practice across underdeveloped oil fields globally. It wastes a revenue-generating resource and produces avoidable emissions. Eliminating it requires investment in gas capture and transport infrastructure. That infrastructure pays for itself. The environmental benefit is a bonus.

Bets on the Ground Beneath the Oil

Taken together, the oil sector environmental programme, the hyper-intensive farm, the water treatment investments, and the solar energy development, what emerges is a remarkably consistent set of long-term bets on the productive potential of Libya’s non-petroleum physical endowments.

Sunlight, arable land, water management, agricultural heritage: these are assets that exist independently of crude prices and that, developed properly, produce returns over timescales that outlast any individual oil field. Bengdara is currently non-executive deputy chairman of Bank Al Masraf in the UAE, a trilateral institution jointly owned by Emirati, Libyan, and Algerian state entities, while continuing to chair Sohoul Agriculture.

The two roles are not unrelated. Cross-border capital flows between the Gulf and North Africa, agricultural finance, and regional development investment are all themes that a bank with that ownership structure exists to facilitate.

The question for North Africa’s resource-dependent economies is whether more of their institutional leadership will develop similarly long positions on non-extractive development, or whether the oil price will remain the only variable that matters.

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Julia Dumont 

Discoveries of migrant bodies have increased in eastern Libya in recent weeks as more and more people take the so-called ‘Tobruk route’. In an Interview, Tarek Lamloum, researcher at the Benghazi Center for Migrant and Refugee Studies and founder of the NGO Belaady, explains that he believes these deaths are the result of the very lucrative human trafficking industry which has developed in the region.

InfoMigrants: At least 45 bodies of migrants were found on the coast of eastern Libya in April and more than 600 people intercepted off the coast of Tobruk, indicating an increase in the departure of migrant boats from this area. What do you think explains this increase?

Tarek Lamloum: There has been a real green light given to smugglers, particularly in eastern Libya, where trafficking has grown in recent years.

The starting point dates back to 2019, when the forces of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar took control of eastern Libya [after having tried, in vain, to seize Tripoli — in the west of the country — in 2019, the soldier declared in April 2020 the transfer of power to his self-proclaimed army, saying he had “accepted the will of the people and their mandate,” editor’s note].

These forces began to control entry points into the country such as airports. Syrians, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were allowed to enter through Benghazi airport on three-month work visas. Their objective was then to take to the sea. It was at this time that the cities of Tobruk and Derna, in eastern Libya, experienced an increase in migrant departures.

Some cities and regions that were not previously departure points for migrants have become so in recent years. Migrants now leave, for example, from Benghazi, or from Soulouq, a village located not too far from Benghazi. This is an area called Al-Brega, an oil region where oil companies are located and the installations are monitored by aerial means.

These areas are controlled by the forces of the Libyan National Army (LNA) and the Tariq ibn Ziyad brigade [two armed groups under the orders of Khalifa Haftar, editor’s note].

The departure of migrants from these areas is a very clear indicator that all this is happening in an organized and coordinated manner by these armed groups. The situation may change or even get worse because the financial profits generated by this trafficking are very significant.

Controls in the Mediterranean Sea have also been considerably strengthened off the coast of western Libya in recent years, following an agreement between the European Union (EU) and the government in Tripoli. Since the start of 2026, just over 5,600 migrants have been intercepted at sea, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Many migrants have therefore sought other, less monitored routes to reach Europe.

The eastern route from Libya, in particular to the island of Crete, is one of them. It is an essential migratory axis at the start of 2026, according to data from the Mixed Migration Center for North Africa, despite a slight drop in the number of arrivals compared to the same period last year. On March 29, 2026, 2,024 arrivals were recorded in Crete, compared to 2,168 on March 30, 2025 (-7 percent). In February 2026, arrivals on the island of Crete were mainly Sudanese (39 percent) and Egyptians (31 percent). In recent months, routes have gradually shifted away from the west to avoid Coast Guard interception efforts. In 2025, the Greek island of Crete recorded 19,857 irregular arrivals, an increase of 285 percent compared to just over 5,000 arrivals in 2024.

Has this increase of migrants been a new economic engine for the region?

T.L: An entire economy was created around the presence of migrants wanting to take off to Europe. This includes smugglers, but also drivers, house and farm owners who rent out their homes. Bakeries too. For example, if someone comes to buy 200 pieces of bread every day, it is because they are intended for a camp where there are migrants. Sometimes these places even have their own ovens and restaurants.

The region is now benefiting from this migratory phenomenon in a very significant way. And I don’t think it will stop nor that we’ll get over it easily.

According to the Mixed Migration Center, the number of migrants in Libya stood at 939,638 in December 2025. This represents an increase of 14 percent compared to the same period in 2024 (824,131). Most migrants reside in western Libya (51 percent), followed by the east (38 percent) and then the south (11 percent).

Sudanese continued to represent the vast majority of asylum seekers in Libya as of March 1, 2026 — the total number of asylum seekers in the first quarter of this year stood at 110,009 refugees and asylum seekers.

How are departures organized in these regions?

T.L: Regarding the departures themselves, the types of boats vary. There are wooden boats, in relatively good condition, equipped with radios, which leave the ports accompanied by speedboats belonging to the coast guard or Libyan militias.

These groups can sometimes facilitate departures or intercept migrants at sea to bring them back to Libya.

“After 2011, political division and the emergence of two rival governments led to the collapse of the official naval system, as well as a weakening of the operational capabilities of the security forces, which found themselves divided between the east and the west of the country. Armed groups took advantage of this vacuum to establish parallel authorities with boats and naval units […] which created a situation of duplication in terms of those who actually exercise the role of ‘coast guard'”, a report from the Benghazi Center for Migration and Asylum Studies published last January explained.

Other departures are made on precarious rubber boats and, unfortunately, shipwrecks are frequent and the victims are most often sub-Saharan Africans or Sudanese. It is departures in this type of boat that cause the most deaths.

Prices for crossings vary and can be as high as 6,000 dollars (around 5,000 euros) per passenger in a wooden boat and can be as low as less than 1,000 dollars (around 850 euros) for an inflatable dinghy.

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Khaled Mahmoud

As international diplomatic efforts intensify in attempts to overcome Libya’s prolonged political deadlock, a renewed US approach has emerged, marked by a noticeable tone of optimism that sits uneasily alongside the country’s fragmented and volatile realities.

15 years after the removal of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, Libya—despite its vast hydrocarbon wealth and strategic location on the Mediterranean—remains unable to consolidate a stable political order or unify its fragmented sovereign institutions. Repeated international mediation efforts have so far failed to bridge the structural divide between the country’s eastern and western political-military formations.

Recently, Massad Boulos, Senior Adviser to US President Donald Trump for Arab and African Affairs, advanced a proposal that signals a partial departure from the long-standing United Nations-led roadmap.

The initiative reportedly emphasises pragmatic power-sharing arrangements between Libya’s rival camps, including discussions around a reconfigured Presidential Council and transitional executive arrangements that could lead to elections by 2027. While presented as a pragmatic adjustment to political realities, the proposal reflects a broader shift in thinking in Washington that privileges managed stability over institutional transformation.

These include the approval of a unified national budget after years of fragmentation, as well as Libya’s participation in multinational military exercises such as Flintlock 26 under the supervision of US Africa Command (AFRICOM). From this perspective, Libya is increasingly framed through an ‘economy-first’ lens, where stabilising oil production and ensuring uninterrupted energy exports are prioritised as tools for managing global inflationary pressures and constraining the growing influence of Russia and Turkey across North Africa.

At a broader level, this approach fits into a transatlantic energy security strategy shaped by recent shocks in global supply chains. Ongoing instability in Middle Eastern energy corridors, particularly tensions involving Iran and the persistent risk of disruption in critical maritime routes such as the Strait of Hormuz, has reinforced the urgency of diversifying supply sources away from the Gulf. In this context, Libyan crude is increasingly seen in Washington not simply as a domestic Libyan issue, but as a useful geopolitical buffer outside both Gulf and Russian energy systems.

What makes Libya particularly significant is its proximity to Europe and the relative quality of its light crude, which can be quickly integrated into Mediterranean supply chains. For key European importers such as Italy and Spain, Libyan exports remain an important, flexible source of supply. As a result, recent U.S. engagement, including initiatives associated with the Boulos proposal, support for unified budget arrangements, and Libya’s participation in AFRICOM-led exercises like Flintlock 26, can be read as part of a broader effort to secure short-term energy and security stability, even if deeper structural security challenges inside Libya remain unresolved.

Shadow Governments and the

‘Militia Veto’

The assumption that elite-level agreements and technocratic coordination can substitute for comprehensive security transformation collides with what may be described as the entrenched ‘militia veto.’ Since 2011, Libya’s security landscape has evolved into a fragmented ecosystem of armed groups that operate not merely as military actors, but as embedded governance structures with financial, territorial, and institutional reach.

Armed groups in western Libya benefited from the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 and succeeded in transforming themselves into dominant structures that regularly make claims for control over the capital, Tripoli.

As a result, the internationally-recognised Government of National Unity (GNU), headed by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, exercises only nominal authority over the levers of power and remains dependent on these factions for its continued survival, particularly following Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s failed offensive on Tripoli in 2019—a year-long conflict that ended with the withdrawal of the Libyan National Army (LNA) and the signing of a fragile UN-brokered ceasefire that brought into being a new political arrangement represented by the Presidential Council and the Government of National Unity. This arrangement continues to shape the broader geopolitical dynamics between eastern and western Libya.

Historically, these groups are characterised by a relatively narrow social base with many of their leaders relying on displays of instrumental religiosity to consolidate local authority. For instance, Abdul Rauf Kara—widely known as ‘the Sheikh’ while formally holding the military rank of ‘lieutenant’—controls a significant portion of Tripoli.

The Special Deterrence Force (RADA) derives its influence from a social base initially strengthened by its anti-narcotics operations before evolving into a ‘state within a state,’ while also maintaining a rigidly hostile stance toward the Muslim Brotherhood. The RADA recruits heavily from conservative neighbourhoods in Tripoli, such as Souq al-Juma’a, and operates under the formal affiliation of the Ministry of Interior; however, in practice, it functions outside effective government control and maintains authority over Mitiga International Airport, the only operational airport in the capital.

