Author - ab_mnbr

Kersten Knipp

Libya’s robust infrastructure for human traffickers and smugglers serves domestic and Russian enterprises, observers say. What can the European Union do to take control?

Ever since the toppling of Bashar Assad in Syria in December, Russia has been unsure whether its armed forces will be able to maintain their naval base at the Mediterranean port of Tartus and the Hmeimim airbase further north. This uncertainty has prompted Russia to shift its focus to Libya.

“In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime […] you had a lot of flights and cargo ships taking Russian material from bases in Syria toward Libya,” Tarek Megerisi, an analyst at the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations and author of a recent study on Russia’s influence in Libya, told DW. “So, it was clear at that point that in Moscow’s eyes, Libya is the safe space for it in the Mediterranean,” he added.

According to a report published in March by the New York-based think tank The Soufan Center, this is not the first time that Russian ships have called at the Tobruk naval base in eastern Libya. The strategic port is under the control of Khalifa Haftar, the warlord and commander of the Libyan National Army militia who rules large parts of the east of the divided country.

“In June 2024, two Russian destroyers visited the Haftar-controlled Tobruk naval base. The warships’ visit was billed as a training mission but was likely a continuation of the delivery of artillery to the [Libyan National Army] for potential use against its rivals in Tripoli or for export to anti-Western military forces in neighboring countries,” the study highlighted.

Moscow looks to Libya to bolster interests

Moscow’s interests in Libya are also represented by mercenary militias such as the former Wagner Group, which now operates under the name “Africa Corps.” According to Megerisi, Moscow is pursuing several interests in Libya, which has been rattled by years  of civil war.

In principle, Russia is striving to establish a military presence in the Mediterranean, the expert told DW. So far, this had mainly been concentrated in Syria. Megerisi also pointed out that Moscow was interested in commercializing local natural resources, especially energy deposits.

Under pressure from Western sanctions, Russia is also trying to find consumers for its exports. As Megerisi noted, Libya is an important export buyer for Russian weapons.

Haftar’s son expands Libya’s role

as ‘hot spot for smuggling’

In the Libyan conflict, Russia has been supporting the renegade commander Haftar for years. “He remains Moscow’s most important partner,” Ulf Laessing, head of the German political foundation Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Sahel regional program in Mali, told DW.

“The Russians also have diplomatic ties to the western part of the country and to its capital, Tripoli, but the focus is clearly on Haftar,” he added.

However, this has become increasingly risky, as Haftar is now 81 years old and his rule may well be fragile in the face of political pressure from the US. One of his sons, Saddam Haftar — against whom Spain issued an arrest warrant in 2024 on suspicion of arms smuggling — has established himself as Russia’s point of contact in Libya in recent years, as Megerisi pointed out in his study. He’s provided Russia with a network of Libyan military bases, the expert explained.

“Russia has used all this to help Haftar’s putative heir, Saddam Haftar, expand Libya’s role as a hot spot for smuggling of weapons, drugs, fuel — and people,” Megerisi stated.

For years, flights from Syria to eastern Libya were operated mainly by a private Syrian airline, as Laessing noted. “They brought migrants from Asia, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, to eastern Libya. From there, they were transferred to ships that set off for Italy.”

Business based on suffering

According to Megerisi, human trafficking follows a fixed pattern. On arrival, migrants hand over their informal visas to [Haftar’s forces], who detain [the people] until they receive payment by the network.

They are then held for between several days to several weeks, typically in inhuman conditions, before being taken to ‘launch points’ where they board boats towards Europe. At this point, Saddam [Hafter] is paid again for his coastguard units to allow boats through: $100 dollars per migrant for ‘smaller boats’ … or an $80,000 flat fee for larger boats,” he wrote in his study. 

Others are taken to western Libya, Megerisi added: “This demonstrates how Libyan armed groups cross political divides in pursuit of profit.” The routes migrants choose to reach Libya vary, depending on where they’ve come from. While Africans mostly arrive by land, people from Asia tend to come by plane. Afterwards, they usually pass through various points of contact until they reach eastern Libya, where they are handed over to Haftar’s network.

‘Migration as a weapon’

This is where Moscow’s interests vis-a-vis Europe come into play. “The Kremlin has weaponized migration,” Megerisi stated. According to him, this was already the case during the war in Syria, when Russian planes brought migrants from Damascus to Minsk, who then traveled on toward Western Europe.

At the time, it increased pressure on the EU’s external borders, he said, adding that it is currently uncertain whether these flights are still taking place. Since the fall of Assad, the focus of migration has been in the Sahel zone, said Megerisi. While Russian militias are helping to ensure that more people from that region find their way to Europe, they are also working hand in hand with Saddam Haftar, he sai.

In his view, Europe can best counteract people smuggling by offering migrants safe routes and checking them upon arrival. This would offer migrants safer routes of passage, and take the business out of the hands of smugglers, he noted.

***

Kersten Knipp Political editor with a focus on the Middle East.

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Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Shaping the peace

In the aftermath of Haftar’s war, an UN-convened committee was tasked to elect a new prime minister and president for Libya. That duo would organise national elections by December 24th 2021. Russia allegedly worked behind the scenes as a bridge between Cairo and Ankara to construct its dream team of Saleh (Russia’s guy) as president and Bashagha (Turkey’s guy) as prime minister. With that, Moscow’s status in Libya would have been secure.

Indeed, the June 6th “Cairo declaration” from which the roadmap grew looked an awful lot like an evolution of the Saleh-via-Russia proposal from earlier in 2020. It was a solution that synthesised the paternalistic Egyptian belief that the dissolution of the LAAF could lead to Libya’s disintegration with Russia’s tactic from 2017 to legitimise its proxies through a political process.

The announcement included existing propagandistic narratives, such as labelling the LAAF as Libya’s national army and framing it as a counter to the “regional threat” posed by Turkey’s “invasion”. The declaration thus conveniently absolved Haftar’s forces and his international coalition of any accountability for the war they started.

Beyond that, the agreement premised the ceasefire on GNA forces surrendering all their weapons to the shattered LAAF and called for foreign mercenaries to leave Libya; but it failed to mention Wagner. Nor did it mention Wagner’s detachments of press-ganged Syrians, the Sudanese Janjaweed militias from Prigozhin’s burgeoning relationship with the RSF, or the Chadian anti-government rebel groups that Wagner and the LAAF often employed. Underpinning this was a quiet understanding between Russia and Egypt that Haftar would later retired and the LAAF resurrected under a different Qaddafi-era officer.

Nonetheless, its presentation as almost an Arab-nationalist project quickly won it support from multiple Arab states. Egypt and the UAE then talked key Western states such as the US and Britain into backing it. (France needed less persuasion as a longstanding member of their coalition in Libya.) According to diplomats working on Libya at the time, Western leaders bought into the narrative of their Arab partners that this was the only way to avert a long war in eastern Libya and Turkey’s colonisation of the country.

But Egypt still wasn’t quite ready to let go of Haftar. Cairo worked to repair ties between Saleh and Haftar to create a powerful eastern bloc able to influence the UN process. This international feeding frenzy to shape the process ate away at its integrity.

Over the end of 2020, a deeply corrupt round of horse trading took place over the leading positions for an empty roadmap. To many observers’ surprise, the dream team lost the war of bribes—with the ever-mercurial Haftar disappointing Egypt once more as he flipped to support the man who would become prime minister, Abdul-Hamid Dbeibeh.

The December 2021 election famously did not happen as Libya’s political elite scrapped to take full control of the ill-defined electoral process so they could engineer it in their favour. In the run-up, Russia extended limited support without picking sides to all of its onetime proxies, Saif, Haftar and Saleh (who all ran for President).

Wagnerfication in the roscolonial

Between 2019 and the end of 2020, European influence in Libya and relevance to Libyan politics plummeted—displaced by Russia and Turkey. While Russia had undermined Europe diplomatically in the pre-Tripoli era, in this period it worked through Haftar as a “best of a bad bunch” proxy to entrench itself in Libya and build its political and military influence.

Russia showed a rationality about picking a proxy and building influence in Libya that contrasted with the often ideological or highly abstract approach of its Western counterparts. France and the US backed Haftar under a flawed analysis of him as a military strongman; Wagner coldly assessed him as unreliable and tried to juggle two bad choices in Haftar and Saif.

At the UNSC the Kremlin helped to protect Haftar’s war, likely so that Russia could benefit from the chaos it left in its wake. But the Kremlin not only rendered Haftar dependent on Moscow; his regional allies such as the UAE also came to need Russia’s military assistance.

This approach has echoed in other theatres. The discrepancy between Russia’s cold pragmatism and Europe’s ideological approach was evident in Niger when President Mohamed Bazoum was displaced by a Russian-backed military coup in 2023.

Bazoum was a democratically elected leader with Western support. But Russia played on public discontent, again building a formidable disinformation machine that spins a paranoia that now protects the military junta. In Libya, Niger and elsewhere, Europe’s resources would have been well-spent strengthening the information space: for instance, expanding the presence of news institutions into new forms of media and producing a stream of reliable, consistent content that would have pre-emptively filled the void into which Russia eventually surged.

However, the frailty of Russia’s approach is reflected in its initial points of frustration with Haftar. That is: the Kremlin struggled to convert its military cutting-edge into decision-making authority or contracts. This is likely why it sought once more to formalise its authority by brokering the 2019 deal with Erdogan; just as it tried to do in 2017, before Macron beat Putin to a summit.

Nevertheless, Russia’s ability to deploy a complex and effective set of diplomatic, political and military tools to protect Haftar showcased their value to the UAE, which clearly needed some operational assistance in bringing its foreign policy visions to life.

It sparked a relationship that would continue through Sudan and the Sahel. Russia was not just setting a new pace in Libya; through its disinformation networks it had managed to shape how Western audiences and even Western policymakers were discussing the conflict, adeptly moving the spotlight from its mercenary forces to Turkey.

In turning away from Haftar, Russia then strengthened relations with key political players across Libya and domesticated the once-troublesome field marshal. This relegated the LAAF to a vehicle that provided cover for Wagner without being able to hinder its activities.

LAAF staff were not even allowed to access Russian sites such as Jufra without Wagner’s approval. Although they have been less able to do this in other theatres since, Russia’s rapid spread through the Sahel has been accompanied by many tales of dominance and political prowess that shape thinking across the West even as Moscow struggles to entrench as effectively in countries like Mali or Burkina Faso as they did in Libya.

***

Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.

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Andrew McGregor

Executive Summary:  

• Russia’s rehabilitation of an abandoned airbase in the Libyan desert offers an opportunity to create a reliable line of supply to Russian forces operating in West Africa. 
• A Russian military presence close to the borders of Egypt, Sudan, and Chad could make Moscow a player in regional politics and security activities. 
• Moscow continues to navigate a complex system of regional rivalries and alliances, which leaves it open to counter-moves by interested parties in the West. 

One of former Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s greatest foreign policy failures was undoubtedly his 1980s attempt to use his Soviet-armed military to spread Libyan rule and influence in the African Sahel region.

Now, Russia is focused on a similar effort in the Sahel, using the same remote airbase in south-eastern Libya that Qaddafi used to launch his offensive into neighboring Chad. The airbase at Matan al-Sarra is the latest addition to a network of Libyan bases hosting Russian military operations and arms shipments. These include al-Khadim, al-Jufra, Brak al-Shati, al-Wigh, Tamanhint, and al-Qardabiya.

Matan al-Sarra is close to the historically strategic Kufra region, a series of small oases. Today, Kufra is an important staging point for illegal African migrants making for the Mediterranean coast and ultimately Europe.  Kufra and the rest of south-eastern Libya are now controlled by self-appointed “Field Marshal” Khalifa Haftar, commander of the so-called “Libyan National Army” (LNA, a.k.a. Libyan Arab Armed Forces). LNA is a composite force of militias, mercenaries, tribal groups, and more formal military formations supporting one of the two rival governments in Libya, the Tobruk-based Libyan House of Representatives.

Haftar’s 2020 Russian-backed attempt to seize Tripoli and bring Libya under his sole control with the aid of Wagner Group mercenaries was a failure, owing in part to the Government of National Accord’s​​ (GNA) effective use of Turkish drones. Rather than drop his alliance with Russia, Haftar instead decided to intensify relations with Moscow in the hope of obtaining more advanced weapons and other military materiel. Permitting Russian use of the airbase in south-eastern Cyrenaïca is part of this process. 

Before receiving support from Moscow for his military campaigns in Libya, Haftar had a history of cooperating with the United States. In 1987, after losing a military campaign as the then-commander of Libyan forces in Chad, Haftar was captured and disowned by Qaddafi. Valuable specimens of Soviet aircraft and radar abandoned by the Libyans were recovered from the battlefield by a U.S. Special Operations group, temporarily damaging Libyan relations with Moscow.

By 1990, Haftar had agreed to move to the United States with 300 other Libyan prisoners, where he became a U.S. citizen and alleged asset for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its efforts to overthrow Qaddafi, who continued to be backed by the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. Haftar returned to Libya in 2011, where he established a power base in Cyrenaïca against the internationally recognized Tripoli-based GNA, which controls most of northwestern Libya (Tripolitania) with the military assistance of Türkiye.  

The new six-square-kilometer (2.3-square-mile) base at Matan al-Sarra will provide a refueling stop for Russian aircraft heading into areas of West Africa where the Russian Africa Corps is active. It is located close to the Egyptian and Sudanese borders. Most importantly, the base lies just north of Libya’s border with Chad, the latest target for Russian influence since the recent withdrawal of French and U.S. military forces stationed there.

Chad’s discontent with the West follows sustained Russian influence operations and the perceived inability of its Western allies to provide effective military aid in the struggle against regional Islamist insurgencies. Kremlin objectives in Africa are furthered by an influence and propaganda campaign that uses regional influencers and social media to encourage belief in Russia as a viable and sympathetic alternative to the West for economic and security partnerships.

Russia began transferring Syrian troops and contractors to Matan al-Sarra last December, where they were engaged alongside Russian personnel in repair and reconstruction efforts at the long-neglected base. Once a means of projecting Libyan power south into Chad and Sudan, the base lost its raison d’être in 2011 and was abandoned when Qaddafi’s death ended Libyan designs on the African interior.

The region around the base, the supply line from Tobruk, and the route to Sudan have been secured by the LNA’s Tariq bin Ziyad Battalion, under the command of one of Khalifa Haftar’s sons, Saddam Haftar. With daily temperature highs of over 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) for six months of the year and almost zero annual precipitation, service at the isolated base will likely be considered a hardship posting for Russian personnel.   

Russian operatives have been in contact with local tribal communities in the region to form useful alliances. The area around Matan al-Sarra is dominated by the Tubu, the so-called “Black nomads of the Sahara” (as described by French soldier and ethnologist Jean Chapelle in his 1958 work Nomades noirs du Sahara), who were displaced from Kufra in the 1840s by their Arab rivals, the Zuwaya. Russian personnel will likely attempt to curry favor with both groups, as aligning with one against the other would create unwanted turmoil and insecurity.  

A Russian presence at Matan al-Sarra would provide Moscow with the ability to ship arms to Sudanese or Chadian territory quietly. Even though Moscow has shifted most of its support in the Sudan conflict from the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to the rival Sudanese Armed Forces/Transitional Sovereignty Council (SAF/TSC), its forces in Libya do not appear to be interfering with Khalifa Haftar’s supply of arms and vehicles to the RSF.

Moscow likely wishes to avoid alienating the RSF and lose an opportunity to establish influence in a possible RSF-ruled state in Darfur, the home of most RSF fighters. Moscow’s overtures to the Chadian military regime are complicated by Moscow’s attempt to play both sides of the Sudanese conflict.

In late March, the SAF command declared that Chadian airports at N’Djamena and Amdjarras are now “legitimate targets for the Sudanese Armed Forces” following allegations that Chad is using them to forward arms from the United Arab Emirates to RSF forces inside Sudan. 