In contrast, the 444 Combat Brigade represents a relatively structured and disciplined military formation aligned with the Ministry of Defence under the Government of National Unity. The brigade benefits from training and indirect support relationships with Turkey and derives much of its legitimacy from its operational effectiveness in areas such as Tarhuna and Bani Walid, while maintaining a socially diverse recruitment base.

Meanwhile, armed groups in Misrata draw their influence from the city’s post-2011 revolutionary networks and segments of its commercial elite, alongside sustained security ties with Ankara. On the periphery, factions in Zawiya remain highly localised, relying on tribal structures such as Awlad Saqr and Abu Humayra, in addition to fuel smuggling economies, which together enable them to resist attempts .

***

Khaled Mahmoud is a Cairo-based Egyptian journalist and political analyst covering regional security, armed conflicts, and Middle Eastern affairs for international publications.

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Filippo Sardella

Precedents, continuity and risk of normalization of the crisis

The May 2026 sequence did not arise in a vacuum. In December 2024, Reuters and AP had already reported armed clashes in Zawiya, resulting in fires and damage to the refinery. This precedent is significant because it demonstrates a recurring pattern: when armed competition enters the urban-industrial perimeter, the risk no longer remains political but becomes technical, environmental, and commercial. The repetition of similar episodes suggests that the refinery is not merely close to an unstable city; it is embedded in a security environment that has not yet effectively separated critical infrastructure from local conflict.

The institutional image of Libyan energy governance is that of a sector struggling to function, plan, and attract expertise despite an uncertain security environment. The material published by the National Oil Corporation on the technical-financial meeting with Zawiya Refinery in 2024 highlights the administrative and industrial dimensions of the asset: production objectives, maintenance, environment, local distribution, investments, and planning. The flipside of this same asset is its exposure to armed conflict. This duality is at the heart of the dossier: the refinery is a formal economic infrastructure located within an informal geography of power.

Speculative hypothesis

The crisis as a violent negotiation of income, not as a simple clash between gangs.

The most prudent hypothesis is that the Zawiya crisis cannot be reduced to an episodic dispute between rival groups, but represents a form of violent negotiation over profitable opportunities: subsidized fuel, commercial goods, port access, control of neighborhoods, transit to Tunisia, and informal protection of supply chains. It is not necessary to attribute a conscious geopolitical strategy to each actor to recognize an overall geopolitical effect. When the oil infrastructure is shut down, the Tunisian border indirectly becomes tense, the Tripoli government must demonstrate coercive capacity, the NOC must reassure operators and workers, and armed networks evaluate whether to resist, negotiate, or reposition themselves.

In this interpretation, the security operation launched after the clashes serves a dual purpose. On the declared level, it aims to target criminals and wanted individuals. On the strategic level, it could serve to redefine who controls Zawiya’s economic perimeter. The risk is that the restoration of order will be interpreted locally as a selection of some groups against others; the opportunity is that the Western Libyan government can, for the first time, more credibly separate the refinery’s security from the urban networks of coercion.

The decisive variable will not be the initial statement, but the persistence of the effect: if after the operation the port remains protected, the refinery operates, and the border is subject to less pressure, then the crisis can lead to an operational strengthening. If, however, the action remains episodic, Zawiya will once again become a clearinghouse between income and weapons.

So What

Best Case Scenario

Key assumptions: the security operation successfully neutralizes the most destabilizing armed hubs without devolving into a protracted urban war. The NOC and the operator maintain credible emergency procedures, the port gradually returns to operation, local authorities cooperate, and the border with Tunisia is not subjected to a new wave of closures or frictions. In this scenario, Zawiya becomes a test of selective state control: not the solution to the Libyan crisis, but a precedent for protecting critical assets.

Impacts: The refinery’s continuity reduces the risk of internal distribution shocks; the Tripoli government can politically leverage its capacity for intervention; Tunisia and border communities benefit from reduced informal pressure. Strategy: Perimeter protection of the plant, financial intelligence on fuel networks, coordination with Tunisian authorities, distribution flow audits, and prudent public communication. Steps to follow: Stable reopening of the port, no new attacks in the industrial area, arrests without retaliation, improved fuel traceability. Operational advice: Daily monitoring of NOC communications, the status of the Ras Ajdir crossing, and local reports of queues, shortages, or incidents.

Worst Case Scenario

Key hypothesis: Security pressure disrupts local balances without replacing them with stable state control. Some groups react, the refinery becomes vulnerable to attacks or sabotage, the port remains intermittently closed, and fuel revenue shifts to more opaque alternative routes. In this scenario, state action does not reduce the criminal economy but reorganizes it, increasing the cost of security and uncertainty for energy operators and local communities.

Impacts: New refinery outages, potential pressure on domestic supplies, tension with Tunisia if the border becomes more porous or militarized, further loss of confidence in western Libya’s ability to protect strategic infrastructure. Strategy: Avoid triumphalistic communications, open local mediation channels, strengthen fire defense and logistical redundancy, and monitor suspicious movements on the coast and border. Steps to follow: Increased videos of clashes, statements from local groups, crossing closures, reports of fuel shortages. Operational advice: Treat any reopening as reversible until at least two to three weeks of operational continuity are observed.

Stability Case Scenario

Key assumptions: No actor achieves a clear victory. The refinery reopens, but informal income survives in a more discreet form; the security operation reduces the visibility of armed groups without dismantling economic networks; the Tunisian border remains manageable but not immune to trafficking. This scenario is probably the most compatible with the recent history of western Libya: tactical stabilization, partial institutional continuity, and the persistence of gray economies.

Impacts: Lower immediate risk to the plant, but no structural transformation of the subsidized fuel supply chain; local stakeholders are adapting; authorities achieve a narrative result without full economic recovery. Strategy: Shift focus from public order alone to fuel distribution governance, customs controls, audits, and volume tracking. Next steps: Technical reopening, media normalization, but no reforms on subsidies, imports, and distribution. Operational advice: Distinguish between visible calm and actual reduction in revenue.

Conclusions

Zawiya as a stress test for Libyan statehood

The Zawiya crisis demonstrates Libya’s difficulty separating energy, security, and income. The established fact is that the fighting has reached a sufficient level to force the refinery to shut down and the port to be evacuated. The strongly supported fact is that the city is a nationally important energy and logistics hub, connected to a sensitive border and long-standing informal economies. The signal to monitor is the security operation’s ability to exert control without triggering a new cycle of retaliation. The analytical inference is that Zawiya is not an anomaly, but an indicator: when a state does not fully control the supply chain between production, refining, distribution, and the border, fuel becomes an instrument of power even before it becomes a commodity.

In the short term, the key variable is the complex’s physical security: the absence of new attacks, the return of personnel, fire safety, and the port’s recovery. In the medium term, the response of local networks is crucial: if they adapt without conflict, the crisis can be resolved; if they shift to other routes or react, the problem spreads. In the long term, the issue raises the structural issue of subsidies, transparency in distribution, and institutional fragmentation. Without a reform of the control chain and traceability tools, Zawiya’s geography will continue to create incentives for armed competition.

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Oscar Rickett

UAE funding for Tripoli offensive

By October 2018, the UAE and the Haftar family had agreed to launch a full-scale invasion of Tripoli. Wagner Group, a private security contractor with links to the Kremlin, was willing, according to The Sentry, “to fulfil a combat function but demanded steady cash”.

Offshore channels were needed to move dollars to fund the operation, with the UAE and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia suspected of having supplied the bulk of the financing. Haftar’s network called on Gadalla, The Sentry said, “thus giving a prominent role to a younger financier who had operated in Dubai since 2008”.

With Farhat Bengdara, an economic adviser to the Haftar family, as chairman, Al Masraf bank extended $300m in loans to three obscure Dubai-based companies controlled by Gadalla in 2019: JTA General Trading LLC, Al Mored Oasis General Trading LLC and ANAA General Trading LLC.

When questioned by MEE, Gadalla’s representatives said that he had no business relationship with Bengdara.

According to senior Libyan Foreign Bank officials who spoke to The Sentry, the money, which left Gadalla’s companies “almost immediately”, funded Haftar’s operations and “most likely bankrolled Wagner mercenaries’ deployment in the context of the April 2019 offensive” – allegations which Gadalla denies.

The UAE has served as a hub in Wagner-linked revenue chains, and US government assessments and intelligence reports have at various times accused Abu Dhabi of financing, collaborating with or facilitating Wagner operations, particularly in Libya.

Thousands died in the Tripoli offensive, which was also supported by Egypt and France as well as the UAE and Russia, and hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes. Despite more than 1,000 Emirati air strikes across Tripoli and the involvement of Russian combatants, the invasion was not successful and the money spent on it remains, for the most part, lost.

“After Haftar’s offensive collapsed, the loans have remained largely unpaid, leaving the Libyan public to bear the financial burden while Gadalla has faced no accountability,” The Sentry said.

Smuggling fuel and arms

The UN Panel of Experts report describes Gadalla as a “Libyan national who rose rapidly within the banking sector over the past 10 years with the support of Saddam Haftar”. The panel reported that Gadalla “subsequently used the funds at his disposal to purchase shipments of diverted fuel from armed group actors operating in both western and eastern Libya”.

“With their support, and his maritime transport capabilities, he facilitated the illicit export of this fuel from Libya, particularly through ports under the control of armed groups, and resold it for profit.” On 18 July 2025, the European Union’s Operation Irni intercepted the Aya 1 as it sailed from Port Rashid in the UAE to Benghazi. Operation Irini identified missing cargo documentation and inspected, at sea, a sample of six containers out of a total of 332. 

The inspection revealed 12 militarised vehicles in some of the containers onboard. Based on photographic evidence provided by Operation Irni, “the Panel assessed these vehicles as military equipment”, the UN Panel of Experts said in its report.

“Operation IRINI contacted the carrier, which is ultimately controlled by Ahmed Alushibe,” it reported, referring to Gadalla. Gadalla has also used the banks he controls to facilitate credit fraud and launder illicit profits, becoming part of the Haftars’ arms and fuel smuggling networks, which connect Libya to Chad, Sudan, Niger and Mali, among others, the Panel of Experts said.

It also reported that in one case, to which Gadalla is not believed to be linked, ammunition originally intended for the RSF in Sudan “was diverted and resold to individuals involved in gold trafficking in Niger” and linked to the Islamic State (IS) group.

Libyan reunification

The spotlight on Gadalla comes as the US pushes for Libyan unification. On 11 April, Libya’s rival legislative bodies approved a unified budget for the first time in more than a decade. Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, the UK and the US all welcomed this development. 

A week later, seeking to weaken Russian influence and enhance Washington’s standing in North Africa, US Africa Command’s (Africom) Flintlock training exercises began in the Libyan city of Sirte, with eastern and western Libyan troops training together for the first time. “These exercises are not just military training. These are overcoming differences, building capacity, and supporting Libya’s sovereign right to determine its own future,” John Brennan, deputy commander of Africom, said last year.

The UK has been riding in the US slipstream. Britain’s ambassador to Libya, Martin Reynolds, recently visited Benghazi, where he met with Khaled Haftar, one of Khalifa’s sons, and enjoyed a lemon and mint drink at a rooftop bar. Away from the rooftops, out on the streets, out in the wide desert tracts, an economy that runs on war rumbles on.

***

Oscar Rickett is a news editor and reporter at Middle East Eye. He has previously written and worked for the Guardian, Vice, openDemocracy, ITN, Africa Confidential and the Africa Report.

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Gregory Aftandilian

Meddling Across Borders and Corruption

Continue Unabated

Such upbeat words belie facts on the ground, however. Haftar’s forces and allied militias have reportedly aided the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan’s brutal civil war by taking over the so-called triangle area where the borders of Sudan, Libya, and Egypt meet. This territorial hold has allowed the RSF to smuggle gold, drugs, and people into Libya, often receiving arms and illicit petroleum exports in return.

The RSF has committed numerous human rights abuses, including the execution of thousands of civilians in the town of al-Fasher in the North Darfur province, which makes it difficult to say, as Saddam Haftar claimed, that Libyan security forces are reliably contributing to regional peace and security.

Both Libyan administrations are engaged in extensive corruption schemes. In the words of one analyst, in western Libya “the appearance of state-building masks a far more predatory ecosystem. Over the past decade, ministries, public agencies, and state-owned enterprises have morphed into personal fiefdoms for factions that operate more like organized crime families than political actors.”

In eastern Libya, where most of the country’s oil fields are located, Saddam Haftar has, as that same analyst put it, “refined the art of large-scale fuel smuggling, exploiting Libya’s heavily subsidized fuel system to siphon off billions [of dollars] annually.” Such smuggling schemes deprive the state of hard currency and contribute to a collapsing welfare system.

The International Monetary Fund has noted persistently large fiscal deficits, which have put pressure on the exchange rate, foreign exchange reserves, and inflation, exacerbating social tensions. Many Libyan citizens are angry over their living conditions, given that Libya is an oil-rich country with only 7.5 million people but according to 2023 data has a poverty rate of nearly 40 percent.

Human rights groups have castigated both of Libya’s governments. Human Rights Watch, for example, recently noted that “armed groups, smugglers, and state authorities in Libya have subjected migrants, including infants and young children, to arbitrary detention, extortion, forced labor, sexual violence, and other serious abuses.” It also reported widespread arbitrary detention, torture and ill treatment in facilities run by state-affiliated forces and armed groups.

The Damaging Role of Outside Players

External powers, including Egypt, Russia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are known to have assisted Libya’s rival factions to further their own agendas, with other outside actors such as the European Union (EU) also contributing negatively to the situation.

A March 2026 report by the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya, mandated to monitor weapons embargo violations and other illicit activities involving the North African country, discusses the involvement of foreign actors in illegal schemes that fund Libya’s militias. The UN report confirmed the findings of a 2025 investigation by the Italian publication Il Foglio of an elaborate scheme involving the UAE and a notorious Libyan businessman known as Ahmed Gadalla, who is close to Saddam Haftar.

The investigation showed that foreign actors continue to violate the UN embargo on weapons and other military items destined for Libya. It also revealed either lapsed judgment or a cover-up by the EU’s naval mission, Operation IRINI, which was established to monitor the arms embargo.

According to Il Foglio, in July 2025, a container ship that left the UAE port of Jebel Ali was intercepted by frigates associated with IRINI in the Mediterranean Sea near the port of Derna, Libya, after a tip-off from US intelligence. The cargo ship was then escorted to the Greek port of Astakos for inspection. Although the ship officially declared that it was only carrying cosmetics, cigarettes, and electronic equipment, it was actually transporting 240 pickup trucks destined for Libya, 86 of which were armored.

Typically used for mounting machine guns, these trucks are the vehicles of choice for Libyan and Sudanese militias. The UN has defined these trucks as military equipment and their shipment is considered a violation of the embargo.

The investigation revealed that the decision to allow the ship to leave for Libya was the result of “secret negotiations” between the EU, Greece, the UAE, and the two Libyan authorities in the east and the west. According to Il Foglio, Greece—worried about the wave of migrants coming from eastern Libya to Crete—sought to avoid offending Haftar and to prevent any retaliation in the form of a new irregular migration surge, decided that allowing the cargo to Libya was the “lesser evil.” Instead of offloading the trucks in Tripoli, the ship docked in Misrata, a port under the control of Dbeibah’s government.

Some 209 trucks were offloaded there; the rest were delivered to Benghazi, suggesting that both Libyan governments were involved in the scheme. The March 2026 UN report noted that 26 of the trucks wound up in the hands of a Libyan militia, al-Katiba 55, that run a notorious prison camp for migrants near Tripoli.

No Political Solution in Sight

Libya’s government is likely to remain divided for some time. Each administration benefits from the status quo through corruption schemes, while the militias depend on patronage that they receive from the governments or on revenues from their own rackets. While recent cooperation to agree on a unified budget may be encouraging, the fundamentals of the situation have not changed.

The decision by AFRICOM to host military exercises in Libya and to include military units belonging to each Libyan administration has done nothing to foster unity. Indeed, all it has probably achieved is to make those factions feel important. Rather than trying to forge unity through military posturing, the international community should increase its efforts to stop oil smuggling out of Libya in exchange for arms.

Some moves in that direction are already underway. On April 14, 2026, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution to reinforce international efforts to monitor and prevent illicit oil smuggling from Libya. The resolution reaffirmed that the NOC is the sole entity authorized to market Libya’s oil and called for a prohibition on depositing Libyan oil revenues anywhere but in official accounts.

Yet there appears to be no real mechanism to enforce such a resolution except to target individuals and entities with sanctions—an approach that obviously has not worked well in the past. Only if meaningful punitive measures are applied to those involved in illicit oil sales will there be pressure on the two administrations to hold national elections and to bring about a unified government.

***

Gregory Aftandilian is a Nonresident Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC. He is a Senior Professorial Lecturer at American University where he teaches courses on US foreign policy. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Boston University and George Mason University, teaching courses on Middle East politics.

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Oscar Rickett

Ahmed Gadalla controls companies in Libya, the UAE, Malta and the UK, and is accused of being a central figure in the Haftars’ illicit operations – allegations he denies.

He is a Libyan businessman who lives in Dubai and carries a passport issued by the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts and Nevis.

According to Italian media reports, he wears $500,000 watches, flies on private jets and stays at five-star hotels in central London.

He is said to own at least eight properties in the United Arab Emirates and a $3.7m apartment in Toronto, where he maintains permanent Canadian residency and donates to a prestigious private health foundation. 

He controls banks, a state-owned enterprise and private companies in Libya, the UAE, Malta and the UK.

But, according to the United Nations’ Panel of Experts on Libya and a detailed report by US investigative organisation The Sentry, Ahmed Gadalla is a key moneyman for Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), which controls eastern Libya and is backed by the UAE and Egypt.

And now, as the US and its allies push to unify the UN-backed government based in Tripoli with the Haftar family’s Benghazi administration, the 46-year-old is in the spotlight.

Active on multiple fronts for at least seven years, Gadalla, who is from Benghazi, is said to have risen with the support of Khalifa’s son, Saddam Haftar, and is alleged to be at the heart of a financial network that includes money laundering, arms smuggling and trafficking of various kinds. 

The UN and Sentry reports have both shed light on what they describe as the use of banks Gadalla controls to obtain fraudulent letters of credit, his alleged involvement in fuel and weapons smuggling, and his connection to Haftar’s failed 2019-20 assault on Tripoli. 

Gadalla denies financing or supporting the LAAF and denies the allegations made in The Sentry and the UN Panel’s report. He says he is still engaging with the UN Panel. 

“I utterly reject and deny the accusations made against me by The Sentry. My lawyers are challenging those allegations, and I also refute the claims made about me in the UN Panel of Experts report insofar as they relate to me,” Gadalla told Middle East Eye. 

“I have conducted my business lawfully and transparently and will continue to do so.”

Fuel and military vehicles

Banks controlled by Gadalla have also been involved in the circulation of counterfeit Russian-printed dinars, according to The Sentry.

According to the UN’s report, a Gadalla-owned bank in Benghazi “actively blocked” attempts to “conduct an official investigation into the letter of credit”, although Gadalla rejects the UN’s conclusion. 

Gadalla’s companies have funnelled money into the Haftars’ war machine, The Sentry said, with payments likely being made to Russia’s Wagner Group, arms sent to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary in Sudan and Gadalla’s Dubai-based entities securing $300m for the failed invasion of Tripoli. 

Gadalla denies that he, or his company, are involved in any such loans, and that the bank records in question had been investigated by two third-party organisations, Deloitte and the Investigation Unit of the Office of the Attorney General of Libya. He also denied financing military activity or funding the Wagner Group.

The Haftars’ operations have suffered a number of high-profile failures, including an attempt in 2024 to import Chinese combat drones disguised as wind turbines, an unsuccessful scheme to procure Spanish drones the year before and, in 2025, the interception by Greek and Italian patrol boats enforcing the UN arms embargo on Libya of a shipment of military vehicles intended for the RSF in Sudan. 

This last failure was connected by the UN report to a shipping company owned by Gadalla, who denies being involved in smuggling fuel or military vehicles.

“Although he now presents himself as a legitimate businessman, Gadalla’s portfolio of official activities conceals a broad range of questionable financial operations executed on behalf of the Haftars,” The Sentry reports. 

“Gadalla’s ascent, which has unfolded at the very nexus between Libya’s militia rule and hollowed-out economic institutions, shows how kleptocratic networks loot Libya’s public wealth on an immense scale.”

Gadalla, for his part, says that he conducts lawful, ordinary commercial activity within the constraints imposed by the post-conflict state.