Russian contractors have been heavily involved in gold-mining operations across the border in Sudanese Darfur to help pay for its war against Ukraine. They may seek to expand into the Tubu-controlled Kalanga region (450 kilometers (280 miles) south-west of Kufra) in the foothills of the Tibesti Mountains along the border with Chad. Chadian forces carried out airstrikes in the region last summer against Chadian rebels gathering there after working as mercenaries in Libya.

The strikes came at the same time as Major General Hassan Matuq al-Zama led the LNA’s 128th Reinforced Brigade in operations to secure the border with Niger and Chad and to displace armed groups in Kalanga involved in smuggling and gold mining. The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) has been working over the last year to develop relations with Khalifa Haftar and encourage military unification in Libya, in an effort to discourage Libyan partnerships with Russia.

In late February, AFRICOM conducted training exercises in Libya involving U.S. B-52H Stratofortress bombers and Libyan military forces representing both rival Libyan governments, designed to promote Libyan military unification while simultaneously slowing the growth of Russian influence.

The exercise came amid regular contacts between Haftar and Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov (responsible for Russian African Corps operations) and a growing number of Russians stationed at the LNA-controlled Brak al-Shati airbase in central Libya. Russian operations in Africa continue to be characterized by a certain diplomatic inconsistency, which may be due in part to inexperience in the region and unfamiliarity with the motives and methods of their would-be partners.

Besides trying to keep a foot in both camps in the Sudan conflict, Moscow continues to attempt to develop relations with the Tripoli-based GNA, which only encourages Khalifa Haftar to leave himself open to U.S. overtures. A failure to make firm and visible commitments makes Kremlin strategic policy in the region a work in progress, susceptible to local manipulation as well as countermoves by Russia’s global rivals. 

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Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Making deals at the crossroads

Having become Haftar’s main military force, the Kremlin pivoted back to mediation. A day after Sirte fell, Putin met his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They promptly issued a joint call for a ceasefire to start on January 12th 2020.

As the date approached, Wagner operatives and their accompanying RSF mercenaries were seen evacuating the Tripoli front for Jufra airbase. Then on January 13th Putin summoned Sarraj and Haftar to Moscow for formal ceasefire negotiations based on a pre-prepared agreement that would see Haftar largely return to the status quo ante positions of April 2019, but keep Sirte.

With hindsight, this looks like a gambit by Turkey and Russia to assert themselves as the core foreign parties to Libya’s conflict and displace Europe’s mediating role. Italy had attempted to hold talks with both Haftar and Sarraj in the days before the Putin-Erdogan summit. But Sarraj had pulled out at the last second, frustrated by what he perceived as European bias towards Haftar. Germany, meanwhile, was working with the UN to host a multilateral conference in Berlin on January 19th to agree a ceasefire and an end to foreign intervention in Libya.

But Wagner’s original analysis of Haftar proved astute. While Sarraj signed up to the deal in Moscow, Haftar refused to give up his hard-won positions in south Tripoli and its environs. His intransigence was allegedly encouraged by the Emirati advisors who never left his side in Moscow and who believed the deal gave Turkey too many concessions. That evening Haftar stormed out, ceasefire unsigned, humiliating Putin.

The field marshal pulled a similar stunt in Berlin a few days later, leaving Germany’s then chancellor Angela Merkel awkwardly trying to entertain a room of world leaders, stalling for time as Haftar refused to commit to a ceasefire.[10] The UAE, which had signed up to the Berlin conference conclusions pledging to respect the arms embargo, immediately increased its weapons deliveries to Haftar, freighting 3,000 tonnes in the subsequent two weeks. Erdogan, for his part, pledged to “teach [Haftar] a lesson”.

By the end of April 2020, that lesson was well under way. Haftar had been expelled from Tripoli’s suburbs and was quickly losing territories west of the capital. For all the bluff and bluster, Wagner’s finest proved quite limited when under fire. But it was not only Russian reputations at risk, so too were Russian relations with Haftar: spats were regularly taking place at the front, and Haftar had even stopped his payments to Wagner.

So, Moscow abandoned Haftar to suffer the consequences of his prideful intransigence. The Kremlin, as always, continued to deny any control over Wagner. But Wagner’s subsequent moves against Haftar (its purported employer), to secure what would become key strategic interests for the Russian state, show once more how the group was the handiest of tools for those leaders in Moscow who denied all knowledge of it.

A slippery symbiosis

As Haftar’s war was gradually lost, the Kremlin worked diplomatically to secure a favourable geopolitical environment for Wagner’s activities on the ground. The group’s hold over the disinformation space likely helped support the Kremlin in this geopolitical gaming. Back in 2020 there was little media, expert or political commentary covering Russia’s role in Libya, its use of foreign mercenaries or Haftar’s weakness. Much of the analysis at that time, in English and in Arabic, focused on Turkey: its “invasion” of Libya and its deployment of Syrian “terrorists”. This commentary also tended to overestimate the LAAF’s military potency.

Moscow thus harnessed Haftar’s and his backers’ growing dependency on Wagner to engineer an existential battlefield crisis for the ageing field marshal. Under the cover of the unravelling chaos, Russia first secured its existing interests. It then re-oriented the international alliance around Haftar towards a new diplomatic endgame for the war. Finally, it used its presence around Haftar’s bases and oil interests to make him dependent on Russian forces as his last line of protection.

Losing the war

After Turkey helped push Haftar out of Tripoli in April 2020, the UN and European states called for a Ramadan truce. The Kremlin pounced on this opportunity to try out a fresh political angle. This time Russia opted to elevate the speaker of the House of Rrepresentatives, Aguileh Saleh, as a new political figurehead for eastern Libya. This pivot seems to have taken place just as Wagner began its initial steps to withdraw from western Libya.

On April 23rd Saleh proposed an immediate ceasefire and the creation of a new “presidency council”, shared between him and representatives from southern and western Libya. This council would then agree to form a new government. Despite a leaked video in which Saleh informed tribal delegates in eastern Libya that Russia wrote the proposal for him, European states and the UN backed the proposal as a political solution to a war that seemed to be slipping away from their influence. 

Egypt and the UAE, however, were not ready to abandon Haftar and pushed him to publicly reject the proposal. The field marshal duly obliged. He also announced the dissolution of the political agreement that had formed the house of representatives and declared military rule (much to Moscow’s chagrin). 

On May 18th a phone call between Putin and Erdogan seemingly led to an agreement that Wagner would withdraw from western Libya. In return the GNA would not invade eastern Libya,. At that point, Wagner withdrew from western Libya in earnest, falling back to Jufra and Libya’s oil installations.

Just a day later, the GNA and Turkey humiliatingly forced the LAAF out of the al-Watiya airbase in the country’s west. Russia had deployed forces to the base when it first arrived on the front and intended to keep control of this large strategic stronghold. But relentless Turkish drone attacks destroyed three Russian Pantsir-S1 air defence batteries in quick succession and made that untenable. This was a humiliation for Moscow and Wagner, as GNA troops paraded Russia’s much vaunted Pantsir around western Libya. They then handed the captured missile system over it to the US.

Wutiya was the loss that began the chain reaction which finally ended the war. It triggered an initial escalation between Turkey and Russia: Russia sent advanced jets into eastern Libya (six Mig 29s, two Sukhoi 24s and two Su-35s); Turkey held large air exercises over the Mediterranean that featured its US-made F-16s.

But Russia’s aircraft were not deployed to attack the Turkish air-defences in Libya or on other such sorties that might have altered the course of the war. This suggests Moscow was not challenging Ankara but merely moving in assets that would help it control the endgame.

Wutiya was also the final straw for the UAE, which finally relented and gave up on Haftar. The government in Abu Dhabi seemed satisfied with Russia’s vision: hold a new front line that guaranteed control of most of Libya’s oil and advanced Saleh’s process as a political vehicle for consolidation, while protecting and reforming the LAAF.

Indeed, Moscow instrumentalised the war via its presence in Syria to broaden its partnership with the UAE. Syria, for example, was the front through which the advanced aircraft were transferred, again disguising any Russian or Emirati culpability for violating the arms embargo. Moscow also used Russian-cultivated pro-Assad Syrian militias such as Liwa al-Quds to recruit mercenaries to secure Jufra and the oil crescent. This Libya collaboration helped facilitate Abu Dhabi’s early outreach to Assad.

To divert Turkey from the Libyan front, for example, in April 2020 Emirati leaders allegedly considered sending the dictator $3bn to break the ceasefire in northern Syria and attack Idlib. It also deepened the UAE’s involvement in Sudan, as Emirati private security firms allegedly press-ganged Sudanese men into Haftar’s limping army. 

As part of its pivot to lead on a new political settlement for Libya, the Kremlin also reached out to the GNA. The target was Fathi Bashagha, a former contact of Kadyrov’s who had since risen in prominence as the GNA’s minister of the interior and a key leader in Tripoli’s defence. But Prigozhin lobbied hard against this—as he held Bashagha responsible for the continuing incarceration of the electioneering operatives who were arrested in 2019.

Wagner’s disinformation team had made a bogeyman out of Bashagha as a terrorist leader. He even featured as the villain of Russian feature films that were produced to drum up domestic support for the release of the jailed operatives.  This diplomatic and military discord was also a legacy of Russia’s initial scoping exercise in Libya, underlining both the benefits and the drawbacks of the Kremlin’s policy to foment domestic competition in its outreach with prospective partner countries.

Eventually, the Kremlin settled on Libya’s foreign minister Mohammed Siyala. Far more consequentially, however, it also targeted Ahmed Maitiq, who was also a commercially influential deputy of Sarraj’s from Misrata. On June 3rd Maitiq, Siyala and Russian officials discussed an immediate ceasefire and peace process based on Saleh’s initiative that would have resulted in the resumption of oil exports, and the return of Russian companies to Libya. This would not be the last time that Maitiq returned from Russia with a controversial plan (see “There will be blood” chapter).

The Russia-Haftar alliance tried to draw the peace lines on the status quo ante positions of April 2019. But this split the GNA. Bashagha, who represented the majority position of the GNA’s armed forces, was adamant they needed to reclaim Sirte and Jufra as a security guarantee. He therefore tried to lobby the US and Europeans on the threat of Russian entrenchment at those crucial crossroads. But Wagner’s defences would make any assault a costly endeavour that GNA forces could not afford without Turkish support.

Egypt was the last piece of Moscow’s diplomatic puzzle. The government in Cairo understood the difficulties of Haftar as a partner, having been against his assault on Tripoli all along. But it also feared that the authoritarian framework it had helped Haftar build in eastern Libya through Operation Dignity would crumble without him. And, like many an abused partner, it probably still believed it could change him.

After the Wutiya debacle Haftar had gone to Cairo like the prodigal son, pleading for Egyptian military support to salvage his operation. Sisi refused to meet with him. On June 5th GNA forces began what was mooted to be a tough battle for Tarhouna,

Haftar’s last stronghold in western Libya. The widespread belief among diplomats, commentators and even some military staff that this would be a long, messy battle—very likely linked to Wagner’s propaganda efforts.

But a mere 24 hours later GNA forces had routed the LAAF almost 400km to the east and were entering Sirte, where they discovered Moscow’s red line. They were met with a series of precision airstrikes, pushing them 100km out of the city, but not causing overwhelming casualties. This was likely a strategic move to not provoke the GNA and Turkey to double down on taking Sirte.

The next day Wagner moved into Sirte, locking down Ghardabiya airbase and Sirte airport and shelling the Wadi Jaraf valley that leads to Jufra to drive out its civilian population. The fleeing families pleaded with the LAAF to intervene, but it was powerless to stop Wagner—which needed Sirte as a buffer to protect its domination over the oil crescent and control of key military bases like Jufra.

The bombardment continued for days until the area was clear, after which Wagner forces placed mines on the roads, set up air defences and built barriers out of sand to create a buffer around Sirte.

Russia had unilaterally drawn

Libya’s new dividing line.

Again Putin and Erdogan agreed to stop the fighting on the newly settled lines, with Putin allegedly threatening an escalation in Syria should the GNA attack Sirte.[12] This was a Turkish-Russian pact that would be announced on Haftar’s side in Cairo, and then become formalised in a UN-sanctified ceasefire agreement on October 23rd 2020.

Haftar ended the battle, and the war, alone and broken. The entire western front had collapsed. His tribal alliances had been eroded, the LAAF was an empty shell, and the ageing field marshal was cowering in Cairo, begging for the protection of his founding partner.

***

Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.

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Gregory Aftandilian

Foreign Interference

On top of this, Libya continues to be subjected to foreign intrigue that is aided and abetted by the interests of its rival governments. There are an estimated 800 to 1,000 Russian mercenaries in Libya supporting Haftar’s forces.

Once part of the now defunct Wagner group, they are now believed to be under Russian government authority, rebranded as part of Russia’s Africa Corps.

Russia sees Libya as an important transit route to Central Africa and views Haftar as an ally. Reports have surfaced that Russia may seek to develop a naval base in Tobruk In the meantime, Haftar has allowed Russian airplanes to land and refuel in al-Jufra, an area under his control.

Haftar also has been supported by the United Arab Emirates, because he claims to be fighting Islamists in Libya, and France. Haftar in late February flew to Paris where he was received by French President Emanuel Macron, who referred to Haftar’s “central role” in Libya’s “political process and stability.”

Egypt used to favor Haftar because he keeps Libyan Islamists at bay and helps to protect its shared border from infiltration by extremists such as from the so-called Islamic State. Since 2024, Cairo has sought to reach a diplomatic solution to Libya’s divisions and to be neutral among its fractious politicians.

Meanwhile, Italy—the closest European Union country—continues to support the GNU. In January Italy went out of its way to shield an official from the GNU from the International Criminal Court (ICC).

This individual, Osama Anjiem, also known as Osama al-Masri, had an ICC warrant against him for war crimes and crimes against humanity. After he was briefly detained in a jail in Turin, Italy, the government of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni decided to release him over a “legal technicality.”

Italian opposition parties and human rights organizations charge that the Meloni government essentially caved and put al-Masri on a plane back to Libya because it relies on the GNU to patrol the Libyan coast to prevent migrants from trying to reach Italy, and because it feared that Libyan militias would unleash boatloads of migrants if al-Masri was not released.

Many believe that without the Turkish military intervention, Tripoli would have fallen.

Turkey also backs the GNU.

In 2019-2020, Turkey played a crucial role in helping the government of western Libya beat back Haftar’s attempt to take Tripoli. Many analysts believed that without this Turkish military intervention—that included drones, officers, and Turkish-directed Syrian mercenaries—Tripoli would have fallen.

But Ankara has exacted a high price for this support. It got the GNU government to endorse Turkey’s expanded claims of territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean, and on August 12, 2024, Turkey disclosed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) it signed with the GNU Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah.

In this MoU, Dbeibah agreed to allow Turkey to restructure Libya’s security sector in return for granting legal immunity and full autonomy to Turkish forces in the country and for financing from the Libyan treasury.

The MoU also gave Turkish forces unrestricted access to Libya’s territory, airspace, and territorial waters. One Libyan analyst described the deal as turning “Libya into a military base for Turkey.”

The UN Security Council has imposed an arms embargo on Libya in 2011, but Turkey obviously has flouted it, as have others.

Sadly, More of the Same

On February 15, 2024, the then-chief of the UN Support Mission for Libya (UMSMIL), Abdoulaye Bathily, addressed the UN Security Council in what can only be described as a pessimistic message.

He stated that despite various meetings and tentative agreements, “Key Libyan institutional stakeholders appear unwilling to resolve the outstanding politically contested issues that would clear the path to the long-awaited elections in Libya.” He underscored that the status quo “seems to suit” these stakeholders.

As mentioned, he resigned a few months later, citing the “selfish resolve of current leaders to maintain the status quo through delaying tactics…at the expense of the Libyan people.” Bathily was especially frustrated that he could not get the long-delayed national elections back on the agenda.

The new UNSMIL team, headed by Hanna Tetteh, a former foreign minister of Ghana with extensive experience in African diplomacy, seems competent and dedicated. But the team is likely experiencing the same level of frustration as Bathily and his predecessors did.