A network of companies

Ahmed Gadalla became a Dubai resident in 2008. Prior to the uprisings that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, he studied engineering and earned a master’s degree in the US, according to The Sentry.

As Libya was gripped by civil war in 2011, Gadalla sold automotive and household cleaning products for an American company.

After Gaddafi’s fall, eastern Libya began to open up and Gadalla used his Emirati connections to get ahead and do business abroad, starting with a 2012 trip to the Chinese manufacturing hub of Guangzhou.

Today, the Libyan businessman is open about leading the Alushibe Group – Gadalla is also known as Ahmed Alushibe – described by The Sentry as “a loose set of companies he controls in Dubai”. 

He is chairman of a Libyan state-owned steel company, owner of the Dubai-based UDS Shipping Services LLC, the Malta-based International Seaport Holdings and oil refiners in Libya.

The Aya 1, a UDS container ship named after Gadalla’s daughter, was intercepted in July 2025 by the Greek and Italian navies because it was suspected of arms smuggling. Itineraries for the Aya 1 and Aya 2, another container ship, show them moving from Libyan ports like Tobruk and Benghazi to the UAE.

Gadalla denies controlling the Aya 1 or any ship involved in arms smuggling.

The UN Panel of Experts found that the Aya 1 had “exported at least 22 containers with flexi-tanks filled with heavy fuel oil from Tobruk to the United Arab Emirates”, appearing to corroborate The Sentry’s assertion that the vessel was “used in illicit petroleum exports”.

Gadalla owns “several banks in Libya, including Wahda Bank and Bank of Commerce & Development”, the UN panel said. It found that he “used the banking sector, with the support of armed group actors, to fraudulently obtain letters of credit from the Central Bank of Libya”. 

However, Gadalla denies owning or controlling multiple Libyan banks or engaging in letter-of-credit fraud.

In 2023, Gadalla purchased Benghazi’s Libyan Cement Company, which was notorious because of its links to the Austrian fugitive Jan Marsalek, a suspected Russian spy accused of bringing about the collapse of Germany’s Wirecard.

Companies House listings in the UK also show that between 2019, when the former CIA asset Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli was launched, and 2021, Gadalla was co-owner of a Nisa off-licence in the British city of Birmingham.

Gadalla is now the director of the IT company Future Information Services, whose registered office is on Oxford Street in central London.

On the Companies House page linked to Future Information Services, Gadalla is listed as Kittitian rather than Libyan, and his country of residence is marked as the UAE.

He does, in fact, carry a passport from St Kitts and Nevis, the Caribbean Island nation whose citizenship can be obtained for $250,000 of investment.

***

Oscar Rickett is a news editor and reporter at Middle East Eye. He has previously written and worked for the Guardian, Vice, openDemocracy, ITN, Africa Confidential and the Africa Report.

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 Salem A. Salem

Sahel insurgent groups are expanding into coastal West Africa, exposing governance gaps and raising risks to regional security and economic stability.

What was once a contained Sahel crisis is now steadily advancing toward the Gulf of Guinea. Extremist groups are not just launching cross-border attacks — they are embedding within communities, building supply networks, and exploiting long-standing governance failures. Coastal states like Benin, Togo, and Ghana are increasingly exposed, facing the same structural vulnerabilities that fueled conflict further north. The stakes are rising: Without early, coordinated action, the region risks a deeper and more complex insurgency. Preventing that outcome will depend less on military force alone and more on addressing the governance deficits that allow these groups to take root.

In meetings with the government of Benin on a humid and cloudy day of July 2023, officials were surprisingly reassuring about the danger lurking beyond their borders. Early warning signs were growing by the day that extremist violence from the Sahel was spilling over into their country.

At the time, violent incidents in northern Benin and Togo were rare. But today, villagers describe a pattern that has become familiar across the Sahel: nighttime raids, armed men appearing along forest tracks, and security forces scrambling to secure remote communities near the Burkinabe border. The frequency and scale of those incidents revealed the Sahel’s rampant extremist insurgency is moving south toward the Gulf of Guinea.

For more than a decade, the Sahel has been the world’s epicenter of terrorist violence. What began in 2012 as a rebellion in northern Mali evolved into a complex regional conflict involving Islamist extremists, local militias, and criminal networks across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and northern Nigeria. Today, the region accounts for more than half of global terrorism‑related deaths, a dramatic increase since 2019.

The question is no longer whether the conflict will spread beyond the Sahel. It already has. The real question is whether coastal West Africa will address the governance gaps that enabled the Sahel crisis to escalate or repeat the same mistakes.

The Sahel Crisis Expands

For years, coastal West African states were widely viewed as insulated from Sahelian instability. That assumption is increasingly difficult to sustain.

Militant groups linked to Jama’at Nusrat al‑Islam wal‑Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Sahel have steadily expanded operations toward the Gulf of Guinea. By 2021, JNIM fighters were already staging attacks from eastern Burkina Faso and southwestern Niger into northern Benin. Since then, attacks in border areas of Benin and Togo have increased sharply.

Across coastal West Africa, terrorist incidents rose dramatically between 2022 and 2024, particularly along northern border regions where state presence remains limited. Benin has been among the hardest hit of the coastal states, with fatalities rising sharply in 2025 even if the overall numbers remain far below those seen in Burkina Faso or Mali.

Togo has experienced a similar trajectory. JNIM claimed its first attack there in 2022, and attacks have since continued in the Savanes region, targeting both civilians and military outposts.

These incidents are not isolated cross‑border raids. As recent analysis and reporting note, JNIM and other militant organizations are deliberately probing the northern peripheries of coastal states. Their strategy is gradual penetration rather than rapid territorial conquest: embedding in communities, establishing supply routes, and exploiting governance gaps.

A Regional System of Conflict

To understand this expansion, it helps to view the Sahel conflict not as a series of isolated insurgencies but as an evolving regional conflict system.

Over the past decade, groups such as JNIM have shifted from classic terrorist tactics toward hybrid insurgency; they increasingly attempt to control territory, regulate local economies, and establish parallel governance structures rather than operate solely through clandestine attacks. In parts of Mali and Burkina Faso, militants have collected taxes, mediated disputes, and enforced their own systems of justice.

This strategy has proven effective where state institutions are weak or absent. For communities long neglected by central governments, militant governance — however coercive — can sometimes appear more predictable than state governance.

At the same time, militant networks are deeply intertwined with organized crime. Smuggling routes linking West Africa to North Africa and the Mediterranean through the Sahel provide revenue streams and logistical infrastructure for armed groups. Livestock trafficking, fuel smuggling, and illegal mining, to name a few, all feed into this conflict economy.

The insurgency is also evolving technologically. Armed groups that once relied primarily on small arms and roadside bombs are increasingly experimenting with drones, encrypted communications, and digital financial tools.

Nigeria: A Convergence Zone

Recent developments in northern Nigeria illustrate how these dynamics are converging across borders.

According to analysis by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), violence has surged in the Benin-Niger-Nigeria border triangle. Militants exploit forest routes and protected areas linking Burkina Faso, Niger, Benin, and Nigeria to move fighters and supplies. Their long-term objective seems to be the establishment of corridors linking the interior of the region to the Atlantic coast.

This region has become a convergence zone where Sahel‑based extremist networks intersect with Nigerian militant groups and criminal bandit networks.

The implications became clearer in October 2025 when JNIM claimed its first attack on Nigerian territory near the Benin border. The attack was small, but symbolically important: It signaled the group’s ambition to expand into West Africa’s largest country.

Nigeria already faces multiple security crises, from Islamic State‑affiliated insurgents in the Lake Chad Basin to bandit networks in the northwest. The growing overlap between banditry, organized crime, and Islamist extremism raises the possibility that Nigeria could increasingly resemble the hybrid insurgencies destabilizing parts of the Sahel.

The Vulnerable Coast

Ghana illustrates both the resilience of some coastal states and the strategic ambitions of Sahel-based militant groups. Despite remaining free of large-scale terrorist attacks, northern Ghana has increasingly been used as a logistics and recovery zone by militants operating across the border in Burkina Faso.

Fighters reportedly cross into Ghanaian territory to obtain supplies, move equipment, and seek medical treatment before returning north to the battlefield. The pattern reflects a deliberate strategy: Rather than attacking immediately, groups such as JNIM are building networks and supply chains that could later support deeper expansion toward the Gulf of Guinea.

Analysts note that Ghana’s relative stability — stronger institutions, functioning security services, and less acute local grievances — has so far limited militant penetration. Yet the country’s role as a logistical rear base underscores the regional nature of the conflict.

As these networks spread across coastal states, Western policymakers increasingly worry that the Sahel insurgency could eventually threaten major trade routes, ports, and energy infrastructure along the Atlantic coast. These concerns reflect a growing recognition that the drivers of extremism in coastal West Africa mirror many of the structural dynamics that fueled conflict in the Sahel.

In many countries, economic opportunity and political influence remain concentrated in southern urban centers, while northern border regions suffer from chronic underdevelopment and limited state presence. These disparities create fertile ground for recruitment.

Tensions between farmers and pastoralist communities, particularly among the herding Fulani populations, have also intensified in recent years. Restrictions on seasonal migration and confrontations with security forces have deepened grievances in some areas.

Research by the International Crisis Group highlights how groups like JNIM deliberately exploit these local tensions, positioning themselves as protectors of marginalized communities while undermining state authority.

Security responses have sometimes worsened these dynamics. In several areas, community militias mobilized to fight extremists have been accused of targeting Fulani civilians, reinforcing cycles of grievance and retaliation.

Stopping the Next Phase

The Sahel’s experience shows that terrorism thrives where governance fails. Military force is necessary to contain violent groups, but it cannot address the underlying drivers of instability. When security operations occur without accountability, they risk deepening the same grievances that militants exploit.

This is why strengthening the rule of law, judicial accountability, and civilian oversight of security forces remains central to long‑term stabilization. Communities are far more likely to cooperate with authorities when they trust that abuses will be investigated and justice delivered.

The spread of terrorist violence toward the Gulf of Guinea is not inevitable. But preventing a wider regional crisis requires acting before insurgent networks become entrenched. Coastal governments will need to invest far more heavily in northern border regions, not only in security forces but also in governance, justice systems, and economic opportunity.

Regional cooperation will also be essential. Militant networks operate across borders, and effective responses must do the same through intelligence-sharing, joint patrols, and coordinated law enforcement action. International partners, including the United Nations, should prioritize strengthening institutions rather than simply expanding military assistance. Investments in judicial capacity, anti‑corruption measures, and accountable security sector reform can have far greater long‑term impact.

Benin and Togo now sit on the frontline of a conflict that began far to the north. Whether they become the next theater of a widening insurgency, or the place where the region begins to reverse the tide, will depend less on battlefield victories than on whether governments address the governance deficits and root causes that allowed the Sahel crisis to grow in the first place.

***

Salem A. Salem (also known as Salem al-Hasi) is a political analyst, strategist, and human rights advocate with four decades of experience in security, intelligence, and geopolitical affairs across the MENA region. His career encompasses leadership roles in Libya’s opposition movements, government institutions, international human rights organizations, and academia. He is recognized for his sharp policy-relevant analysis of regional dynamics, conflict resolution, and security challenges.

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Michael Rubin

The Security Crisis Africa Now Faces Dwarfs the 2014 Rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) noose continues to tighten in Mali, with the Al Qaeda-affiliated group blockading the capital. Coordinated attacks on April 25, 2026, which claimed the Malian defense minister’s life, among many others, show the group’s potency. The extremists now control checkpoints around the capital as the Russians, upon whom the Malian military junta relied, evacuate.

Should Mali—once among Africa’s most democratic governments—fall, the ripple effects throughout the region will be severe. Geographically, Mali is huge: It is roughly the size of Texas and California combined. Seven countries border Mali, with a combined population of over 175 million. A terror base in Mali would give safe-haven and sustenance to Boko Haram. Mali lies just 600 miles from the northern border of Nigeria, through largely ungoverned or loosely governed regions.

Just as in Somalia, the war in Mali is not a single conflict, but rather, an amalgam. Mali has long faced a Tuareg movement seeking to establish Azawad, a separatist state across the northern half of the country, centered around Gao and Timbuktu. While the Islamist rebels in southern Mali and the Tuaregs long operated as rivals, they now act as a united front against the state. The same dynamic is at play in Niger, where dissatisfied local groups and terrorist organizations now make common cause.

While some scholars have suggested the United States fill the vacuum in Mali, this is unrealistic in the current political environment. With war continuing with Iran and many Americans skeptical of force, and both Democrats and MAGA Republicans hostile to military deployments, direct U.S. action is a non-starter. After President Donald Trump ordered a U.S. withdrawal from Syria during his first term, U.S. Africa Command put out word to its officers to stay out of the news media at all costs, lest Trump realize the American presence in Africa was three times as large.

The security crisis Africa now faces dwarfs the 2014 rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As the new White House Counterterrorism Strategy notes, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda affiliates stretch from Mali to Somalia and down into the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique. Whereas the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria could smuggle oil via Turkish brokers to gain cash, the resources within the groups’ territories in Africa extend beyond oil to gold, silver, timber, and potentially even uranium.

Just as the Pentagon partnered successfully with Syrian Kurds to roll back the Islamic State, the United States must find local, indigenous allies to be the tip of the spear against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Fortunately, three countries or groups fit the bill and could act as the tip of the spear.

First is Libya, or at least those portions of the country not controlled by the recognized Tripoli government. Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Armed Forces successfully stabilized 70 percent of Libya, including its oil fields and export facilities; the Libyan Armed Forces likely could control the entirety of the Libyan state if the international community ceased tolerating Tripoli-based Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dabaiba and Grand Mufti Sadiq Al-Ghariani’s provision of extremist militias with safe-haven and weaponry.

Every week, Ghariani uses his influence over Qatari-financed mosques to recruit extremists in western and southern Libya for the so-called jihad in the Sahel. The U.S. Department of State should sanction Dabaiba for his two-faced protection of extremists, and target Ghariani, who is as dangerous as the late Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and Islamic State caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Second is Somaliland. Somaliland is a natural ally: Western, democratic, and secure and aligned with Israel and Taiwan against the growing threats of both Islamic extremism and China. Too many career diplomats and even Trump administration National Security Council officials, though, seek to put Somalia first. Some do so out of ignorance of history: They fail to understand the precedent of failed federations reverting to their constituent parts—Senegal and Gambia, for example—nor do they have the legal background to realize Mogadishu never ratified the agreement with Hargeisa.

Others do so out of a misguided effort to keep Somalia happy. They subscribe to the “one-Somalia” arguments put out by Mogadishu, not understanding that Somali officials merely replicate the failed strategy of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who used Arab nationalist rhetoric to distract from his own failures. Finally, some counterterrorism officials argue that siding with Somaliland would undermine Somalia’s cooperation against al-Shabaab.

Such an argument falls flat. It assumes Mogadishu seeks to defeat al-Shabaab, though it has not for decades despite ample support. It also replicates the mistakes of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, in which fear of losing counter-terror support led successive U.S. administrations to indulge Pakistan, even as it supported the Taliban and sheltered bin Laden. To embrace Somaliland could mark a turning point to push back Al Qaeda and Islamic State gains in Somalia.

Third is Rwanda. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department sanctions Rwanda and defers uncritically to Russian, French, and American progressives who launder their state and personal interests through the United Nations Group of Experts, the country is key to regional security and moderation. It is the region’s Singapore against the backdrop of failed and failing states.

More importantly, Rwanda, at its own expense, has helped secure Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, the capital of the Central African Republic, and much of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Activists might disparage Rwanda’s contributions by noting investment and commerce followed, but more sober minds would applaud this: functional economies lead to functional states.

Too often, State Department Africa Bureau policy is disjointed, cobbled together by individual country teams or diplomatic fiefdoms absent any broad coherence. If Trump and Rubio want to counter the looming terror threat, it is time to approach Africa holistically and consider those partners with whom the United States can achieve its goals. The answer—Libyan Armed Forces, Somaliland, and Rwanda—will be self-evident, if only Trump, Rubio, or Congress asks the question.

***

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in Middle Eastern countries, particularly Iran and Turkey. His career includes time as a Pentagon official, with field experiences in Iran, Yemen, and Iraq, as well as engagements with the Taliban prior to 9/11.

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Salem A. Salem

Coordinated Mali attacks expose state vulnerabilities, insurgent adaptation, and shifting regional alliances across the Sahel.

The April 25 coordinated attacks in Mali mark a dangerous inflection point in the Sahel’s security crisis, revealing both the growing sophistication of insurgent groups and the fragility of state authority. A rare alliance between jihadist and separatist actors signals a pragmatic convergence that could reshape conflict dynamics and accelerate territorial fragmentation. At the same time, the limitations of Russia’s security support and emerging geopolitical recalibrations raise questions about the region’s external partnerships. As violence expands into urban centers and spills across borders, the crisis is no longer confined to Mali — it is redefining security risks across the Sahel and beyond.

The coordinated attacks that took place in Mali on April 25 mark a pivotal turning point, not only in the nation’s enduring conflict but also within the broader context of insecurity across the Sahel region. What occurred was neither a typical insurgency operation nor merely an escalation of violence. It was a carefully planned attack on various fronts that exposed significant vulnerabilities within the Malian government, demonstrated the fragility of its international alliances, and signaled an alarming shift in the tactics employed by armed groups in the region.

The scale and coordination of the attacks were unprecedented in recent Malian history. Armed groups targeted critical military and government installations across several locations, including the capital Bamako and nearby Kati, northern strongholds such as Gao and Kidal, and the central city of Séveré. By striking these locations almost simultaneously, the armed groups demonstrated not only tactical proficiency but also a strategic vision aimed at eroding the ruling junta’s power.

The recent attacks were also remarkable for the coalition involved: Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an organization affiliated with al-Qaeda, collaborated with the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg separatist movement. Historically, such alliances have exhibited tension and ideological contradictions. JNIM endeavors to establish governance based on Sharia law, whereas Tuareg separatists aspire to attain autonomy or independence for northern Mali. Despite these divergent long-term objectives, the two groups reached a consensus in their opposition to the Malian ruling regime. Their current collaboration exemplifies a pragmatic alignment of interests: JNIM benefits from the local legitimacy and ethnic grounding of the Tuareg cause, while the FLA gains access to JNIM’s superior military capabilities and regional influence.

This collaboration was not unprecedented; in 2012, similar coordination helped rebel forces seize key northern cities. Nevertheless, ideological divergences ultimately led to the disintegration of the coalition, as factions within the group were unable to harmonize their conflicting visions on governance and adherence to Sharia law.

In early 2025, the FLA and JNIM convened to discuss and reach consensus on principal issues. The Association of Azawad Scholars, representing the FLA, proposed a collaborative approach. In the proposal, the FLA committed to adhering to Sharia law and rejecting secularism, while simultaneously urging JNIM to renounce any affiliation with al-Qaeda. JNIM responded by reaffirming that its allegiance constitutes a religious obligation that can only be relinquished in extraordinary circumstances, such as the collapse of the Bamako regime.

It seems that JNIM is increasingly following the model of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria. Despite the differing circumstances, the emerging parallels are now apparent. HTS began as an al-Qaeda affiliate but gradually reinvented its identity, localized its objectives, and established governance structures that facilitated its transformation from insurgency to de facto authority. Similarly, JNIM has progressively incorporated into local communities by leveraging grievances, offering conflict resolution, and forming tactical alliances with local entities, including Tuareg organizations.

Additionally, drawing inspiration from HTS’s strategic approach towards Russia, JNIM issued a public statement on the second day of the attacks. The statement urged Russian forces to maintain neutrality in exchange for a commitment not to target them and called for coordination to establish a balanced and effective future relationship. Furthermore, JNIM’s adoption of HTS’s example is evident in its statement on Thursday, 30 April, in which it called on all factions of Malian society to unite to establish a cohesive “single front” to “dismantle the junta” and achieve a “peaceful and inclusive transition.” This marks a departure from its typical religious rhetoric toward a more nationalist discourse.

Another remarkable consequence of the recent attacks was the fall of Kidal. Although not the largest city in northern Mali, Kidal holds profound symbolic and strategic importance. Control of Kidal has long been associated with dominance over the northern region, and the FLA’s capture of the city represents a significant setback for the Malian government. This is particularly notable given that Malian forces, supported by Russian paramilitary forces, had only recently regained control of the city in 2023. The withdrawal of the Africa Corps, following an agreement with the FLA, raises concerns about the reliability and effectiveness of the Russian support. 