On March 11, 2025, UNSMIL hosted an online platform for 29 Libyan young people that was revealing in what they expressed. According to the UN readout, the 10 female and 19 male participants overwhelmingly emphasized political stability as a fundamental requirement for economic recovery.

Many also highlighted the urgent need for improved governance, stronger accountability, and decisive measures to curb widespread corruption.” As one young Libyan said, “I am a graduate with no job, no car, and don’t benefit from fuel subsidies.” Undoubtedly aware of how these subsidies are part of an elaborate corruption scheme, he added, “We need clear guidance from the government on how to address [their] removal.”

Instead of heeding the advice of these young people—Libya’s future—the rival factions continue to enrich themselves and to maintain their fiefdoms. Unless they change course, they will have alienated a whole generation of young people whom they need to rebuild and unify the country.

As for the international community, it needs to keep a spotlight on Libya and impose penalties on governments that, instead of pressing the two factions to unify, want one side to prevail or simply maintain the status quo with arms and economic support.

***

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.

_____________

Fuat Emir Şefkatli

Türkiye, which has been approaching the two separate power centers and social bases of the country at an equal distance since the beginning of the Libya crisis, has recently attached great importance to diplomatic opening with the east of the country, with which it has strong relations.

Fuat Emir Şefkatli from the National Defense University wrote for AA Analysis about the benefits that Türkiye’s steps towards normalization with eastern Libya will bring to both sides.

***

Libya entered a new era in political, social and military terms when the uprising against then-President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 turned into the February Revolution. The country is still referred to as a frozen conflict zone today. The power struggle in Libya, which largely began as rival political factions attempting to claim ownership of the revolution after the revolution, eventually gave way to military polarization as armed groups became active actors.

The unilateral policies of international powers and the inadequacy of supra-state mechanisms such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) and NATO, which sought to resolve the crisis in Libya, were also influential in the emergence of this picture.

Turkey, on the other hand, is looking for solutions to restore peace and stability to the country within the framework of international law and foreign policy principles within this complex equation that has emerged over time. In fact, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan noted in an interview with an international media organization on July 24 that relations with eastern Libya are progressing quite well. Minister Fidan, who announced that the Turkish Consulate General in Benghazi has reopened, added that they are in contact with Tobruk-based Parliament Speaker Akile Salih, as well as Khalifa Haftar and his sons.

Normalization with the East is gaining

momentum

As is known, Türkiye’s steps towards normalization with eastern Libya were taken in the last quarter of 2021. In this sense, the period when Türkiye put the opening towards Cyrenaica, the eastern region of Libya, on the agenda corresponded to a period of political deadlock following the cancellation of the presidential elections planned to be held in December 2021.

During these dates, official visits by a delegation from the Libyan Parliament to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) were followed by the visit of the then Libyan Ambassador to Turkey, Kenan Yılmaz, to Akile Salih. However, the turning point in relations in a positive direction was the reception of Akile Salih by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2022.

Turkey, which has approached the two separate power centers and social bases of the country at an equal distance since the beginning of the Libyan crisis, has recently attached great importance to diplomatic openings with the east of the country, with which it has strong historical and cultural relations. However, in addition to its increasing contacts with the east of Libya, Turkey also aims to maintain its relations with the National Unity Government (NMU) led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dibeybe and institutions in the west.

Unifying and solution-oriented rhetoric

Türkiye’s recent integrative rhetoric and policy preferences developed through statements and visits can be interpreted as a serious effort to shift the tense atmosphere in Libya to the diplomatic ground. Because the legitimacy crisis between the East and the West, the fragmented security bureaucracy and governance crises constitute a strong obstacle to putting comprehensive solutions on the agenda.

On the other hand, the negotiation channels that Turkey is trying to establish contain certain gains in the medium and long term for both Libya and Turkey under three subheadings. The first of these, as emphasized by Minister Fidan in his interview, is Türkiye’s motivation and intention to use the relations it has developed with the East for East-West integration.

Türkiye, which is holding talks not only with local elements but also with Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar in order to organize elections and ensure democratic transition in Libya, will increase its diplomatic efforts to establish stability and peace, which will prevent a new conflict environment in Libya and may strengthen the unity of the country in the long term. It should be said that this situation is an effective policy choice for Türkiye in terms of both preserving current gains and reaching potential future benefits.

Based on this, the second issue is that Türkiye, which has deep historical, cultural and economic relations with both parts of Libya, will secure its interests and commercial gains in the Eastern Mediterranean, namely the Blue Homeland, by transferring its influence from the West to the East. In such a scenario, the political climate in the East, which was relatively against Türkiye’s Maritime Delegation Agreement in 2020 and Hydrocarbon Agreement in 2022, may be completely changed.

Although the relevant agreements are based on solid ground in terms of international law and legitimacy, obtaining the indirect consent of the Parliament and the Haftar wing for these agreements may strengthen the Turkey-Libya alliance relationship in the Eastern Mediterranean geopolitics.

On the other hand, when Türkiye’s normalization with eastern Libya is more broad-based and institutional, it is quite possible that the agreements made with Turkish companies through the Libya Development and Reconstruction Fund affiliated with the Parliament will increase significantly. The commercial benefits that this possible picture will provide to Türkiye are of critical importance.

Finally, Türkiye’s military presence in the west of the country has served as a deterrent in preventing small-scale conflicts from turning into large-scale civil wars after 2020. Türkiye’s military mission, based on training and consultancy, has not only balanced the military polarization between the east and the west, but also the fragmented security bureaucracy in the west.

At this point, high-level diplomatic contacts with eastern Libya may also pave the way for breaking the negative narrative developed by the eastern-centered public and media organizations regarding Türkiye’s military presence in the past. At the same time, the ongoing process may provide Türkiye with significant time in planning military structuring and engagements until a democratic structure is established.

***

Fuat Emir Şefkatli is a PhD candidate at the National Defense University.

_____________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Wagnerfication: How Russia harnesses

struggling strongmen

…

The Devil’s bargain

The story of how Wagner entrenched around Haftar suggests a transition to a more direct route for the Kremlin to secure its in-country interests. The forcefulness of this route was probably tempered by Russia’s enthusiasm for its relations with its new friends: Egypt and the UAE. Underneath it all, however, the lifeline of Russia’s involvement in Libya was still the same cargo planes. And they were still traversing the same routes, in violation of the same arms embargo, as they had from the start.

Planting the idea

It did not take long for Wagner to begin a disinformation campaign in Libya to dominate the country’s already poorly regulated and managed information space. Unsurprisingly, Wagner’s Libya operations mimicked the tactical modus operandi of Prigozhin’s infamous Internet Research Agency.

Facebook was the primary communication platform for over two-thirds of Libyans. From December 2018 onwards Wagner created a network of interlinked news sites and “social-first” Facebook pages that focused on memes and live videos. The pages were run by administrators in Egypt and managed by Russian-trained reporters alongside Libyan subcontractors.

This complicated the task for Libyan authorities and even international investigators to track which pages featured Russian involvement. Wagner’s use of Libyan consultants also allowed it to pick up and sensationalise local grievances to polarise audiences, creating impassioned followers who could then be conditioned into adopting Russian-devised narratives.

The Facebook-trialled content then branched out to other social media platforms, along with private WhatsApp and Telegram groups. These activities clustered to create the impression the Wagner-promoted views were widely supported, manufacturing highly impactful echo chambers. The pages also adopted savvy social media engagement tactics, using features like competitions, feedback forms, and Facebook Live videos to develop close relationships with their audience.

The network of different organisations that hosted these pages illustrates how useful the decentralised system of ad-hoc companies was for masking Wagner activities. When leaked documents exposed the Libya operation, Facebook uncovered similar networks in the Central Africa Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, Mozambique and Sudan.

Haftar himself proved more problematic. In early 2019, Wagner assessed Libya’s socio-political scene through one of Prigozhin’s agencies and found the field marshal wanting. The report derided Haftar’s expansion in Libya as simply “bribing local tribes for the right to plant the [LAAF] flag”, likely using the billions Goznac, the Russian mint, continued to print.

Wagner’s report also found that Haftar was pushing powerful western Libyan groups (such as the Misratans) to unite against him, as well as isolating former allies like the Tebu tribes of southern Libya. Most concerningly of all for Moscow, the report concluded that Haftar was simply using Russian assistance to boost his profile and strengthen his ties with the likes of France and the US.

A crucial UN conference to organise elections was set to take place in April. Wagner opted to boost the political profile of Saif al-Qaddafi, the old dictator’s son, as a counterbalance to Haftar (who by the end of March was advancing in western Libya towards Tripoli). Then they could use the disaffected Tebu along with mercenaries from a new alliance Wagner was developing with the RSF in Sudan to build Saif an army that could displace Haftar.

But Wagner’s first meeting with Saif revealed him to be delusional, narcissistic and irrational. Saif thought Haftar was his biggest threat. But he also believed that, as soon as he went public, Haftar’s officers would simply abandon the LAAF for him. Clearly, this candidate would also need some work.

By March 2019, Wagner’s disinformation operation had grown to 12 Facebook groups. These included pro-Haftar, pro-Saif and highly localised news sites that boasted audiences of over 250,000 and had a weekly penetration of up to two million users. This meant that Russian narratives were hitting just under one-third of Libya’s population of 6.5 million.

That same month, a Prigozhin-linked firm bought a 50% stake in the former state-run, pro-Qaddafi al-Jamahiriya TV station. It also created a pro-LAAF newspaper and officially consulted with the pro-Haftar al-Hadath news organisation. One key line was that “the UN is failing in its goals for Libya”.

In May 2019 three operatives linked to a Wagner-linked troll factory were arrested in Tripoli, accused of electioneering on behalf of Saif. But by then Haftar had begun a full assault on Tripoli, loosely Libya’s second post-uprising civil war. This would disrupt the very UN process supposed to lead to the elections Russia aimed to engineer in Saif’s favour.

Summoning a demon

Only Russia publicly protected Haftar following his attack on Tripoli, vetoing an April 7th Security Council resolution that would have condemned the field marshal’s offensive—though France and the US implied they would if Russia did not.

The Russian cargo planes used by the UAE during Operation Dignity to deliver Russian ammunition to Haftar’s forces were now chartered by the UAE and Egypt. They sent three planeloads a day carrying up to 500 tonnes each of Russian ammunition to Haftar’s profligate forces. 

Tripoli’s defenders noted the use of advanced Russian weaponry such as anti-tank Kornet missiles being used to devastating effect, likely again delivered through other partners such as the UAE.[4] Separately, Russia sent journalists to Benghazi to help the propaganda effort.

Back in April, Wagner had assessed Haftar’s chances of taking Tripoli as “nil”, noting that the field marshal’s diplomatic support from France, Russia and the US had made him delusional. Despite the extensive support, Haftar had overcommitted on the battlefield and was already being pushed back.

The LAAF’s command and control was comically unprofessional, to the extent it shot down its own aircraft. According to Wagner’s assessment, “The plan to ‘wear down’ Sarraj’s army […] has actually been turned into the attrition of the [LAAF] itself”. Only massive investment from the UAE, including the deployment of Chinese Wing Loong drones allowed Haftar to maintain a stalemate, while Moscow bided its time.

As autumn approached, Haftar’s alliance was crumbling. High casualties had provoked dissent among the eastern tribes that once made up the bulk of his rank and file. Tribal fighters from the south were gradually abandoning the front having been mis-sold a quick war and easy riches. There was dissent in the ranks, and despite billions of dollars in armaments from Haftar’s backers, along with months of air superiority thanks to the drones, the field marshal had not made any meaningful progress into Tripoli—in fact he had even lost his forward operating base to the GNA two months into the assault.

But from September 2019 Russia dramatically increased its military assistance. (US intelligence sources would later claim that the UAE had financed Wagner’s deployment.)

At least 122 operatives were dispatched to the Tripoli front, including 39 specialist sniper teams.[6] Russian air force planes flew them and their equipment directly from the UAE to Emirati controlled airbases in Libya.[7] The operatives quickly claimed the al-Watiya air base in Libya’s western Nafusa mountains, where they deployed an SU-22 fighter-bomber.

This sowed fear in the ranks of Tripoli’s defenders. The combination of airstrikes and attack helicopters launched from al-Watiya (along with more competent soldiering) allowed Haftar to finally progress into Tripoli’s suburbs. By the end of November at least 24 Wagner operatives (including a senior commander) had been killed.[8] But hundreds more were arriving.

Russia’s sudden intervention also made the LAAF more strategic. On September 16th airstrikes hit key GNA defences in Sirte: the western gate to the oil crescent; a central node of Libya’s east-west coastal road; and a main route south, through the major LAAF-controlled airbase at Jufra. This was the beginning of an operation to soften up the city that marked the east-west divide between Haftar and the GNA.

Following the airstrikes, Misratan forces guarding Sirte were gradually dragged to buttress Tripoli’s defences against the Wagner offensive. Then on January 7th 2020, the LAAF seized Sirte in a lightening raid involving feints, misinformation and a level of tactical sophistication previously alien to Haftar’s force. Taking Sirte granted Wagner access to another airbase, Ghardabiya.

It also provided Haftar with the security to shut off Libya’s oil exports (the financial lifeline of Tripoli’s defence). Around the same time as the LAAF took Sirte, Russia imported a unit of Syrian mercenaries—flown from Damascus to Benghazi on Syria’s Cham Wings airline.[9]

In western Libya meanwhile, Turkey had signed a memorandum of understanding with a desperate GNA. The Turkish army accordingly took defensive positions in western Libya. The memorandum provided the GNA with Turkish security guarantees, in exchange for a deal to delineate maritime boundaries between the two countries—likely a diplomatic gambit by Ankara to boost its position in the eastern Mediterranean. This was the gamechanger that defined the battle for Tripoli (and what came after it). It also created a new foil in Libya for a rising Russia.

***

Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.

_______________________

Gregory Aftandilian

Libya has fallen off the international radar screen as other crises in the region—the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah wars, the Sudanese civil war, and the change of regime in Syria—have dominated the news. But Libya’s internal problems have not abated. The country remains deeply polarized.

The political leadership in each region is backed by militia groups that have benefited from oil, extortion, and human trafficking schemes that prey on the large number of migrants in the country. Although a new United Nations (UN) team is in place, it is not likely to be any more successful than the previous ones.

Last April Abdoulaye Bathily, threw up his hands and resigned after failing to get the two sides to agree on a political process, centered upon national elections for a national unity government, to end the divide. As long as each side is comfortable profiting from the status quo, there is little incentive for them to hold the vote; the proposed elections have been stalled since December 2021.

In the meantime, foreign governments, with their own agendas in Libya, contribute to the division by backing their favorite domestic actors in this internal struggle.

No Change in Government Structures

and Power Dynamics

Libya has been divided politically since 2014, three years following the 2011 overthrow of dictator Muammar Qaddafi.

Today’s Government of National Unity (GNU) is based in Tripoli, controls about a third of the northern part of the country, and is supported by various militias in the west. A rival government in the east, finding its legitimacy from the House of Representatives (HoR) in Tobruk, controls the remaining two-thirds of Libya’s north (the rest of the country is mostly sparsely populated desert).

The Tobruk government depends on the support of the self-anointed Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and his large militia, the Libyan National Army (LNA).

Since Haftar’s failed attempt to take over Tripoli in 2019-2020, the country has been wracked by occasional outbursts of militia violence. The only good news in recent months is that such fighting has decreased.

This is not because the militias have suddenly embraced the idea of peaceful co-existence. Rather, they probably have been too busy making money, perhaps motivated by the belief that violence is bad for business.

Oil Divisions and Schemes

Libya has long been Africa’s second-largest oil producer after Nigeria. In the 1970s, under Qaddafi, oil production reached 3 million barrels per day (b/d). But in the post-Qadhafi period, output has been much lower and has fluctuated based on political and security conditions.