The involvement of Russian forces, initially through the Wagner Group and subsequently through the Africa Corps, was intended to enhance the Malian military’s capabilities to counter terrorism. However, recent developments have revealed the limitations inherent in this partnership. The failure of Russian-supported forces to prevent the capture of Kidal or to defend against coordinated assaults across the nation has undermined their credibility. The images of Russian personnel withdrawing from contested territories under negotiated agreements further undermine the perception of strength that Moscow has sought to project in Africa.

The death of Defense Minister General Sadio Camara, who died in a suicide attack at his residence, intensified Moscow’s challenges. Camara was both the architect of the nation’s security strategy and the principal channel between Bamako and Moscow. His assassination exposes weaknesses at the highest levels of leadership and raises significant concerns about the regime’s competence; moreover, it creates a leadership vacuum at a pivotal moment, potentially exacerbating internal conflicts within the junta.

Another potential consequence of the attacks is a transformation in geopolitical dynamics. Mali’s alignment with Russia and its strained relationships with Western partners represent a broader trend among Sahelian juntas seeking to forge alternative alliances. Nonetheless, recent setbacks for Russian forces may prompt the Sahelian juntas to reevaluate the effectiveness of their current partnerships and explore diversifying. Indicators of such diversification are already evident, as demonstrated by reports of expanding ties with Turkey and tentative re-engagement with the United States.

The attacks also underscore a wider shift in insurgent strategies. Historically, organizations such as JNIM have concentrated their operations in rural and peripheral areas with limited state presence. Nevertheless, the recent offensive signifies a strategic pivot towards urban warfare. By attacking urban centers, insurgents seek to enhance psychological effects, destabilize governance, and contest the state’s portrayal of dominance. Urban assaults also diminish public confidence in the government by manifesting conflict within daily life.

An additional concerning consequence of the recent attacks is the increasing availability of advanced weaponry to insurgent groups. Publicly circulating videos show combatants obtaining heavy military equipment, including armored vehicles, which were confiscated following recent clashes that concluded with the withdrawal of Malian and Russian military forces or the abandonment of strategic positions. This development boosts the capacities of these groups and increases the likelihood of regional spillover, potentially leading to further instability in neighboring countries and escalating conflicts in the region.

Analysts warn that Mali is now at serious risk of fragmentation as militant groups increase territorial control and weaken state authority. In the short term, Mali’s junta may seek to restore control through intensified military campaigns, possibly with sustained Russian assistance. However, the efficacy of this approach is considerably questioned, as the assaults have exposed significant intelligence shortcomings and the incompetence of the Malian Armed Forces in countering insurgency in Mali.

At the regional level, the April 25 attacks are expected to have repercussions that extend well beyond Mali, thereby destabilizing neighboring countries such as Niger and Burkina Faso. These effects might reach further into southern Libya and down to the Gulf of Guinea. Areas are already facing governance challenges and insurgent activity.

Recent attacks have demonstrated that relying solely on military solutions has not achieved the desired outcomes. This issue has sustained ongoing debates among Sahlian elites over alternative strategies, such as negotiations, local governance, and hybrid security methods, including diplomatic efforts and community engagement, to tackle the root causes of the conflicts.

The recent meeting between Burkina Faso’s ambassador and the Taliban’s acting representative to Iran may exemplify this approach. While pro-Taliban media claim the dialogue mainly centered on trade, agriculture, mining, and vocational training cooperation, analysts suggest that the main goal might have been to engage the Taliban in mediating between the ruling junta and Sahelian armed groups.

In conclusion, the recent coordinated attacks in Mali are of concern beyond the Sahelian states. North Africa, West Africa, and the Gulf of Guinea nations are all concerned about the potential impacts on their interests. Mali’s recent attacks are significantly shaping the security landscape throughout the Sahel and adjacent regions.

***

Salem A. Salem (also known as Salem al-Hasi) is a political analyst, strategist, and human rights advocate with four decades of experience in security, intelligence, and geopolitical affairs across the MENA region. His career encompasses leadership roles in Libya’s opposition movements, government institutions, international human rights organizations, and academia. He is recognized for his sharp policy-relevant analysis of regional dynamics, conflict resolution, and security challenges. 

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Nosmot Gbadamosi

Inside what analysts call a “pinky promise” between Libya’s rival factions.

Step Toward Reunification?

Libya’s rival administrations approved the country’s first unified state budget in more than a decade last month, sparking hopes of greater stability in a nation that has been sharply divided between two governments since 2014.

The April 11 agreement, which aims to reduce corruption and allocate enough money to the Libyan state-owned National Oil Corp. (NOC) to boost production, was brokered by Massad Boulos, U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior advisor for Arab and African affairs. Boulos described it on X “as part of a broader roadmap toward peace and national unification.”

Yet while the deal is a positive step, analysts told Foreign Policy that it is more of a restricted spending agreement and is unlikely to prompt broader unification anytime soon. As Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, told Foreign Policy, the budget isn’t underpinned by structural reforms or enforcement mechanisms. “The deal at this stage is more of a pinky promise,” Badi said.

Libya has faced an economic crisis since civil war broke out in 2011, with rising living costs, inconsistent oil revenue, and soaring public debt. Today, in the wake of the 2020 cease-fire, both administrations—the United Nations-recognized government based in the capital, Tripoli, led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and a rival faction in the east controlled by warlord Khalifa Haftar—contribute to rampant overspending.

“The most obvious symptoms of that [spending] has been the decline in the value of the Libyan dinar,” said Rhiannon Smith, the managing director of Libya-Analysis, a consultancy. Boulos began negotiations with the rival governments last July, with the goal of fostering peace and advancing “commercial deals” for U.S. firms in Libya, a petrostate that exports the majority of its oil to European markets. (A few weeks after the budget deal was announced in April, U.S. energy giant Chevron signed a preliminary agreement with Libya’s NOC to assess the country’s shale oil and gas potential.)

The approach in Libya aligns with much of “the Trump administration’s foreign policy, whereby American interests across various conflicts are largely viewed through economic considerations,” Belal Abdallah recently wrote for the Cambridge Middle East and North Africa Forum.

The result of negotiations was a $30 billion unified development budget, which allocates around $1.9 billion to the NOC, with other dispersals covering subsidies, staff wages, family allowances, and operational spending, according to Reuters. While many of the budget’s details have not been publicly disclosed, the overall goal is to align parallel infrastructure spending and curb state overspending.

However, Badi said, “two political entities [are] dispersing separate portions of said budget,” and there is “limited willingness to exert coercion or pressure on the Libyan parties.” Smith echoed this sentiment. “This isn’t a government agreeing to a budget,” she said. “This is two distinct political families agreeing that they’re going to limit their spending.” The U.N. Support Mission in Libya has welcomed the agreement as “important progress towards addressing the urgent need to strengthen discipline in public expenditure management” but called for “robust oversight of public spending across Libya in line with international standards.”

Analysts including Badi and Smith say the spending framework, which concerns the 2026 fiscal year, is a temporary fix that does not address deeper structural issues, such as graft and the siphoning of oil revenues to foreign networks enabled by Russia and other international actors. It is also unclear what the war in Iran will mean for government spending. With the conflict rattling oil markets, Libya has ramped up production to meet global demand. Last week, the NOC said oil revenue had climbed to $2.9 billion in April, up from $1 billion in February.

While the two administrations have seen a significant windfall since the outbreak of the Iran war, that money is unlikely to go toward public services or paying off the country’s debt. “Almost certainly it will probably be siphoned off,” Smith said. The nature of the budget negotiations will also have implications for the future of Libyan politics. In talks, Boulos dealt primarily with Dbeibah’s nephew Ibrahim and Haftar’s son (and likely successor) Saddam—a move that, critics argue, sidelined wider political institutions and parties.

As Smith pointed out, the talks strengthened the legitimacy of the Haftars, whose regime is generally not recognized by the international community: “They now have a direct line to the U.S. administration.” “It’s not very logical to hope that the stakeholders that have been at the center of dilapidating the state’s reserves and economy will spearhead a solution for its economic problems,” Badi said.

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Andrea Cellino

The Vacuum Russia, Turkey, and

the UAE Have Filled

The consequence of EU depoliticization has been a structural vacuum that other powers have filled with far greater effectiveness. Turkey’s military intervention in 2019-2020 reversed Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli, earning Ankara a permanent military presence in western Libya and an increased degree of influence over the GNU. Russia, which supported Haftar’s offensive through the Wagner Group (now operating under the Africa Corps brand), is entrenched in eastern Libya and the broader Sahel corridor.

The Panel of Experts of the UN described the arms embargo as “totally ineffective” and noted “widespread and flagrant” violations, including by Russia. The UAE has been a consistent financial and military backer of Haftar, largely undisturbed by EU diplomatic pressure. In 2025, the Haftar family conducted a systematic international legitimation campaign: Khalifa Haftar was received by Macron in Paris in February and by Putin in Moscow in May, while his son Saddam visited the United States, Turkey, Italy, and Niger.

The EU’s Operation Irini, the naval mission supposed to enforce the arms embargo, has been criticized for selectively inspecting cargo while remaining cautious where inspections might interfere with migration cooperation. EU officials contest this characterization, noting structural constraints: Naval law bars the inspection of Turkish military vessels; few member states make ports available for cargo diversion; and arms flows have increasingly shifted to air transport, beyond Irini’s interdiction capacity. Yet the political perception — that Irini polices migration routes more effectively than weapons flows — has stuck and is not easily dismissed.

The UNSMIL Roadmap: A Test Europe

Is Failing

In August 2025, UNSMIL Special Representative Hanna Serwaa Tetteh presented the Security Council with a new roadmap structured around three pillars: an electoral framework for presidential and parliamentary elections, institutional unification through a new government, and a structured dialogue on governance, economy, security, and reconciliation.

Tetteh indicated that national elections could be held within 12 to 18 months if the roadmap is successfully implemented. The EU’s response was limited to declarations of support by the EU Delegation and member state missions in Libya, alongside general endorsements in UN fora.

No specific EU political initiative has followed. The October 2025 launch of the New EU Pact for the Mediterranean, while signaling a rhetorical shift towards treating Mediterranean partners as “geopolitical actors to be managed,” offers little concrete change for Libya: The document prioritizes migration control and contains only a weak reference to human rights, good governance, and rule of law.