In a September 2020 agreement between the eastern- and western-based governments, revenues from the oil and gas sectors were to be equally divided. But the two sides disagreed over who should head the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and the Central Bank (oil revenues are first to go into accounts managed by the Central Bank).

The dispute came to a head in August 2024 when forces loyal to Haftar blockaded major oil fields and ports, causing oil production to fall from 1.2 million b/d to 600,000 b/d. After several weeks of negotiations and the appointment of a new Central Bank Governor acceptable to Haftar and his political allies, production shot back up to 1.2 million b/d in October 2024, and by December had inched up to 1.4 million b/d.

Libyan authorities hope that production can be expanded to 2 million b/d by the end of 2025, although that may be too ambitious a goal. Oil revenues, which account for 95 percent of Libya’s exports and two-thirds of its GDP, are obviously vital to the country’s economy, including by financing food imports for its population, almost a third of which remains in poverty.

At the same time, the country’s dueling governments use oil revenues to sustain themselves, and this income serves as a deterrent to forming a unified government. In other words, oil revenues keep both sides comfortable in sustaining the status quo.

The country’s dueling governments

use oil revenues to sustain themselves.

Perhaps to become less beholden to the NOC and the Central Bank for oil revenues, Khalifa Haftar in 2023 allowed his son, Saddam, heir apparent and now chief of staff of the LNA, to set up a private Libyan oil company outside of the NOC.

This new company, called Arkenu, is headquartered in Benghazi in the east. According to media reports, between May and December 2024, Arkenu exported 7.6 million barrels of oil worth some $600 million.

But instead of being deposited in Libya’s Central Bank account in New York, the money from Arkenu was reportedly put into bank accounts in Dubai and Geneva.

Oil revenues also fund barter schemes that sustain the rival governments. Both west and east governments have been engaged in illicit barter arrangements that work as follows. Oil authorities swap crude oil for refined fuels (the country lacks adequate refinery capabilities) instead of purchasing them. The refined fuels are sold domestically at subsidized prices and then resold on the black market.

Libya’s subsidized fuel system costs $12.5 billion annually. Because gasoline and diesel are sold at a fraction of their production costs, black market operators tied to the political factions and the armed militias reap large profits in subsequent sales. Import volumes of refined fuel totaled 5.5 million tons in 2020 and reached 10.35 million tons by 2024.

Exploitation of Migrants

Another obstacle to unification and peace is a huge influx, and Libyan exploitation of, irregular migrants and refugees, who are mostly people from sub-Saharan Africa seeking to reach Europe from Libya’s Mediterranean coast.

According to one report, as of May 2024 there were 725,304 migrants and refugees in the country. More than 4,000 of them were arbitrarily detained in official detention centers, while another 3,000 were detained in unofficial detention centers operated by Libyan armed groups.

On March 18, 2025, the GNU Minister of Interior Emad al-Trabelsi claimed in front of ambassadors and representatives of the International Organization of Migration (IOM) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees that 4 million migrants are currently in the country.

He emphasized that Libya will not bear the burden of caring for them alone and will not become a resettlement zone for them, either. In this he was supported by the prime minister of the eastern HoR government, Osama Hammad, who essentially said the same thing.

Trabelsi underscored that the root of the problem is Libya’s porous southern border, and called on the European Union to provide modern equipment and technology to improve monitoring.

But the southern border is a vast desert area that is a huge challenge to control. Moreover, many traffickers of these desperate migrants belong to militias tied to the east and west governments. So, on the one hand, Libyan officials complain about an inundation of migrants; on the other hand, there are profits to be made from this sordid business.

Information continues to surface about this human tragedy.

On March 22, 2024, IOM reported that at least 65 bodies were found in a mass grave in the southwest desert. The victims likely died while being smuggled to the Mediterranean.

This disturbing story came on the heels of another report that at least 60 migrants died after leaving the Libyan coast to cross the Mediterranean in a dingy.

Although the UN has provided some humanitarian assistance to migrants in Libya, it is nowhere near enough, and these people are being subjected to abuse, rape, and sexual violence allegedly perpetrated by Libyan officials and affiliated militias. The UN recently called on Libyan authorities to desist from misinformation and hate speech campaigns about migrants.

To be sure, Libya faces genuine challenges in dealing with a migrant crisis of this scale. But the fact that the government turns a blind eye to or is implicated in human trafficking schemes and reaps profits from it, is central to the problem.

***

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.

________________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Sparkling conversation

The GNA’s mandate was set to expire in December 2017. Russia’s response seems to have been to attempt to mediate a political deal to form a new government and formalise the LAAF as Libya’s army. This would have given Haftar and his Soviet-trained officers a powerful role in the country’s institutions.

In January 2017 Russia granted the field marshal the military honour of being received on its aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, where he spoke again with Shoigu and received assurances of more military support. Alongside this, Moscow increased its contact with the GNA and political and military forces from Misrata on Libya’s north-western coast. But the Kremlin never got the chance to turn these flirtations into a summit.

In July 2017 the French president Emmanuel Macron pipped Putin as a mediator, convening Haftar and Sarraj at La Celle St Cloud in France where they agreed a roadmap towards elections. Haftar, for his part, roundly ignored the roadmap to continue with his conquering. He also wooed the Kremlin back towards him with promises of oil from the crescent Russia had helped him seize. Still constrained by the same limits on arms transfers, however, Russia’s ministry of defence would have to give way to the less conspicuous GRU.

In May 2018 Wagner appeared in Libya for the first time, helping Haftar storm Derna—the last city in eastern Libya outside his control. Haftar was apparently so pleased with this support that he returned to Moscow on November 10th to catch up with Shoigu and, more notably, Prigozhin.

The meetings in Moscow came during the build-up to Italy’s November 12th “Palermo Conference”, through which Rome aimed to jumpstart the stalled Haftar-Sarraj agreement from La Celle St Cloud. But Moscow’s mercurial friend made life difficult. Indeed, he prevaricated over whether he would attend at all, confirming only at the last minute, and then arriving more than an hour late.

Haftar also refused to attend plenary sessions, instead insisting on a “mini summit” with Sarraj, Sisi and Russia’s then prime minister Dimitry Medvedev. The Russia-Egypt-Libya breakout room pointedly excluded Turkey (which at that point was at odds with Russia in Syria and a key regional rival of Egypt and the UAE). This exclusion promptly turned the mini summit into a mini diplomatic scandal, as Ankara’s delegation stormed out of the conference altogether. Later Sarraj would pull Medvedev aside and complain about Russia’s destabilising support for Haftar.

Russian military flights to Libya had peaked alongside Wagner’s deployment as Haftar consolidated in the east and moved south. The field marshal had been struggling to operate around or gain control of the National Oil Corporation (NOC), Libya’s sole legal seller of crude. But Wagner already had expertise in helping Assad in Syria illicitly sell oil, generally offering military assistance in return for shares in local assets. This suggests Haftar was attempting to keep his promises to transform control of the oil crescent into sales.

This indicates another shift in Moscow’s tactics: unable to claim an exclusive proxy or distinguish itself as a mediator, the Kremlin would use Wagner to entrench around Libya’s assets and use them to serve Russian interests.

Cultivation in the roscolonial

Europeans can learn a lot from how Russia re-established itself in Libya: from better understanding how the Kremlin opens up unfamiliar states to its influence, to the need to create robust diplomatic processes and the importance of protecting international norms and alliances. Indeed, the early stages of the second Trump presidency suggest that Europeans should view these less as lessons to take in gradually and more as a long-overdue cramming session.

Russia’s re-entry into Libya was a masterclass in how to fill a vacuum—even if it was in pursuit of an inherently destabilising goal. The network of elites Russia deployed demonstrates the breadth of tools Russia can apply to grasp such opportunities. Kadyrov was a cultural envoy of sorts; the oligarchs offered an avenue with corrupt autocrats and influential business figures; the ministry of defence provided an attractive vehicle for relationship building with local military actors, given Russia’s powerful military reputation.

The series of coups in the Sahel over the past few years have provided ample opportunity for Russia to deploy its military leverage. Russia has most successfully built relationships with African partners who have performed such coups, like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traore; or helped others towards coups of their own, such as the junta in Niger and Sudan’s RSF. Of course, this relationship-building depends upon bypassing any sort of rules-based order, which Europeans could not police in Libya because key states like France were also supporting Haftar.

But looking back, Russia’s re-entry into Libya also provides insight into the processes by which Russia’s relationship-building continues towards client relationships and entrenchment. If the US and European governments had better policed the arms embargo, then Russia would not have been able to develop a foothold in Libya. Nor could it have benefited from its Libyan scoping exercise to build relationships with vital partners of the West such as the UAE.

It was in this context of impunity that Russia introduced Wagner. The result was Haftar being empowered to counter Macron’s electoral process and undermine the Palermo conference. Europeans’ own involvement with Haftar and their struggles to build a meaningful Libyan or international constituency around their conferences gave Russia and Haftar the space to do this.

***

Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.

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Prof. Miral Sabry AlAshry

In press statements, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Libya, Ali al-Hibri, issued a warning about dangerous economic indicators threatening Libya. He warned of the repercussions of a lack of transparency and increasing uncontrolled government spending, given Libya’s near-total reliance on the oil sector as the primary source of national income.

The collapse in oil prices to their lowest levels in four years has sparked speculation that markets could see prices drop to $40 per barrel. Goldman Sachs expects oil prices to decline significantly by the end of 2025 and 2026, based on several scenarios linked to developments in global markets. First, Goldman Sachs lowered its forecasts for average Brent and WTI crude prices for 2026, citing increased recession risks and the potential for increased OPEC+ supply. Second, in the worst-case scenario, Goldman Sachs estimated that Brent crude prices would fall below $40 per barrel by late 2026.

In its oil price forecast, Goldman Sachs estimated that Brent and WTI crude prices would reach $62 and $58 per barrel by December 2025, and around $55 and $51 by December 2026, based on two assumptions. First, the US economy will avoid a recession due to the significant reduction in tariffs scheduled to be implemented on April 9, 2025. Second, supply from eight OPEC+ member countries will increase moderately, with two final increases of between 130,000 and 140,000 barrels each. Under a US recession and OPEC’s baseline scenario, Brent crude oil prices are projected to fall to $58 by December 2025 and $50 by December 2026.

Under a slowing global GDP scenario, with OPEC’s baseline unchanged, Brent crude oil prices are projected to fall to $54 by December 2025 and $45 by December 2026. This slowdown in global GDP and the complete elimination of OPEC cuts could lead to a supply adjustment from non-OPEC countries. Oil prices are likely to exceed expectations given a sharp decline in tariff policy. This is why US President Donald Trump escalated his threats to impose tariffs on China on Monday, April 7, 2025. The European Union has drawn up plans to impose retaliatory tariffs in response to the US decisions, increasing fears of a protracted trade war that could push the global economy into recession.

The collapse in crude oil prices has caused a decline in Venezuelan oil exports due to taxes imposed by President Donald Trump on countries that buy from Venezuela. Kazakhstan’s oil exports have fallen due to the recent agreement with the G8 OPEC+ alliance.

Libya is on the brink of collapse in the near future as the state’s budget break-even point relies heavily on oil prices stabilizing at no less than $72 per barrel. Any drop below this threshold could lead to severe financial imbalances, directly affecting the state’s ability to fulfill its operational and developmental commitments.

It was noted that the National Oil Corporation (NOC) had been allocated around 34 billion Libyan dinars to increase production to two million barrels per day. However, the fate of this expenditure remains uncertain, with concerns raised about its lack of transparency. Libyan citizens are unaware of whether concrete steps have been taken to reach this production goal, which is crucial for achieving a temporary economic equilibrium.

In order to address the structural challenges facing the national economy, particularly its heavy reliance on the oil market and lack of diversified income sources, the Libyan government must disclose its economic policies and develop a clear strategic plan that is transparent, monitored, and accountable. Economic sustainability hinges on effective fiscal policy implementation, promoting foreign direct investment, and enhancing the productivity and efficiency of the private sector to reduce dependence on government spending.

Recent data shows that Libya is facing a severe fiscal deficit of $1.5 billion, as total oil revenues amounted to $778 million while foreign exchange disbursements reached approximately $2.3 billion. This financial crisis is attributed to various structural economic issues, including low oil revenues relative to production and global prices, as well as a significant increase in fuel import costs, which consume about 45% of oil revenues.

Excessive government spending by the two rival governments has led to a significant increase in demand for foreign currency. This is due to the absence of effective policies to control imports or support local production. As a result, 60% of oil revenues are now being used to cover imports. Non-oil revenues have almost completely collapsed, no longer covering even 1% of public spending. This is exacerbated by the malfunctioning of monetary policy tools and the increasing money supply both inside and outside the banking system.

The escalation of smuggling of fuel and goods to neighboring countries is contributing to the worsening foreign exchange crisis. This is putting increasing pressure on the national economy. Without radical solutions or effective regulatory measures, the situation is likely to continue deteriorating.

Libya is indicating a major fundamental flaw in the management of its economy. This issue seems to be out of everyone’s control as long as they continue to operate independently without comprehensive coordination. The absence of a framework regulating public spending and the lack of a clear fiscal and monetary policy from the Central Bank are leading to the continued collapse of the economy. The economic situation in Libya is suffering from a severe crisis that requires swift action and a comprehensive policy. The economic deterioration will continue, and the consequences will be disastrous at all levels. Libya needs comprehensive coordination among all stakeholders to manage the economy and a clear fiscal and monetary policy to restore stability to the country.

The narrowing of the Brent market’s downward trend, a market structure in which spot futures prices are higher than supply at a later date, indicates growing investor concern about declining demand for crude oil and the possibility of a supply glut. Trump’s tariffs on China began at 104%, adding a 50% increase after Beijing failed to raise its retaliatory tariffs on US goods. Beijing also vowed not to succumb to what it called US blackmail after Trump threatened to impose an additional 50% tariff on Chinese goods if the country did not lift the 34% retaliatory tariffs.

China’s aggressive response weakens the chances of a quick agreement between the world’s two largest economies, raising growing fears of a global economic recession. Growth in Chinese oil demand, which currently stands at between 50,000 and 100,000 barrels per day, is at risk if the trade war continues. However, a stronger stimulus to boost domestic consumption could mitigate the losses.

The decline in oil prices was worsened by the decision of OPEC+, which includes the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies like Russia, to increase production in May by 411,000 barrels per day. Analysts believe this move will push the market into a surplus.

Goldman Sachs expects Brent and WTI crude prices to drop. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices are projected to fall to $62 and $58 per barrel by December 2025, and to $55 and $51 per barrel by December 2026. With the decline in oil prices, the price of Russian ESPO crude oil fell below the $60 per barrel price ceiling for the first time ever. Data from the American Petroleum Institute showed that US crude oil inventories fell by 1.1 million barrels in the week ending April 4, compared to expectations in a poll for an increase of about 1.4 million barrels.

In Libya, oil production declined by 8.5% in 2024 due to the crisis in the Central Bank of Libya, dropping from 1.17 million barrels per day to 0.54 million barrels per day in September. Production increased to 1.3 million barrels per day by the end of October. Oil prices remained at around $80 per barrel, as they were in 2023, amid declining global demand, particularly from China, and rising regional geopolitical risks.

Libya’s economic trends over the past decade have been severely impacted by ongoing instability, with losses estimated at approximately $600 billion over ten years in constant 2015 dollars. Libya’s GDP increased by 74% in 2023. Key challenges also include heavy reliance on oil, lack of diversification, low productivity, and deteriorating healthcare and education quality. In the medium term, Libya faces the challenge of diversifying its economy and reducing its dependence on hydrocarbons. Stability and improved governance will be key components of Libya’s economic recovery, as evidenced by the severe economic losses incurred due to instability in recent years.

Oil production is expected to recover to 1.2 million barrels per day in 2025 and 1.3 million barrels per day in 2026, boosting GDP growth to 9.6% in 2025 and 8.4% in 2026. Non-oil GDP growth is projected to reach 1.8% in 2024, driven by consumption, and will average around 9% over the period 2025-2026.

Despite lower oil revenues in 2024, fiscal and external surpluses are projected to reach 1.7% and 4.1% of GDP, respectively, due to lower spending and imports. Now, after Trump’s escalation with China and the world, and the collapse in the price of a barrel of oil, Libya cannot continue. Its economy is based on oil, and with a per capita gross national income of $7,570 in 2023, Libya falls into the upper-middle-income bracket. This, too, will decline due to fluctuating oil prices.

By prioritizing non-oil sectors and encouraging private-sector-led growth, Libya can implement projects to boost its development indicators, thereby improving citizens’ lives, aligning with global action, and finding rapid solutions that could reverse Libya’s economic decline.

***

Prof. Miral Sabry AlAshry is Co-lead for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at the Centre for Freedom of the Media, the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield.

_______________________

Federica Saini Fasanotti

Since 2011, Libya has been in turmoil, facing a divided state, stalled elections, militia control and unsuccessful UN stabilization efforts.

Libya remains fragmented between

rival factions

• Armed groups consolidate power, fueling oil smuggling
• Local elections show potential, but national governance remains flawed
• For comprehensive insights, tune into our AI-powered podcast here

ince Muammar Qaddafi’s ousting and death in 2011, oil-rich Libya has been plunged into more than a decade of turmoil, marked by political instability and rival factions. This chaos has divided Libya between the east and west, creating a “de facto” partition.

On one side is the Government of National Unity, led by Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibeh and based in Tripoli, with the advisory support of the High Council of State. On the other side is the Government of National Stability, based in Tobruk, led by Osama Hamad and supported by the House of Representatives and the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army (LNA) under the command of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

This division dates back to the country’s last election of 2014, which sparked the start of the second Libyan civil war. Although national elections were scheduled for December 2021, they were indefinitely suspended due to instability.

Since 2011, the United Nations has monitored Libya’s challenging political stabilization process through its Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL). The mission has appointed 10 representatives and envoys to date, with the latest being Hanna Serwaa Tetteh of Ghana, previously the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Horn of Africa. Over the years, UNSMIL has attempted to unite the warring parties through various approaches, but these efforts have not succeeded.

The final proposal from Stephanie Koury, former UN special representative in Libya, was to initiate a new political process by convening a committee of experts to address all unresolved issues, such as the electoral law, to pave the way for the long-awaited elections. A national reconciliation dialogue would allow the country to find a broader consensus. Instead, Libyan politics have been captured by a few actors backed by foreign states, spoiling the natural process of political selection.

Despite the political quagmire at the national level, locally, Libyan citizens have many ways to make their voices heard. Various rounds of municipal elections have been successfully held over the years. For instance, on November 16, 2024, the first phase of the municipal council elections took place in 58 municipalities, with a significant turnout of 74 percent of eligible voters. However, the second round, originally scheduled for February 8, has been delayed to an unspecified date. Some Libyans suggest it could be May 2025, but this remains unofficial.

Despite these local bright spots, the national crisis persists, exacerbated by issues that have drawn international attention and action.

Sanctions and Libya’s ongoing political crisis

On January 16, 2025, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2769 to extend the mandate of the Panel of Experts on Libya until May 15, 2026, and to authorize actions against the illegal export of Libyan petroleum until May 1, 2026. The package also includes updates to the arms embargo and asset freeze measures already in place from Resolution 1970, adopted on February 26, 2011. The latest report from the UN’s Panel of Experts, released in December 2024, highlighted the alarming situation in Libya more than a decade after the revolution against Qaddafi.

The report describes how armed groups in Libya have further solidified their hold on politics, consistently weakening already fragile public institutions. One key factor is the systematic smuggling of oil, facilitated by the General Electric Company of Libya’s unethical use of the facilities in the old harbor in Benghazi to divert a considerable amount of diesel.

In fact, since March 2022, experts have estimated – and these are conservative figures – that the volume of smuggled diesel was 1.13 million tons. According to the Panel of Experts’ report, the president of GECOL, Mohamed Omar Hassan al-Mashay, “was instrumental in preventing governmental entities from exercising any form of oversight, including by intimidating responsible national authorities and consistently refusing to cooperate with them.”

The real decision-makers were likely the leaders of western Libya’s most powerful and influential militias. This included figures like Abdel Ghani al-Kikli, who heads the Stability Support Apparatus, and Colonel Abdulsalam al-Zobi, the commander of the 111th Brigade.

The situation in the east is equally concerning. The LNA, commanded directly by one of Mr. Haftar’s sons, Saddam Haftar, has complete control over all activities in the territorial waters of Cyrenaica. This includes both legal and illegal operations ranging from security to trade. In the south, the LNA exercises unrestricted authority over the borders with Niger and Chad, overseeing all illicit cross-border activities involving arms, drugs, precious minerals and human trafficking.

Furthermore, according to the UN, the Haftars have permitted two Sudanese armies (the Rapid Support Forces and Sudanese Armed Forces), which have been at war with each other for nearly two years, to use southern Libya as a safe haven. In addition to the Sudanese groups, the region also hosts al-Qaeda and Islamic State cells, as well as foreign armed groups and private military companies, particularly from Russia and Turkey.

International response to Libya’s militia-controlled instability

Libyan institutions are held hostage by militias that use them as their fiefdoms. These include not only GECOL but also the National Oil Corporation, the Libyan Central Bank and the Libyan Investment Authority, which is Libya’s sovereign wealth fund established in 2006 to manage the country’s financial reserves from oil revenues. However, 10 member states and 16 financial institutions have consistently failed to adhere to the asset freeze intended to safeguard the Libyan people’s resources, resulting in the erosion or weakening of these assets in certain instances.

Facts & figures

Libya’s tumultuous journey since 2011

2011: Protests erupted in Benghazi in February, spreading nationwide. Muammar Qaddafi was captured and killed in October; the National Transitional Council declared Libya liberated and planned for elections.

2012: The U.S. Ambassador was killed in an extremist attack in September 2012.

2013: The Petroleum Facilities Guard militia started oil export blockades.

2014-2015: Khalifa Haftar launched anti-extremist operations in Benghazi. Tripoli airport was destroyed, and embassies were closed. In January 2015, warring factions declared a partial ceasefire after UN-sponsored talks. Mr. Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) failed to retake Derna as the Islamic State gained ground.

2016-2017: The UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) was formed in March. Mr. Haftar’s troops seized oil terminals in September. Fighting by the Islamic State persisted in Sirte. In 2017, tensions increased regarding the control of oil fields as both the GNA and LNA attempted to assert dominance over lucrative oil resources.

2018-2020: In September 2018, the GNA declared an emergency in Tripoli. Mr. Haftar’s troops attacked the capital city in April 2019; the GNA sought global support.

2021-2023: Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibeh became prime minister in March 2021. A year later, the eastern-based House of Representatives appointed Fathi Bashagha as interim prime minister. In May 2023, the parliament suspended Mr. Bashagha and assigned Finance Minister Osama Hamada to the role.

2024: Oil production was halted due to Central Bank disputes. Local elections took place in 58 municipalities, the first simultaneous voting in the east and west since 2014.

***

According to the UN Security Council Report, negative interest rates and unreasonable management fees have been charged. Essentially, the report denounced “non-compliance with international standards, discrepancies in agreed-upon procedures, conflict of interest, depletion of frozen assets, limited visibility of the Libyan Investment Authority and limited control over its frozen assets.”

Moreover, the militiamen operating the notorious prisons in the Tripoli area pose a significant concern. This is illustrated in the case of Osama Najim Almasri, the head of the Mitiga Detention Center in Libya, who has been accused of torturing refugees held in the prisons. Italy’s decision to deport rather than hold him, despite an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, has created real challenges for the Italian government. The situation underscores a significant and systemic issue: In detention camps for migrants and others, militias often enforce summary justice, leading to reports of torture, sexual violence and various human rights violations.

Scenarios

….

Highly unlikely in the short to

medium term: Elections are held

For this scenario to become a reality, an international security force would be essential, with a mandate to keep the militias at bay and enable those who need to work on the electoral process to do so without fearing for their own safety or their loved ones. Considering the evident deterioration of the situation from multiple perspectives, it seems unlikely that Libya can manage this alone. The Libyans and their closest partners, including Italy and France, would undoubtedly be the main beneficiaries if this scenario were to occur. Many large companies have refrained from investing in Libya in previous years precisely because of this endemic instability. Additionally, migrant flows departing from the Libyan shores would be controlled and managed, benefiting both Africa and Europe.

Very likely: Libya slides further

into social disorder

Over the past 14 years, UNSMIL has failed to implement solutions genuinely accepted by the Libyan people. The intention was to “empower” citizens; however, this approach overlooked that UN personnel often had to engage with inadequate leadership.

It would have been unfeasible for national elections to take place in 2021, without any established electoral law or political parties. Stability will remain out of reach as long as these issues are not addressed. Change appears possible, up to a certain point – when those in power realize they could lose their position to a genuine democratic process, prompting them to go to great lengths not to be ousted.

The consequences of this instability are evident and are further intensified by the ongoing discontent among the Libyan population and rising concerns about migration within European public opinion.

Moreover, the presence of foreign powers hostile to European policies, particularly Russia, will also hinder stabilization. The new American administration is unlikely to seek more engagement with Libya. Vice President J.D. Vance clearly stated the administration’s position at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, leaving European leaders stunned by stating that it is no longer in the United States’ interest to protect Europe.

***

Federica Saini Fasanotti is a military historian and specialist in counterinsurgency. Her fieldwork and research have covered, among others, Afghanistan, Libya, Ethiopia and Somalia, and her latest book is “La Forma della Guerra” (“The Shape of the War”) (Historical Office of the General Staff, Italian Ministry of Defense, 2022).

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Abdullah Alkabir

Following the initiative of Musa Al-Koni, a member of the Presidential Council (PC) representing the south, to go back to the three-region system politically and the previous governorate system administratively, Abdullah Al-Lafi, a member of the PC representing the west, is proposing another initiative.

He proposes the election of a three-headed Presidential Council, the same composition as the current Presidential Council, but elected directly by the people, and dividing the country administratively according to the thirteen electoral districts. Mohamed Menfi, Head of the Council, did not miss the presidential initiative season, proposing a popular referendum on the contentious points of the electoral laws.

In fact, all initiatives or proposals contain ideas worthy of discussion and can be built upon and developed to produce a solid formulation that could be key to resolving the crisis. However, a question has been raised by almost all commentators on the initiatives:

Why do the initiatives come from individual Council members? or in other words?

Why doesn’t the Presidential Council propose a single, comprehensive initiative that represents the PC’s collective vision for a political solution?

All answers pointed to the existence of deep disagreements among the PC members, and they did not reach an understanding that would allow them to come up with a unified initiative.

Each PC member then presented his own vision in the manner he chose, without any comment or response from the other houses or councils or ruling political forces. This is perhaps because political activity declines during the month of Ramadan, as people in general, and elites in particular, are distracted and preoccupied with other matters during this month.

However, positions will not change even if initiatives are proposed outside of the holy month, for several reasons.

The first is awaiting the proposals of the advisory committee affiliated with the United Nations mission, as these provide some hope for producing acceptable and applicable outcomes.

The second is despair regarding the possibility of the parties in power agreeing on a way out of the crisis, as this would mean their exit from the scene and consequently the loss of their power and influence.

The third is a firm conviction that any initiative not adopted by the United Nations is useless, even if supported by influential international or regional parties in the Libyan crisis.

Presidential proposals and initiatives are not devoid of ideas that could actually put the country on the path to ending the crisis, if the intentions were purely for the nation. Returning to a popular referendum, as Menfi suggests, means deferring to the legitimate authority, and whatever it decides is what should be implemented.

Breaking up centralization through a system of regions and governorates, as Al-Koni believes, will ease the burden on the capital by distributing powers and wealth among the regions and governorates.

This would eliminate the possibility of coups and the seizure of power by controlling the capital. Adopting a tripartite presidential council, as Al-Lafi believes, would prevent the concentration of power in a single president, who might deviate from the path of authoritarian decision-making and end any participation in it.

To be fair, what is noticeable about all presidential initiatives, and other initiatives, including those of the United Nations, is that there is no initiative that approaches a referendum on the draft constitution, which, in my opinion, is the most likely path to writing the final chapter of the transitional phase.

Even if it does not secure a two-thirds majority in the first round, the way forward is clear in the Constitutional Declaration. It will be returned to the Committee of Sixty to make the required amendments to the rejected or reserved articles, and then it will be put to a referendum again in a second round.

There are various reasons for objecting to the draft constitution, some of which are external, because the constitution being voted on constitutes the solid foundation for independence. Some regional and international powers do not want this independence and believe that the state of chaos and division serves their interests better. It is unfortunate that some local political parties, for other reasons, are aligning themselves with obstructing the constitutional process.

Ignoring the constitutional process and pursuing other initiatives is not in the interest of the nation and its future, but rather serves political parties that insist on remaining in power to serve their own personal agendas, indifferent to the fact that such insistence further compromises the nation’s remaining unity and sovereignty.

_______________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Cultivation: How Russia enters

geopolitical vacuums

…

A bear knocks at the door

In 2014 Russia had to regrow its influence, almost from scratch, in a new Libya that was fracturing politically, economically and militarily. The Kremlin encouraged groups of Russia’s elites to approach Libyans from their respective angles: politicos doing diplomacy, oligarchs conducting economic outreach, and the ministry of defence overseeing military partnership building. Russian foreign policy experts have since described this process as a competition to see who could bring the best prize back to Putin.[2] Intentionally or not, the result of this scoping exercise was a platform on which Russia could build more complex foreign policy.

Setting the table

The diplomatic track was heavily influenced by Ramzan Kadyrov. The Chechen leader had worked closely with Putin on Middle East policy since the early 2010s, acting as something of a cultural envoy for Russia thanks to longstanding connections between the region and Chechnya.

In 2015 Kadyrov picked a close associate, Lev Dengov (a career diplomat with previous experience in Libya) to lead the new “Russian contact group for intra-Libyan settlement”. This would become the Russian foreign ministry’s official vehicle to engage with Libya. The contact group was a mission focused on Libya’s Tripoli-based and internationally recognised government of national accord (GNA).

To supplement this, Russia used Kadyrov’s links with Islamist and old revolutionary armed groups to expand its network across western Libya. This allowed Russia to set itself up as a mediator between Libya’s warring parties and helped ensure it a place in the UN-led political process to reunify the country. In March 2017, then GNA president Fayez Sarraj visited Moscow, the Kremlin used the visit to push its narrative on how the West broke Libya and pose as the one who would fix it. It was also an opportunity to get Sarraj to promise to review the Russian contracts that were lost in 2011 with the fall of Qaddafi.

Also competing for Putin’s approval were an assortment of oligarchs and business figures with commercial ties to Libya. They helped economically re-establish Russia across Libya and leverage the value of the former contracts to develop political allies who could restart frozen projects. But the most successful of Putin’s men were those from the ministry of defence.

In 2014 Russia had reached out to militia leader Ibrahim Jathran, who then controlled Libya’s lucrative oil crescent, an eastern coastal area rich in hydrocarbons. Jathran had blocked Libyan oil exports, holding the country to ransom in a power move he justified as a demand for more equitable division of oil revenues.

In a deal that would have turned this opportunistic yet small-time militia leader into a serious national force, Russian agents offered Jathran weapons and help to illicitly sell oil and get into government. According to Russian foreign policy experts, the Kremlin places great value on monogamy in its proxies. Moscow accordingly demanded to be the militia leader’s sole foreign backer. This was also an apparent attempt to develop an exclusive partnership on valuable Libyan real estate. Ultimately, Jathran backed out following pressure from other intervening states.

Since Haftar—then a disgraced Qaddafi-era “general”—returned from exile in the US in 2011, he has attempted several coups in Libya. So far, after years of gruelling military campaigns and thanks to considerable foreign support, he can claim control of Libya’s eastern province of Cyrenaica and its southern province of Fezzan.