Recommendations: Reclaiming a

Political Role

If the EU is to halt its slide into irrelevance in Libya, several reorientations are necessary.

First, develop a common EU political position on the UNSMIL roadmap. UNSMIL’s three-pillar framework offers an external scaffold the EU could more actively support rather than merely endorse. This means coordinating member state diplomatic positions around concrete benchmarks — electoral legislation, institutional unification timelines — and ending the pattern by which France, Italy, Greece, and Malta pursue separate bilateral tracks that undermine collective credibility.

Second, use SC16337 to push for executive interdiction powers for Irini. In April 2026, the Security Council passed resolution SC16337, requiring that payments for Libyan crude oil be routed exclusively through National Oil Corporation accounts at the Libyan Foreign Bank — a significant step towards closing the illicit export channels that have long undermined both the sanctions regime and Libya’s fiscal unity. With Irini’s mandate already extended until March 2027, the EU should now press for the mission’s hydrocarbon role to be upgraded from monitoring to active interdiction: The financial architecture is in place; what is missing is the enforcement capacity to give it teeth.

Third, engage eastern Libya without conferring unilateral legitimacy. Technical contacts with Haftar’s administration are pragmatically unavoidable given his control over coastline, oil infrastructure, and migration routes. But the planned Benghazi coordination center should not proceed without a clear political framework that includes commitments on human rights and alignment with the UNSMIL roadmap — conditions, not blank checks.

Fourth, build on the unified budget as economic glue. In April 2026, Libya’s rival legislative chambers approved a unified state budget for the first time since 2013 — a Libyan-owned agreement with the Central Bank as its neutral anchor. The EU should seize this opening by conditioning a meaningful share of its NDICI assistance on alignment with unified budget mechanisms, supporting public financial management and audit institutions that serve both administrations. Strengthening the NOC-Central Bank revenue-sharing nexus — the one economic arrangement both sides have an interest in preserving — gives the EU real leverage without the zero-sum dynamics that Russia, Turkey, and the UAE exploit on the security track.

Fifth, make transparency non-negotiable. The EU has never suspended assistance to Libya over documented rights violations, rendering conditionality threats hollow. All programs touching border management or detention should be subject to mandatory, independent human rights impact assessments with published findings — giving civil society and the European Parliament concrete grounds to hold the Commission to account where political will to act has consistently been absent.

The window for reclaiming political relevance in Libya is narrowing, not closed. Each year of Russian and Turkish military entrenchment and EU technical retreat makes a credible future initiative harder to launch. What the EU has demonstrated is that money, in the absence of political will, does not buy influence — it buys the appearance of engagement while others shape the facts on the ground. Reversing this requires accepting that stabilization in Libya is not a technical problem to be managed but a political challenge to be confronted, even when doing so demands difficult choices among member states that have long preferred comfortable inaction.

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Andrea Cellino is Vice President at MEIS, the Middle East Institute Switzerland, and Non-Resident Executive Fellow at GCSP, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. 

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Jalel Harchaoui and Frederic Wehrey

The bank governor installed at the close of that crisis, Naji Issa, now faces relentless political pressure from both sides to disburse funds for projects of varying legitimacy. The result is that Libya’s annual hard-currency deficit was roughly $9 billion last year, and the dinar suffered its steepest sustained depreciation in years, driving a painful surge in consumer prices across the country.

There is also a multibillion-dollar gap between the value of the crude oil the National Oil Corporation extracted in 2025 and the amount it deposited with the central bank. This is largely because both ruling factions are diverting hydrocarbon wealth to their own coffers from the state treasury.

The 2022 power-sharing arrangement has yielded no discernible benefit for ordinary Libyans. Nor has it advanced U.S. or broader Western interests in the country. As Libya’s institutions have continued to weaken, Western firms have found it more difficult to operate in the country since they now face greater unpredictability and opacity. Large U.S. companies struggle to function in such conditions.

Any windfall Libya sees as a result of Iran war–related spikes in crude oil prices will merely obscure the dysfunctional mechanisms responsible for these fiscal problems. In fact, greater oil revenues this year will only encourage both the Dabaibas and the Haftars to indulge in further abuses of the current system.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

DEALS GONE BAD

The Trump administration’s Libya policy is plagued by contradictions. Its insistence on reconciling the two ruling families as a precondition for any unified governance structure suggests that the Dabaiba and Haftar clans are expected to remain in power for the foreseeable future.

But in his February 18 remarks at the UN, Boulos explained that Washington’s goal is to “create the conditions for a democratically elected government to be able to lead Libya”—an outcome that would require at least some of the incumbent leaders to step down.

Washington’s focus on elite bargains and economic statecraft first became clear last summer, when Boulos visited both Tripoli and Benghazi. The ruling family in each city pledged grandiose business opportunities to the U.S. adviser, including tens of billions of dollars in contracts for American firms. In September 2025 and January 2026, Boulos convened further meetings with Libyan leaders in Rome and Paris.

He mediated not between broad political constituencies but rather between representatives of the two families: Ibrahim Dabaiba, the prime minister’s influential nephew, and Saddam Haftar, one of the field marshal’s sons and his presumptive heir. Marketed as a signature Trump administration peace initiative, this format merely imitated the Biden-backed, Emirati-brokered arrangement from 2022.

The Trump administration argues that its diplomacy will help U.S. firms secure business opportunities, yet it overlooks the inherent instability that comes in a country where political power is so yoked to a handful of influential leaders.

To be sure, major U.S. oil companies are expanding their operations in Libya. After years of absence, ExxonMobil is set to survey four offshore blocks. Chevron won an onshore block in the Sirte basin and signed a separate offshore survey agreement. ConocoPhillips has renewed and expanded its existing license for the Waha oil field through 2050, and SLB (Schlumberger) is increasing its well-services role.

But once committed, these firms will have no institutional framework to fall back on when the officials who welcomed them prove unreliable.

The White House’s flawed approach also extends to its engagement with Libya’s fragmented military. Washington worked hard to convince military leaders from both eastern and western Libya to participate together in April’s Flintlock military exercises. But securing that joint participation came at a cost.

For months, Washington refrained from exerting serious pressure on either faction lest one side pull out of the exercises, issuing no public criticism about corrupt practices and instituting no sanctions against midlevel figures. The tradeoff might have been worthwhile had the exercises produced genuine military unification, but no serious integration of rival Libyan forces is yet underway.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Securing the Trump administration’s commercial objectives in Libya requires a level of institutional stability that personalized dealmaking cannot provide. To that end, Washington needs to broaden the scope of its engagement with Libya and with the foreign states that wield influence in the country—primarily Turkey.

The United States should prioritize Libya’s fiscal viability by helping rebuild the independence of its two key economic pillars—the central bank and the National Oil Corporation. It should also support accountability and transparency through independent, public audits and third-party revenue monitoring, opposing the sort of politically motivated interference that produced the 2022 National Oil Corporation debacle and the 2024 central bank crisis.

And any meaningful U.S. effort to stabilize Libya will require comprehensive coordination with Turkey—and, when divergences prove irreconcilable, a willingness to apply pressure on Ankara.

Washington must move beyond seeking intermittent Turkish buy-in and instead commit to granular, sustained engagement that uses both diplomatic coordination and forceful pressure to check Ankara’s unilateral activism.

More broadly, the United States must also support the imperative of national elections for a unified executive. Here, it has a ready platform to promote: the UN’s new road map for Libya, which calls for broad consultations with Libyans to address economic and political grievances, unify the country’s parallel administrations, and, crucially, hold elections.

The UN’s plan also endeavors to incorporate municipal councils, grassroots civil society organizations, and political parties into the country’s technocratic institutions, an approach that should receive more backing from the United States.

Trump’s evisceration of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had previously been supporting both local and national institutions in Libya, has not helped matters.

But for Washington to truly open Libya for steady U.S. business, it must recognize that conditions for long-term investment will never be propitious as long as U.S. officials focus only on pandering to the ambitions of the country’s dueling potentates.

***Jalel Harchaoui is a Libya specialist with the Royal United Services Institute.

Frederic Wehrey is Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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foreign Affairs

Justyna Gudzowska

The New Arab

Libya’s sovereign wealth fund needs better governance before UN sanctions can be eased.

On 11 April, the United States brokered a unified spending framework for Libya, endorsed by both eastern and western factions—a sign of the attention that Washington has been devoting to the North African nation lately.

The US-Israeli war with Iran has only increased the strategic value of Libya, an oil-rich country situated on the southern flank of Europe, away from the Persian Gulf. As a result, international diplomats have been paying closer attention to it and to what its leaders want.

One of those wants is the loosening of restrictions on the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund. Libya’s current leaders desire easier access to the LIA’s frozen billions via a partial lifting of the UN sanctions in place since 2011. Their message to the Security Council and individual member states has been consistent: the freeze has lasted long enough and has harmed Libya. The reality is that the opposite is true.

A fresh asset valuation looms

On 14 April, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2819, a narrow, technical measure that mostly clarified the rules of how some frozen LIA cash can be reinvested to preserve value.

But critically, it also reiterated that the LIA should continue to work “with international accounting and auditing firms to provide accurate audited consolidated financial statements… and to further improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of its investment plan… clarifying data inaccuracies and inconsistencies and addressing conflict of interest issues.”

While the LIA welcomed the resolution’s modest provisions relating to reinvestment of frozen assets, the Council’s continued stance over the need to clean up the LIA’s governance has prompted a fresh commitment from the LIA to revalue its assets.

This undertaking is fraught with risk for the LIA, as a proper asset valuation would necessitate a close look at how Libya’s leaders have been managing the assets they already have access to. An examination of these assets reveals the shaky foundations upon which the LIA’s demands are based.

The case for lifting the asset freeze

The LIA’s lobbyists will no doubt continue promoting the notion that the UN freeze is the main obstacle to sound management of the sovereign fund’s assets. In reality, roughly a third of the portfolio has already been free of restrictions.

A years-long investigation by The Sentry—grounded in forensic inquiry and financial analysis across multiple jurisdictions—found that of the LIA’s $60 billion-plus in assets, only two-thirds are frozen.

The LIA’s current leadership has enjoyed unfettered access to about $20 billion worth of assets for years. How those items have been managed tells us everything we need to know about the institution’s fitness to handle the rest.