In May 2014 Haftar launched “Operation Dignity”, a key formal trigger for Libya’s first post-uprising civil war. The general advertised this as a push to purge extremists from the eastern city of Benghazi, following assassination campaigns that had plunged the city into fear, and which he entirely blamed on his enemies. Haftar managed to rally former regime officers and eastern tribes to create a new military force, the “Libyan Arab Armed Forces” (LAAF).

The LAAF was an expression of its external backing. Egypt helped Haftar design his army and the UAE provided the funding, technology and know-how. Both regional powers had also cultivated his failed coup against Tripoli in February 2014 and then drove his subsequent military operation on from behind. Haftar’s operation thus opened a Libyan front in a Gulf-driven counter-revolution to revert the Arab world’s nascent democracies to authoritarian rule, one that Sisi had begun in Egypt the previous year.

Haftar and his band of former officers were familiar with Russia, having trained at the Soviet Frunze Military Academy. But the general, with his strong ties to the West, was far from the unclaimed prize Jathran would have been. Russia would also have likely hesitated to take a side in what the Kremlin perceived to be a regional spat: with Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia supporting Haftar; and with Turkey and Qatar considered to be behind a rival, Islamist movement called “Libya Dawn”.

Accordingly, Russia’s initial support for Haftar was low-key. In the first two years of Operation Dignity, Russian arms were quietly air freighted in cargo planes to Tobruk on Libya’s eastern Mediterranean coast. Russian Sukhoi, Mi-8, and MiG-21 military aircraft appeared in the country to join Haftar’s ageing Soviet fleet, as did military trainers, technicians and advisers. Russia provided all this in cooperation with the UAE and Egypt.

Indeed, that the support happened at all was likely down to Moscow’s willingness to trade exclusivity for an opportunity to strengthen Russian relations with those regional powers which were considered more important than Libya, like the UAE. This became the foundation of a military alliance between Moscow and Abu Dhabi that would later flourish, helping to ignite more civil wars in Libya, then in Sudan, and later fuelling Russia’s push through the Sahel. Simultaneously, Moscow used its official contact group in western Libya, via Dengov, to maintain plausible deniability and claim that Russia’s position was support for the UN-led peace process (and the ongoing 2011 Security Council arms embargo).

Boiling the kettle

From 2016 Russia’s quiet support for Haftar began to get much louder. In May the Russian mint Goznac printed 4bn dinars ($2.9bn) of a counterfeit Libyan currency to provide liquidity to Haftar’s cash-strapped operation. It did this through a parallel central bank inaugurated by Libya’s parliament, the House of Representatives, which sat in Haftar-controlled Tobruk.

Despite protestations from the GNA and Western governments, given that these notes differed from Libya’s official currency printed by Britain’s De La Rue, the GNA eventually accepted the Russian bills as Libyan tender. This was likely because not doing so could have led to completely divided economic systems that would be near impossible to reunify.

In June Haftar visited Moscow, where he met defence minister Sergei Shoigu and security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev. The general used this first Russia visit to formally request more advanced weapons systems and replacements for the LAAF’s ageing aircraft. Haftar’s spokesman hailed the trip as a successful formalisation of the relationship. The agreements reportedly included weapons maintenance and air defences, and enabled the LAAF to claim frozen Qaddafi-era arms contracts.

For its part, the Kremlin publicly maintained that Russia could not re-activate weapons contracts until the arms embargo was lifted. But the claims of Jathran’s lieutenants when Haftar swept the oil crescent in September 2016 suggests advanced weaponry was being transferred regardless. These claims were corroborated by new munitions such as Russian-made guided artillery shells suddenly appearing in Haftar’s battles.

Having gained control over Libya’s reactivated oil terminals, Haftar was emboldened to push for more. In September, he anointed himself with the rank of field marshal. Shortly after, he dispatched an ambassador to Moscow  to request a Syria-style intervention. Haftar then returned himself in November, allegedly offering Russia an airbase near Benghazi if it could get rid of the arms embargoKhalifa Haftar in Moscow after his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, November 29th, 2016.

A few things were likely behind the romance of 2016. Firstly, Moscow had failed to secure exclusivity over any military proxy. Jathran was a busted flush. The western Libyan armed groups Kadyrov had engaged were working closely with the US, Britain and Italy in a military operation to free the central city of Sirte from the Islamic State group.

Secondly, the Haftar project helped Moscow show it could be a practical friend to the America’s most active regional partner, the UAE. Moscow had also managed to deepen relations with Cairo in its bid to to secure rights over Sidi Barrani, a Soviet-era airbase on Egypt’s far western coastline. Conveniently enough, the Sidi Barrani airbase was also a significant platform for Russia’s stepped up assistance to Haftar, just as Russia deployed special forces to the Egyptian base.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Russia was far from the only intervening power claiming to support the UN while developing its own proxies and securing its interests. International norms around Libya were being chipped away by a multitude of states pursuing their own gains. France, for instance, was actively supporting Haftar and flouting the arms embargo alongside Egypt, Russia and the UAE, believing only a strongman could bring stability to Libya’s multitude of militias.

It found itself against Italy, which was cooperating with western Libyan authorities and militias in the hope that this would stop hundreds of thousands of migrants from crossing the Mediterranean and ending up on its shores. The UK and Turkey also sided with the western, internationally recognised authorities.

This rejection of the rules-based order for unilateral interventions around individual actors and forces diminished Libya’s potential for political progress. Europeans had also validated a game they could only lose against states willing to use force and violate norms more flagrantly. Russia favoured this game. In the words of Gerald Feierstein, a senior US diplomat for the Middle East, Putin was “pushing the envelope” and would keep doing so “until he was stopped”.

Putin was not stopped. But Russia would have to shift its focus to deepen its engagement in Libya. Haftar’s “love-bombing” of Moscow over 2016 could not alter the fact that lifting the arms embargo was practically impossible. Libya was still divided, Haftar was still warring in Benghazi, and he was still detested by western Libyan groups. The returns for the Kremlin had seemingly plateaued. Compared with the UAE and France, Russia remained a junior partner in Haftar’s military coalition. And there would be no Russian base in Egypt, as the newly inaugurated US president—one Donald Trump—worked to improve relations with his “favourite dictator”, President Sisi. So, it seems that Russia pivoted from proxy building to pursuing formal political engagement. This is a pivot that would reappear multiple times over the coming years.

***

Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.

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Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi

A fragile “entente roscolonial”

The story of Russia’s return to Libya begins with its post-2007 moves to reemerge as a great power after the blows of the 1990s—and more specifically its moves to dominate the south-eastern Mediterranean basin as part of that comeback.

For example, Russia tried to fill the void the US left when it froze military aid to Egypt after President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s bloody coup in 2013. Then in 2015 Russia went all-in to defend its last warm-water naval base at Tartus in Syria, invoking its “regime change” narrative about Libya to shield Assad and other Russian interests in the country from UN-led humanitarian interventions in the war there. By entrenching its power in Libya, Moscow would benefit further. It could tap the country’s vast energy potential. One UK intelligence source also claimed that Moscow explicitly wanted to trigger further waves of migration towards Europe.

In February 2022 Russia’s attempted full-scale invasion of Ukraine galvanised the Kremlin’s antagonism towards the West. Unlike in Crimea in 2014 or for its crimes in Libya, this time the West held Russia accountable for its violation of international norms.

Russia’s violation was also condemned by multiple resolutions at the UN General Assembly, underlining the weakness of Moscow’s multilateral politicking compared with its Western rivals. Putin’s diplomats subsequently moved more aggressively to case Russia as the geopolitical antithesis to the West; a role in which it aims to build mutually beneficial partnerships with the “world majority” and “democratise” the world order.

According to Russian foreign policy experts, in a practical sense, this means leaders in the Kremlin currently see the world as a collection of pro-West, pro-Russia or agnostic states, seemingly based on a country’s position in the Ukraine war.[1] More generally, it gives Russia a geopolitical stature far beyond what its economic, military or cultural power might ordinarily allow. It also creates, ironically, colonialist opportunities for Russia to increase that power.

Accordingly, the Kremlin seems to have divided the world into clusters, developing bespoke tools to maximise the benefits of different groupings and countries. Although it is unspoken, Russia’s “new world” appears to be stratified into those with which it can partner to build alternative global systems (like the UAE); and those it can exploit enhance its own status (like Libya). The latter countries are usually marked by the presence of the network of shell companies formerly known as the “Wagner Group” (alongside other PMCs).

Wagner politics was a vehicle for Russian entrenchment that usually involved propping up weak strongmen in exchange for asset control. Despite its presentation as a PMC, mercenaries were always technically illegal in Russia; and there was never a single entity named “Wagner”. The label “Wagner Group” was itself an abstraction that referred to a network of companies that sprung up, often ad hoc, to provide political engineering, military assistance and resource extraction services where Russia was building its influence.

Despite their protestations, the Russian presidency and senior GRU officers always had close control over Wagner activities. Soldiers joining Wagner and related PMCs (which this paper will group under “Wagner”) sign contracts with GRU “Unit 35555”, a laboratory for socio-psychological research. Besides the GRU, the network was cohered and unified by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin as a financier and central administrative node; and characters such as the (also late) neo-Nazi Dimitry Utkin were the military link. Utkin’s nom de guerre “Wagner” gave the group its name.

Prigozhin’s mutiny in mid-2023 was a show of discontent towards Russia’s ministry of defence that span out of control. Following Prigozhin’s and Utkin’s deaths in a plane crash shortly after, the Kremlin dropped the pretence entirely and removed the layers of abstraction. It named the new body it formed to oversee this process “Africa Corps” (seemingly after the Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel’s “Afrika Korps”).

Russia benefits economically from the assets of Wagner-linked states, and from the group’s military gains by using its men as mercenaries. These fragile states are becoming increasingly interconnected, in what some analysts have dubbed the “entente roscolonial”. All the while, Moscow broadcasts a revolutionary propaganda of helping to “fix what the West broke”.

Whether by happenstance or design, in 2025 Libya is the operational hub of Russia’s Africa cluster. The military bases Wagner commandeered —at Tobruk, al-Khadim (Benghazi), Ghardabiya (Sirte), Jufra, Brak-al Shati (in Libya’s south-west) and the newly developed Maaten al-Sarra (near the border with Chad)—are the logistical hubs Russia uses to support its other African deployments.

These bases form part of an airbridge that helped arm the attempted putsch by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023 and sustain the country’s devastating civil war ever since. Troop movements and flights over 2024 indicate that Russia’s bases in Libya have become indispensable in maintaining its nascent deployments in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso as well as its prolonged presence in the Central African Republic.

Alongside this, Haftar has become a diplomatic asset, used to provide Libyan support to Russia’s African acolytes. Moscow’s proxy sent one son, Sadeeq Haftar, to Khartoum with $2m for the RSF leader on the eve of Sudan’s civil war in 2023.

Another son, Saddam Haftar, was dispatched to tour the Sahelian outposts of the entente over 2024 with a view to formalising a diplomatic alliance. These military partnerships helped the Nigerien junta under Abdourahamane Tchiani and Chad’s leader secure lucrative cross-border smuggling routes.

In early 2025 Khalifa Haftar even visited Belarus. It seems Russia is using Belarus as cover to help upgrade Tobruk’s Gamal Abdul Nasser military base—which Moscow likely aims to make its new Mediterranean naval headquarters after Assad’s fall put its Syrian base at risk. The wide range of cooperation discussed in Minsk is seemingly a channel to inject Libyan money into Belarus in exchange. This underlines how Russia can use Libyan finances and the fig leaf of Haftar’s military to strengthen its non-African Russian allies.

Underpinning Russia’s new Africa infrastructure is a smuggling network that Wagner presumably guided Saddam Haftar to build. Through this the Kremlin exploits (and exacerbates) Libya’s lawlessness to circumvent European sanctions on fuel exports. It also destabilises Europe and the US through the weaponisation of migration; smuggles fuel and arms to other African proxies; and, of course, makes plenty of money.

The rebrand from Wagner to Africa Corps does not change the fundamentals. Even the Nazi connotations of the name have remained, along with the group’s longstanding disinformation function. The biggest change is in the governing structure. The Kremlin has effectively shortened the leash between Putin and the operatives on the ground—formalising the Russian presence in Libya.

The price of this is a loss of plausible deniability. But in a post-Ukraine world where the UN Security Council is effectively frozen, and Putin has an ICC arrest warrant against him, that is no longer so important. In a post-Gaza world, in which the US president has imposed sanctions on the very same court, it matters even less; especially not to Putin’s strategic narrative that he is battling to democratise the world-order against US imperialism.

But, as the story of Russia’s re-entrenchment in Libya will show, Moscow is not in as comfortable position as it seems. The shift to Africa Corps was a consolidation. Putin will inevitably miss the initiative Prigozhin brought to enable such a rapid and creative rise in security partnerships and business relationships.

Russia is already struggling in Burkina Faso and Mali; it seems to have few ideas to stabilise Libya beyond attempting to nudge its proxies into formal positions of power (essentially, to recreate the Assad scenario). Given the predatory, extractive and fractious nature of all these proxies, that is more likely to worsen than end the chaos.

Now is the time for Europeans to extract Russia’s Libyan linchpin. The three phases through which Russia achieved its status in Libya show how the Kremlin feels out opportunities to develop proxies. They reveal how it can then entrench itself and ultimately hijack a nation to pursue its geopolitical goals. But they also show how Russia’s vacuum-filling is unsustainable and destructive. Europeans will have to learn from this to compete with Russia in the confrontation Putin has forced on them.

***

Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.

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Trump’s national security team is seeking to blunt Russian influence in the Mediterranean and in Africa by engaging eastern Libya warlord Khalifa Haftar, despite his well-documented human rights abuses.

Russia’s steady expansion of forces in Haftar-controlled territory positions Moscow to help anti-Western military governments in Africa. Trump officials conducted a show of force in Libya in February to try to weaken Haftar’s ties to the Kremlin. Haftar’s opponents fear he will use aid from both Washington and Moscow to try to consolidate control over the whole country.

The fall of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi in 2011 left Libya divided between two rival administrations, opening the country to interference by major powers seeking geopolitical advantage. Fourteen years after Qadhafi’s collapse, big power rivalry in Libya is only escalating, not diminishing, and in the process, feeding the ambitions of Libya’s divided leaders. A U.N.-backed government in Tripoli, reliant on Islamist and other militias, is supported primarily by Türkiye, which looks to Tripoli to help it prevent rival powers from encroaching on its influence in the eastern Mediterranean.

Contending for control over Libya is a Benghazi-based parliament, controlled by allies of strongman Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA) militia. For many years, shunned by the U.S. and European powers because of his brutal repression of Islamists and other dissidents, Haftar built ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and several regional authoritarians, including Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El Sisi.

Haftar’s partners look to Libya as a springboard to advance their interests in Africa and the Mediterranean. The U.S. and its European partners backed U.N. efforts to unify the Libyan political structure, but Libya was not a priority for the first Trump administration or for the early years of the Biden administration. There was little incentive for U.S. officials to advocate engagement with Haftar, whose human rights record and failed military aggression against Tripoli in 2019 made him anathema in Washington.

Libya assumed a more prominent place on the U.S. and European policy agenda following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which heightened pre-existing concerns about Russian gains not only in Libya but elsewhere in the region. Western leaders feared that Russia intended to use its expanding military presence on the African continent as leverage against Europe and to advance Putin’s broader effort to undermine the West globally. 

Military coups in Mali in 2020 and 2021, one in Burkina Faso in 2022, and in Niger in 2023 resulted in the expulsion of U.S., French, and other Western forces, and an influx of Russian forces. The Russian buildup was spearheaded by the Wagner Private Military Corporation, which evolved, following the death of its rebellious founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, into what is now the “Africa Corps.” U.S. and French counterterrorism officials viewed the net effect of Russia’s growing influence as a major threat to their efforts to combat the African affiliates of the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda and to supplies of critical minerals from several countries in Africa.

In Libya, U.S. and European strategists watched with some alarm as Russia steadily expanded its military presence in Haftar-controlled territory. During 2023-2024, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov visited Haftar in Benghazi five times, and, in June 2024, two Russian destroyers visited the Haftar-controlled Tobruk Naval Base. The warships’ visit was billed as a training mission but was likely a continuation of the delivery of artillery to the LNA for potential use against its rivals in Tripoli or for export to anti-Western military forces in neighboring countries.

By August 2024, there were a reported 2,000 – 2,500 Africa Corps personnel deployed at various military sites in Libya. Russia’s buildup in Libya accelerated after the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria in early December, which brought to power an Islamist government hostile to Assad’s partners and forced Russia to evacuate most of its forces based there. Russia has redeployed a large proportion of those military assets to LNA-controlled locations in Libya. One expert assesses that the number of Russians stationed at Libya’s Brak al-Shati airbase has increased from 300 to approximately 450 since the Assad regime collapsed.

The U.S. calculation it needed to counter these Russian geopolitical gains caused Washington to rethink its isolation of Haftar. A May 2024 NATO experts report outlining NATO’s first official “Southern Strategy” set the stage for working with figures such as Haftar by suggesting cooperation with “non-accountable southern partners” without requiring them to adopt European values.

U.S. officials began to downplay Haftar’s drawbacks and view him as a like-minded potential partner against violent Islamist organizations. Some officials argued that engagement with Haftar might move him out of Moscow’s orbit and blunt the Kremlin’s regional ambitions. In August 2024, the commander of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), General Michael Langley, met with Haftar in Benghazi, as publicly announced by the U.S. Embassy in Libya.

In September, high-ranking Pentagon official Celeste Wallander and the deputy AFRICOM commander held a follow-up meeting with Haftar in Libya and praised the LNA for “significant contributions to maintaining stability and promoting unity in Libya.” According to readouts of the meeting, she also highlighted “the importance of Libya’s security forces in ensuring the country’s protection against terrorism and external threats.”

The Trump administration, which took office as Russia was redeploying forces from Syria to Libya, articulated no specific policy toward Libya. But, the Trump team continued the efforts of its predecessors to try to reorient Haftar’s allegiances away from the Kremlin, even as Trump sought to reengage with Putin in an effort to settle the Ukraine war.

In early February, Lt. Gen. John W. Brennan, Deputy AFRICOM commander, met with leaders of major Libyan military institutions, including Haftar as well as military leaders under Tripoli’s authority, “to promote increased security cooperation between the United States and Libya.” Some of the meetings took place in Sirte, a city where U.S. support helped local forces defeat a challenge from ISIS in 2016. The U.S. military visit was also intended to foster greater military unification and cooperation efforts between pro-Haftar and pro-Tripoli elements “through face-to-face engagements and training that benefits both sides, contributing to Libyan efforts to overcome divisions and foster unity.”

Included in the meetings was LNA Ground Forces Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Saddam Haftar, the most prominent Haftar son, who is believed to advocate closer ties to the U.S. and distance from the Kremlin. He reportedly visited the United States in 2024. Yet, Trump critics immediately noted that a December 2022 Amnesty International report excoriated Saddam Haftar for war crimes, human rights abuses, and corruption committed by the Tariq Ben Zeyad (TBZ) Brigade unit of the LNA under his command.

In late February, the Trump Pentagon further elevated its engagement with the LNA by sending two B-52 Stratofortress bombers from their U.S. bases to conduct a joint training exercise with Libyan military air controllers near Sirte on February 26. Defense News, a U.S. outlet associated with the Defense Department, characterized the U.S. show of force as a deliberate attempt to tempt Haftar and his sons and other associates to eject the Russian troops stationed in LNA bases in the country.

The B-52 mission came after Haftar, Saddam Haftar, and another son, Khaled, returned from a visit to Russia’s close ally Belarus, and meetings with its authoritarian pro-Putin leader, Aleksander Lukashenko. The visit – publicly described as “establishing strategic partnerships, particularly in Belarus’s industrial and agricultural sectors” – was taken in Washington as a sign that Haftar remained closely aligned with Moscow.

U.S. officials judged that peeling Haftar out of the Kremlin’s orbit would require additional U.S. steps, including demonstrating the unique role U.S. forces can play in securing the region. The B-52 exercise was conducted in line with a January 2025 decision by the U.N. Security Council to provide an exemption to the U.N. arms embargo on Libya for “technical assistance or training provided by Member States to Libyan security forces intended solely to promote the process of Libyan military and security institutions’ reunification.”

Critics of the Trump approach toward Libya argue the outreach to Haftar might have unintended consequences. Jalel Harchaoui, an analyst at the RUSI think tank in London, expressed to Defense News skepticism Haftar will ever break with Moscow, telling the outlet “Haftar tells the U.S. he would work with them but says Russia gives him air defenses and military training. The U.S. tells him it would give him more if only he would distance himself from Russia.”  

Others note that Haftar, emboldened by engagement with both Washington and Moscow, might abandon the U.N.-led unification process and initiate another push to capture western Libya. In August 2024, Major General Ahmed Al-Mismari, Haftar’s lead spokesman, denied that an LNA deployment toward Libya’s border with Algeria represented a prelude to armed action against Tripoli. He explained that the developments in neighboring countries, particularly in Mali and Niger, necessitated the dispatch of reinforcements to military zones where the LNA is stationed, with the objective of securing Libya’s borders.

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Tarek Megerisi

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

***

Summary

Over the past decade, Russia has re-entrenched itself in Libya, making the country the main hub of its African operations.

It has used three opportunistic processes: “cultivation” (seeding proxies), “Wagnerfication” (propping up strongmen) and “domestication” (harnessing local assets).

To understand these is to understand Russia’s playbook for embedding itself in fragile states.

It is also to identify weaknesses European states can exploit to curb Russia’s influence in Libya, a major vulnerability on the continent’s southern flank.

How Russia returned to Libya

In 2011, as the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi rained shells upon his citizens, Russia chose not to veto the crucial UN Security Council resolution to impose a “no fly zone” over Libya. The abstention may have been part of a genuine policy to reset Russian relations with the West. Or it may have been a ploy to rebuild Russia’s multilateralist credentials, divert Western powers into more Middle Eastern misadventures, and make space for Russian interventions elsewhere.

Either way, since Vladimir Putin reclaimed the Russian presidency in 2012, his misrepresentation of this episode as a betrayal by NATO—which he says abused Russia’s abstention to conduct unilateral regime change in Libya—has become part of the origin story for his crusade against the West.

Whether or not Putin was genuinely sore about Qaddafi, Russia’s position in Libya deteriorated in the revolution’s aftermath. Libya’s new authorities cast Russia as an enemy of the Arab uprisings, depriving it of roughly $14bn in weapons, oil and construction deals. But in 2014 Libya descended once more into civil war—and it was in that unfolding chaos that the dormant Russia-Libya relationship began to stir from its slumber.

One goal of Putin’s foreign policy has always been to reaffirm Russia’s status as a great power. His attempts to do this over the past decade, antagonistically to Europe and the West, have perhaps been most visible in their flashpoints: the war in Syria, for example, and the all-out invasion of Ukraine. These are also the fronts where the United States and European countries have pushed back.

But Russia has more quietly re-entrenched in Libya over the past decade, and in so doing has met far less resistance from the West. Now, Moscow once again enjoys powerful influence in this troubled but strategically pivotal Mediterranean state. Russia’s presence extends from Libya’s north-eastern coastline to its south-western Sahelian borders.

Russian forces maintain this presence via proxies, notably the eastern Libyan dictator Khalifa Haftar, from five military bases dotted through the country. These forces are also present, and wield influence over, Libya’s southern oil fields and eastern oil terminals. Russia has used all this to help Haftar’s putative heir, Saddam Haftar, expand Libya’s role as a hotspot for smuggling: of weapons, drugs, fuel—and people.

Libya’s lawlessness has thus proven valuable for the Kremlin. So much so that the country has become a forward operating base to help Russia deploy fighters and equipment to other theatres (and extract assets from them).

It was telling that after the fall of Moscow’s Middle Eastern proxy, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in December 2024, Russia simply relocated many Syrian assets to Libya. Syria remains vital to Russia; hence Moscow’s swift pivot to working with the new authorities in Damascus. But by the end of 2024, Libya was Moscow’s main hub to feed its African operations. 

This paper examines the gambits, tactics and strategies the Kremlin deployed to re-embed itself in Libya under Europe’s nose. The patterns it uncovers in the past ten years of Russian engagement in the country make clear that this was far from a “masterplan”. But they also provide a window onto the evolution of Russia’s foreign policy since 2014. Indeed, this paper shows that Russia’s re-engagement in Libya took place over three phases that add up to a playbook for Russia embedding itself in and exploiting fragile states. These are:

Cultivation: Seeding potential proxies through a range of influence groups, sowing fertile ground for deeper interactions in states where Russia lacks pre-existing relations;

Wagnerfication: Deploying Russia’s foreign intelligence agency the GRU (previously under the banner of the “Wagner Group” and other such fronts) to entrench in a country by helping a proxy, usually a struggling strongman;

Domestication: Using increasingly open control over that proxy and a country’s assets to advance Russian interests, often to the severe detriment of the country (and European security).

Over the course of these different approaches in Libya, one constant in Russia’s tactics has been patient opportunism to continuously deepen its entrenchment. Another has been its quest for openings to develop its relations with powers such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), all the while undermining Europe and the West.

It has done this by militarily, diplomatically and politically assisting Haftar and other proxies such as Saif al-Islam Qaddafi (Muammar Qaddafi’s son, now wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity) to increase their influence in Libya, but also their dependence on Moscow. Russia then moved through these proxies to effectively claim and exploit military bases, oil infrastructure and smuggling routes.

But Russia’s hold in Libya remains moored to the fate of its proxies. Unlike other intervening states—notably Turkey, which is a key backer of Libya’s internationally-recognised government in Tripoli—Russia has no legal military presence in Libya.

This means that Russian power there still depends on Libya remaining in its state of transition. Leaders in the Kremlin are reportedly working to correct this by seeking to lease a naval base in Libya’s far eastern port city of Tobruk. It is also developing relations around the government in western Libya and trying to shoehorn its proxies into positions of legal authority.

The ins and outs of the past decade of Russian influence in Libya thus also reveal the frailties of the Kremlin’s approaches, and how the very European countries it works to undermine could displace its chaos-exploitation activities.

European policymakers are juggling many competing and urgent priorities. But whether they like it or not, Europe’s strategic competition with Russia extends to the southern neighbourhood. Displacing Russia from Libya would have knock-on effects throughout this competition.

It would close off vital funds for its aggression in Ukraine. It would also obstruct Russia’s efforts to fuel Sudan’s civil war. And it would hamper Russia’s attempts to flip African states against Europe, helping to redefine the global competition for critical raw materials and undermine Russia’s entire Africa strategy.   

European countries need to start by making Russia’s deployment more costly for Moscow. They should do this by combatting the smuggling activities it is linked to, as well as developing new legal tools to fight Russia’s network of private military companies (PMCs). In Libya, Europeans will have to degrade Russia’s proxies and press key regional actors to stop facilitating destabilising Russian activity.

But they will also need to offer a vision of their own. They should aim to build coalitions with Russia’s current partners and work with them to secure a safer space for all to pursue their interests. This feeds into the longer-term goal of shepherding Libya towards a unified, legitimate government that would ideally call for Russia to leave. And at the very least it would dilute Moscow’s influence and strengthen both Libyan independence and Libya’s capacity to resist Russian-inspired criminal activity.

***

Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His work mainly addresses how European policy making towards the Maghreb and Mediterranean regions can become more strategic, harmonious, and incisive—with a long-term focus on Libya.

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Yaseen Rashed

There is a case for Trump and Meloni

to challenge the status quo.

Renewing US-Italian engagement in Libya  

Any international reengagement on Libya short of a clear US role in facilitating an agreement risks plunging the country into a deeper web of maligned foreign intervention and spoiling development potential. 

US President Donald Trump, along with his transatlantic ally and personal friend Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, are key international players in Libya. Only their absence and lack of diplomatic engagement allowed Russia and China to expand their operations there. By leading the facilitation of a renewed political process, the US and Italy could benefit from securing exploration contracts for the country’s energy resources, assist Europe in meeting its energy needs, while ensuring that Libyans get the democracy they have wanted since 2011. 

Italy is already developing a framework that Trump could assist in—positioning itself to become Europe’s energy hub, helping to facilitate the sale and transport of oil and gas from Africa to the rest of the continent as it pivots from Russian natural resources. Meloni’s “Mattei Plan”, named after Italian oil giant Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi’s (ENI) founder Enrico Mattei, could help Italy achieve its ambitions in becoming Europe’s main energy broker, and Libya could prove to be a helpful provider of the key to that opportunity. 

Tripoli’s energy potential remains untapped. It could offer Italy and wider Europe cheaper production rates and a higher quality of “sweet crude” oil compared to its neighbors.  

Italy’s investments in Libya have been relatively limited amid concerns about government instability. Rome has pursued energy contracts with other North African energy partners like Tunisia’s ELMED interconnector and Algeria’s Sonatrach. However, ENI has already resumed drilling in areas of the Ghadames basin late last year after a nearly ten-year hiatus, signaling its willingness to invest in  Libya’s energy potential. Furthermore, its proximity to Italy could also provide cheaper transport rates, making Libya a highly attractive energy investment partner for Italy. 

Meloni knows that without a clear political solution in sight for Libya, there is a significant risk in any investments in the country’s energy sector. Both the HoR and the GNU have failed to achieve their mandate of getting the country to elections, and have lost legitimacy for many Libyans after years of disengagement in determining their country’s future.  

The US and Italy could help a new political process by sanctioning Libya’s kleptocrats, who have stalled a solution at the cost of Libyan lives. Their participation and inclusion in any political process should be limited as they risk spoiling the process in exchange for a future role in the country. The US and Italy may instead focus on engaging the country’s civil society and array of economic and political experts in Libya and abroad, to head a transitional process with clearly defined mandates, deadlines, and limitations on power to help get the country towards elections. 

This renewed process would have to include negotiations over Haftar’s future role in the country, a subject for which no one has more leverage to bring the military leader to the table than the United States, considering his citizenship there and continued assets in the greater Washington area. Haftar also established a friendly working relationship with President Trump from his first term in office, which could allow the Trump administration an unprecedented opportunity to negotiate on Libya with Haftar’s camp.  

There is additional appeal in Libya for Trump, as the country is an important member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Earlier this year, the US president said he would demand that OPEC bring down the cost of oil, blaming high prices on the Russia-Ukraine war.  

Tripoli could assist in cutting oil costs by increasing and stabilizing production output. Libya’s acting oil and gas minister, Khalifa Abdulsadek, has already signaled his goal of increasing production from 1.5 million to 2 million BPD by December 2025. Oil production has already recovered and increased in recent months, and by attracting investments, the country’s energy sector could rebound to its pre-2011 output. By diversifying foreign investment in the country away from maligned foreign actors like China and Russia, who have spoiled the peace process in pursuit of their own interests, Libya could ensure investors greater transparency and compliance with international regulations, including the existing arms embargo. However, this cannot be achieved through the current status quo. It’s time for a renewed US-Italian engagement on Libya in search of innovative solutions to its prolonged stalemate. 

Trump has already proven he is not afraid to think “out of the box” on foreign affairs during his second term, a posture that could help clinch a deal to end the stalemate. From his attempts in facilitating a ceasefire in Ukraine, to imposing strict tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the US president is interjecting a new strong-armed approach to global issues that could reignite a post-Benghazi attack dormancy on US engagement. Nine years after he used the 2012 terrorist attack as a campaign issue against Hillary Clinton, Trump now has an opportunity to rewrite the fate of Washington’s mission in Libya and bring about a much-needed “win” in the region.  

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Yaseen Rashed is the assistant director of media and communications at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East Programs and a Libya researcher.  