This reality is easy to miss because the case for easing sanctions sounds, on its face, rather logical. In 2011, I was an attorney at the Treasury Department in the office responsible for imposing swift and expansive sanctions to prevent Muammar Gaddafi from using the LIA to bankroll his violent suppression of a popular uprising and to safeguard those assets for the benefit of the Libyan people.

Fifteen years later, the Gaddafi regime is long gone, but the LIA’s assets, which were valued at $62.85 billion in 2020, remain hampered by the UN’s continuing sanctions. One can understand why reasonable voices would advocate for lifting them altogether.

That view has gained support in

policy circles.

Last year, a report from the International Crisis Group argued that select portfolio components, particularly under-performing assets and idle cash, would benefit from a partial unfreezing under the supervision of the Security Council or the World Bank. The proposal sounded measured, but it did not consider what was happening with the LIA’s assets that were not frozen.

Actively managed assets lose money and frozen assets make money

Analysis of assets actively managed by the LIA and its subsidiaries makes for sobering reading. In London, a $72 million LIA-owned building has sat vacant for a decade, forgoing an estimated $79 million in rental income. In South Africa, at least $210 million was invested in prime Johannesburg real estate beginning in 1999; no returns have reached Libya, and a $110 million loan internal to the LIA from 2006 remains unpaid.

In Liberia, some $100 million in state investments failed under murky circumstances, with assets appearing to have enriched individuals connected to Liberia’s former President.

At Ola Energy, an LIA-owned fuel company operating across 17 African countries, politically driven management appointments led to ballooning costs and more than $10 million in fines from Moroccan regulators due to insider trading.

These are merely a handful of examples, but they reflect a systemic pattern of mismanagement.

There is also significant irony in how LIA assets have performed over the past 15 years. The LIA contends that the freeze has cost it $4.1 billion in forgone equity returns. Yet the UN Panel of Experts on Libya found that frozen assets had grown in value by nearly 12%.

On the other hand, the value of the LIA’s subsidiaries, which hold assets unaffected by the freeze, has depreciated. The assets nobody could touch outperformed those the LIA has been actively managing. The freeze may have been the best fund manager Libya had, and that alone speaks volumes about the state of the institution.

This does not mean that keeping the current restrictions in place comes without consequences. But the policy question has been badly framed. The main problem is not that the Security Council froze Libya’s sovereign wealth.

It is that the LIA’s current leadership cannot even fully identify the assets it controls, has failed to produce a credible public audit, and presides over an organisation in which conflicts of interest, political interference, and corruption have become routine.

Easing the freeze under these conditions would not unlock prosperity for ordinary Libyans. It would remove the last external constraint on an incumbent team that has demonstrated, across multiple jurisdictions, that it cannot responsibly steward the country’s wealth.

The way forward

Any future sanctions relief must be conditioned on a comprehensive asset valuation and consolidated accounts from the LIA. The details will be critical: robust terms of reference must be established to ensure a genuine reckoning of losses and irregularities, rather than a whitewash (the LIA’s previous efforts have papered over critical data gaps).

The Libyan population deserves access to its national wealth. But that wealth must first be protected from those who have been squandering it.

The freeze has not been the problem. It has, in fact, provided a decent if imperfect safeguard. More importantly, it offers precious leverage—perhaps the only such tool the international community has left—to secure a higher standard of governance from Libya’s leaders. Once lifted, that leverage disappears, and with it any realistic prospect of extracting the institutional reforms that ordinary Libyans need.

Loosening the reins without establishing real safeguards amounts to accepting that a substantial share of the country’s wealth will simply vanish, lost to the same combination of negligence, incompetence, and corruption that has defined the LIA’s stewardship so far.

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Justyna Gudzowska is an expert on sanctions, corruption, terrorism financing, and money laundering, having worked on these issues across the public and private sectors.

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The Sentry

Magnate of Seas and Skies

Gadalla’s commercial expansion includes a foray into both maritime logistics and private aviation. Since May 2024, UDS Shipping Services LLC, a Dubaibased company founded the previous year, has appeared in Lloyd’s Sea searcher database—an authoritative international reference for maritime intelligence covering vessel tracking and ownership screening—as belonging to Ahmed Gadalla’s Alushibe Group.

In May and July 2024, UDS Shipping Services acquired two similar container ships, the Aya 1 and Aya 2, named after Gadalla’s daughter. During the autumn of 2025, the vessels were renamed Zulfa 1 and Zulfa 2, respectively, after one of Gadalla’s Benghazi-based companies. Evidence gathered by The Sentry further confirms that Gadalla indeed controls and runs UDS Shipping’s activities.

While the Aya 1 drew significant global attention after it was intercepted by the Greek and Italian navies in July 2025 owing to suspected arms smuggling, both vessels may also have been involved in fuel smuggling. Their itineraries show repeated movements from various Libyan ports—namely, Tobruk, Benghazi, alKhums, and Misrata—to the UAE, where they conduct ship-to-ship transfers.

The frequency of those transfers combined with the vessels’ reported draft and other evidence gathered by The Sentry suggests that UDS Shipping lifts fuel at Libyan ports and sells it off at or near Emirati ports like Jebel Ali and Fujairah. Moreover, both vessels have on occasion disabled their Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders—a tactic commonly used to conceal illicit maritime activity.346 After their Gulf visits, both ships typically head for Indian hubs, such as Kandla and Mundra, to pick up unknown cargo.

All in all, UDS Shipping’s activities present enough red flags to warrant further scrutiny. UNSCR 2769, adopted in January 2025, condemns attempts to illicitly export refined petroleum products from Libya and renews the authority of member states to inspect and interdict suspect shipments. UDS Shipping Services LLC did not respond to The Sentry’s request for comment.

Another Dubai-based company controlled by Gadalla, al-Mored Oasis General Trading, bought an almost-new Airbus ACJ319neo airplane in November 2024. The purchase price likely exceeded $70 million. The jet, which features a 19-passenger corporate interior, is registered in Aruba as P4-KH519.

From November 2024 through January 2026, while under Gadalla’s control, the aircraft flew frequently between Benghazi, Dubai, and Paris. A secondary circuit by the same plane has included London, Toronto, Amman, and Riyadh. Flight logs also show occasional stops in EU cities—Nice, Palermo, Munich, Milan, and Larnaca—as well as intercontinental trips to Jakarta and Kuta, Indonesia.

The logs even record a brief stop in Las Vegas on September 16, 2025. In June and December 2025, Field Marshal Haftar and his two sons, Khaled and Saddam, traveled on this aircraft for official meetings with President al-Sisi in Egypt. Overall, the plane seems to have served partly as a personal aircraft for Gadalla himself and partly as a transport for the Haftar family on official visits abroad. While al-Mored Oasis sold the plane to another Dubai based company, Forte Strategy Aviation LLC, in late January 2026, members of the Haftar family have continued to use the plane.

The Sentry could not independently verify whether the sale of the aircraft was followed by any arrangement between Gadalla and Forte Strategy.

Gadalla’s Expansion into Libya’s

“Legitimate” Economy

As his notoriety has grown, Gadalla has made efforts to project the image of a genuine entrepreneur, launching high-profile ventures to boost his legitimacy. Gadalla also funds philanthropic activities in Benghazi.

Steel Plant in Benghazi

In July 2024, Gadalla announced a partnership with Tosyalı Holding, a Turkish company, to build the “world’s largest iron steel plant” in Benghazi’s eastern outskirts. News wires officially presented Gadalla as chairman of the Libya United Steel Company for Iron and Steel Industry (SULB), driving economic development and job creation.

Ten months later, Saddam Haftar himself endorsed the Tosyalı-SULB partnership and the would-be steel mega-plant. This alignment demonstrates Gadalla and Saddam’s tight collaboration, despite Gadalla denying any financial arrangements with the Haftar family.

Telecom and Commercial Aviation

Beyond his involvement in finance and banking, Gadalla maintains substantial interests in various other enterprises within eastern Libya’s private sector. In the geopolitically charged domain of telecommunications, he helped the Haftar family establish Ozon, a new mobile operator headquartered in Benghazi. The venture, initially designed to involve Chinese firm Huawei, challenged the authority of Tripoli-based regulators over Libya’s network infrastructure.

In December 2024, the Ministry of Communications and Informatics under the Haftar-controlled government announced it had opened a tender for a comprehensive telecommunications operator license. A few months later, in May 2025, the Haftar-aligned ministry divulged that it had awarded Ozon the comprehensive license and authorized the start-up company to begin work. Tripoli-based regulators rejected the move, arguing that the GNU’s General Authority for Communications and Informatics alone was legally authorized to issue, suspend, or revoke such licenses.

In August 2025, the GNU briefly suspended Huawei’s activities in Libya, alleging violations of national and international law, including contracts with unauthorized entities. The incident stemmed from eastern authorities asking the CBL for a $198 million down payment on a $700 million Huawei contract for Ozon without coordinating with the GNU. If a Chinese conglomerate can strike a direct deal with the Haftar-aligned telecom authorities, it could position itself to secure the nationwide network, or at least shut out Western suppliers such as Nokia from Tripoli-linked infrastructure contracts.

By December 2025, however, there were indications that the Haftar family was dialing back its direct telecom engagement with Chinese firms. Nevertheless, even though ultimate control of the Ozon endeavor rests with Saddam Haftar, Gadalla’s 60% ownership stake establishes him as the formal majority owner, departing from his previously established pattern of serving merely as an informal intermediary between the Haftars and a company’s nominal executives.

Gadalla is also said to influence another private company—Medsky Airways, which was launched in 2022 by Misrata magnate Mohammed Taher Issa and then sold two years later to Fauzi al-Muqla, a Benghazi-based entrepreneur with close ties to Saddam Haftar. According to The Sentry’s sources, regardless of the shareholders who appear on paper, ultimate control of Medsky Airways sits with Saddam Haftar now, and in turn, Gadalla has a say in the company’s day‑to‑day decisions.

The airline’s financial operations—from letters of credit for aircraft leasing to liquidity for payroll—run through banks that Gadalla controls or influences, meaning his sign-off is a prerequisite for Medsky’s day-to-day viability.

Muqla’s formal ownership and Gadalla’s banking leverage functioning as successive layers of a single chain of command leading back to Saddam Haftar. Muqla is also involved in two other private Libyan airlines: he serves as president of Buraq Air’s general assembly and holds a stake in Berniq Airways. Neither Gadalla nor Medsky responded to The Sentry’s request for comment.

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