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Stephanie T. Williams

The lesson that should be taken from the LPDF experiment is to continue with an inclusive approach. Under no circumstances should the international community return to the days of gathering two or five guys or their representatives in a smoke-filled room. It is the triumph of hope over experience to believe that these cynical status quo actors—who spar during the day and collude at night—are interested in the kind of meaningful change that Libya so desperately needs.

In fact, conflict settlement in a rentier economy comes with its own set of challenges. This is particularly true in the case of Libya, where one man had served for 42 years as the allocator-in-chief, using his vast intelligence and security apparatus as enforcers in apportioning the country’s wealth among its different constituencies. For some years after 2011, the international community prized maintaining the autonomy and integrity of the country’s sovereign financial and economic institutions.

Therefore, the politicization of the National Oil Corporation since 2022 is an alarming development that has accelerated fuel smuggling and further deprived the average Libyan of the benefits that should accrue from being a citizen of one of Africa’s largest oil producers. Until last year’s leadership crisis, the central bank had fared better, but it has yet to fully enact the recommendations of the U.N.-facilitated financial review to regularly hold meetings of the board of governors, display the utmost transparency, and further unify the institution.

Enjoying equal levels of impunity are those who have committed atrocious human rights abuses, including the wholesale slaughter and burying of innocents in the mass graves of Tarhouna, as well as enforced disappearances, suspicious deaths (such as falling out of windows), arbitrary detention, and the trafficking of migrants—helpless souls, like the people of Derna, who have met their watery death when trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Far too often, the victims of this avalanche of abuse have been women, whether public figures such as human rights activists and advocates like Salwa Bugaighis and Hanan al-Barassi, both brutally murdered in Benghazi, or former General National Congress member Fariha Barkawi, who was assassinated in Derna. To this day, no one has been held accountable for these crimes as well as for the enforced disappearance of parliamentary member Siham Sergiwa, who was violently abducted from her home in Benghazi in July 2019 by armed actors believed to have been loyal to Haftar’s forces. I hope that the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor continues to move with alacrity on the Libya file. Justice delayed is justice denied.

An indifferent “international community”

The fifth and an equally important factor causing the Derna tragedy was, as the U.N. secretary-general so eloquently noted, the appalling indifference of the so-called international community. These actors have consistently failed to hold accountable those responsible for the many abuses and excesses, instead prioritizing the pursuit of their own bilateral agendas over the need to help the Libyan people build a functional and accountable state. In the case of Derna, I recall the stony silence we heard when we would report to the U.N. Security Council on the terrible human rights abuses committed during the siege of that city by Haftar’s forces.

Even worse, those responsible for spoiling U.N. political processes, in 2019 and in 2021, have been rehabilitated and rewarded for their destructive behavior rather than marginalized. In this project, some countries have elevated the counterterrorism agenda above all other bilateral priorities. While no one can really dispute the need to pursue U.N.-designated terrorist groups, too often the counterterrorism agenda requires the alignment of international actors with domestic Libyan hybrid armed groups who have no interest in the state-building project, not to mention the concept of good governance.

The same is true of those countries that have prioritized the counter-migration file above nation-building. Today we witness the cynical wielding of the migration file by actors across the southern Mediterranean, threatening to turn the migrant pipeline on or off depending on the level of material or political support received from European leaders. A recent example of this hypocrisy was the Italian government’s decision to return a known human rights abuser to Libya instead of complying with an arrest warrant from the ICC.

And then there are those countries that have carelessly used Libya as a battlefield for their ideological disputes, raising the bogeyman of political Islam or trying to impose an authoritarian model in order to suppress any move toward democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. In these proxy wars, it is unfortunately the case that Libyan actors have been full participants, inviting in tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries and allowing foreign forces, the majority of whom today are supplied by Russia and Turkey, to occupy bases throughout the country.

These and other countries have poured weapons and lethal systems into Libya, a country that was already awash in weapons from the 2011 and 2014 wars, in full violation of the U.N. arms embargo. At one point in the 2019 to 2020 war, Libya became the largest arena of drone warfare in modern history. (That record has now been shattered since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.)

The alarming facts on the ground, which are represented by the many foreign-occupied bases, will be very difficult to unwind, particularly in the absence of a fully sovereign, representative, and united Libyan government. The stark reality is that Russia and Turkey have effectively divided Libya into zones of influence, each using the country to pursue wider geostrategic objectives, whether in the Sahel and Central Africa or to extract resources and pursue commercial deals.

Since the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 and with Haftar’s acquiescence, Russia has increased its footprint in North Africa, shifting assets from its naval and air bases in Syria to eastern and southern Libya. In addition to maintaining its toehold in Libya and projecting power in Africa, Russia’s ancillary goal is to put pressure on and destabilize southern Europe by leveraging the migrant pipeline. Needless to say, all of this negative foreign interference further renders the state-building and good governance project exceptionally difficult.

Decentralization as a path forward

Having outlined five governance-related factors (and no doubt there are more) that I believe contributed to the Derna tragedy, I believe we can best honor the memories of Storm Daniel’s victims by pressing forward. We must start somewhere, and I would modestly propose that more focus should be put on local, grassroots, and community-led efforts.

Already, good work has been done in this regard by local Libyan groups like the Peacemakers and ad-hoc coalitions of political parties and other gatherings. In fact, there is widespread consensus among Libyans about the need to devolve power from the center in pursuit of an enhanced decentralized model that would put more power and resources in the hands of local constituencies.

During the planning process for the aborted 2019 National Conference, during which the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue conducted 77 meetings with over 7,000 Libyans inside and outside Libya, participants agreed that “an overly centralized government is widely seen as having caused many of the problems Libya is experiencing today.”

Therefore, they recommended that “there should be a gradual transfer of a significant portion of ministerial responsibilities to municipalities and, eventually governorates.” As an interim measure, and pending a more durable solution, the current decentralization law, Law 59, which was passed in 2012, should be fully implemented.

In 2022, the constitutional negotiations I facilitated between the two legislative chambers resulted in an agreement on the establishment of 13 governorates—using the existing 13 electoral districts—along with the precise division of resources at the central, provincial, and local levels. Some have argued for the establishment of elected chambers at the three levels: a national parliament and higher chamber, elected provincial legislative bodies, and elected municipalities.

In fact, since 2011, the majority of Libya’s municipal councils have been elected, with the exception of some councils in eastern and southern Libya whose elected members Haftar replaced with loyal appointees. The election of municipal councils represents important green shoots of democracy in an otherwise arid environment. The U.N. helped the elections commission to organize council elections throughout the 2019-2020 conflict and even during COVID-19. It is heartening to see that municipal elections took place in 2024, accompanied by a surge in voter registration.

Decentralization in Libya will give greater autonomy and authority to local officials and, with it, greater accountability.

For all of these reasons, the move to a more devolved model must be pushed. It will lessen the pressure on Tripoli, reducing its vulnerability to constant attack. Decentralization will give greater autonomy and authority to local officials and, with it, greater accountability.

The knock-on effects of devolution could be realized in the pursuit of local disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration efforts. A variety of studies point to the fact that Libya’s armed groups are by no means monolithic and that many are well integrated into their local communities. These communities will know best how to reintegrate and rehabilitate those who have resorted to arms, helping them to turn swords into plowshares.

At this moment, when we are seemingly at a hinge in history, faced with the threatened redrawing of the global order and when international institutions are under threat—even from the very architects of that order—we must continue to work on solving conflicts like the one in Libya

Libya is a country that has enormous talent and capable citizens—women and men alike—who have their hands extended and their hearts open to each other, and who want to build themselves a viable state. The best way to honor those whose lives were tragically cut short in Derna is to neither give up nor give in.

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Yaseen Rashed

There is a case for Trump and Meloni

to challenge the status quo

Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) announced in January that the country will “soon” hold a public tender for exploring key gas and oil plots, the first such bid since 2007. The upcoming bidding round could allow Libya to stabilize and grow its oil output while attracting foreign direct investments into the country’s energy sector, a vital arm representing about 60 percent of the Libyan GDP, 94 percent of its exports, and 97 percent of the government revenues. Even still, there is room for growth—a majority of Libya’s territorial waters and 70 percent of its land area remain unexplored and are projected to hold vast basins of petroleum and gas reserves.  

But the round is set to occur against the backdrop of a decade-old stalemate between the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU) and Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR). Since 2014, the warring factions have failed to agree on a pathway for national elections and a political reconciliation process. 

The crisis is one that the US and Italy may be uniquely postured, and incentivized, to quell. 

Absent a thawing of that frozen stalemate, Tripoli is unlikely to attract an influx of energy investment. Even more, the stalemate risks plunging Libya into a deeper web of maligned foreign intervention. Both Washington and Rome could leverage their global positions to combat the country’s rabid kleptocracy and facilitate a Libyan-led technocratic political process. The carrot, of course, for this US-Italian stewardship is the opportunity for greater cooperation in countering Russia and China’s growing ambitions in Libya.  

Libya’s volatile energy output 

Libyan National Army (LNA) Commander Khalifa Haftar—who is also a US citizen—has held a monopoly over national energy resources for nearly a decade, bringing increased volatility to the country’s oil production. He has demonstrably leveraged his monopoly to negotiate arms deals and grow his access to a foreign support network. A recent Telegraph report uncovered a deal between Haftar and China where the latter reportedly shipped one billion dollars in Wing Loong military drones in exchange for crude oil. Haftar used the arms shipment to further project his power, by using United Nations-affiliated officials to facilitate it, in direct violation of the 2011 UN arms embargo. The move further signaled his rejection of any UN-facilitated process that could threaten his access to power.

As the stalemate stands, there is no guarantee for potential investors that Haftar or his affiliated militias will not force a shutdown of exploration or production. The bidding on the country’s largest petroleum reserves, the Sirte Basin, is largely under the control of Haftar’s LNA. It’s hard to imagine any company winning the exploration rights without buy-in from Haftar’s camp in exchange for security guarantees. Haftar could then leverage the exploration findings—if proven to be promising—to negotiate more favorable drilling approval and production plan contracts, growing his consolidation of the country’s shared institutions as defined by the 2020 ceasefire agreement. This could further open the door for increased foreign intervention in the country as both the GNU and Haftar have continued to leverage existing international partnerships to bolster their grip on the country’s wealthy energy resources.  

That includes an increasing closeness with Russia as Moscow pivots from Syria in the aftermath of the ousting of Bashar al-Assad. Such coziness portends that Haftar is likely to seek Russian and Chinese investment in the Libyan energy sector over Europe or the US. Already, in July 2024, Haftar signed a deal with Russian Railways Company to develop a railway connecting Sirte to Benghazi, a route critical to resupplying LNA weapons as well as shipping oil for export. Coupled with his smuggling of Russian oil into Europe, Haftar and Russian President Vladimir Putin demonstrate a keenness to collaborate and circumnavigate existing sanctions on Russian energy resources.  

Russia could ensure that its oil continues to be sold while Haftar would bank on Russia’s security backing to negotiate a more favorable role in the country’s future. By working with Russia and China, Haftar is more poised to use the contracts to retain his access to illegal arms shipments in exchange for oil. With little international oversight, he may seek to use the upcoming public tender as an opportunity to gain influence with maligned foreign actors and solidify his grip on power. 

Investment opportunities amid growing

foreign ambitions 

At the end of 2024, the NOC defied global expectations and increased its production to an eleven-year high of 1.422 million barrels per day (BPD). By attracting investment, Libya hopes to repair existing refineries and work with international companies to re-establish its pre-war production output. Libya’s oil minister, Khalifa Abdulsadek, told Reuters in January that the country needs three to four billion dollars in foreign investment to reach a 1.6 million BPD output.

This has already raised some eyebrows among energy investors, and Libya is increasingly considered a hub of investment opportunity with promises of reforms and greater transparency. As Haftar continues to cozy up to China and Russia in search of weapon sales, the GNU has grown closer to Turkey. In 2019, they established an exclusive economic zone between the two countries. The GNU also signed a deal in January with Turkey to grow its cooperation in the renewable energy sector, and has attracted investment interest from Ankara’s state-owned Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO). 

At the 2025 Libya Energy & Economic Summit held in Tripoli, General Manager of TPAO Ahmet Turkoglu indicated Turkey’s readiness to invest in the country’s energy sector, telling reporters “We are here because we see great potential. I am sure Libya will achieve much more,” specifically referring to offshore fields as part of a 2019 Memorandum of Understanding. 

Turkey’s ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean are neither secret nor uncontroversial. Similar to signing its fate with Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Turkey placed its bets on Tripoli’s GNU in hopes of solidifying its ambitions to become a regional hegemon. Paired with Ankara’s growing involvement in facilitating Israel-Hamas negotiations, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is playing a regional chess game, one that has already proved successful in Syria and in its initial 2020 intervention in Libya. By growing investments in energy projects in Libya, Turkey seeks to gain influence in the country’s economic and political recovery. 

***

Yaseen Rashed is the assistant director of media and communications at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East Programs and a Libya researcher.  

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Stephanie T. Williams

Geography as destiny

The second factor that contributed to the Derna tragedy was the city’s geographic location, on Libya’s periphery, at a considerable distance from the capital and even far removed from the eastern region’s largest and most important city, Benghazi. So, it is the case that state-building, and the promotion of good governance, must also take into account Libya’s geography.

Many of Libya’s cities and municipalities are located far away from Tripoli, the country’s capital, which is located some 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) to the west of Benghazi. In addition, a good number of Libya’s far-flung municipalities are inaccessible due to inadequate road maintenance and persistent insecurity. Given the limited writ of the successive U.N.-recognized governments, even towns closer to Tripoli complained about not receiving adequate resources.

The resentment of the Tripoli armed groups’ monopoly over vital institutions stoked the mini-war on Tripoli that took place in August 2018 when forces from Misrata and Tarhouna attacked. The consistent marginalization of these non-Tripoli communities is a conflict driver and has produced calls for secession or a return to the federalist model that characterized the state in its first 12 years before the 1951 constitution was amended toward a centralized model in 1963.

Gadhafi’s frequent bureaucratic eruptions and his internal security forces’ brutality further frayed ties within and among communities near and far, sowing a great deal of mistrust, the resonances of which are still felt today. Marginalization, corruption, misgovernance, and repression have fed extremism in Libya. When a faraway city like Derna was identified as an extremist hotbed, it became the target of further repression, its citizens punished and neglected during the Gadhafi era and in recent years following the outbreak of violence in eastern Libya in 2012.

When I visited the city in the summer of 2019, after Haftar’s forces had “cleansed” it of extremists, its downtown area was totally demolished, reminding me of what was left of Mosul, Iraq, in the summer of 2017 after the Islamic State group was defeated. Due to conflict, distance, and neglect, the Derna dams and other critical infrastructure had not been tended to in decades, rendering the citizens of the coastal town entirely vulnerable in the event of serious flooding. Indeed, other communities are equally vulnerable to catastrophic weather events; last year’s heavy rains produced historically devastating floods in the southern Libyan towns of Ghat and Al-Kufra.

A quarrelsome ruling class that sometimes takes its quarrels to the streets

The third factor that contributed to the Derna catastrophe was the incessant quarreling among members of Libya’s ruling class, which has produced nothing beyond 10 years of divided government, persistent dysfunction, and occasional bouts of violence.

This broken political model has hampered the executive’s ability to respond to fast-breaking events and has stifled the fostering and development of experts and technocrats whose skills are desperately needed to address the country’s many challenges, including the effects of climate change and Libya’s overreliance on fossil fuels. Instead, the ruling class has prioritized patronage politics, battles over the shallow legitimacy of the remaining institutions, and the nepotistic appointing of relatives to important positions.

For instance, Derna’s mayor at the time of the epic 2023 storm just happened to be the nephew of parliamentary head Aguila Saleh, which seems to have been his only qualification for the job. It, therefore, comes as little surprise that responsibility for Derna’s reconstruction was handed to one of Haftar’s sons.

Meanwhile, across the country in Tripoli, the head of the U.N.-recognized government, Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, has granted extraordinary access and power to his cousin Ibrahim. While they disagree on almost everything and went to war in 2014 over the results of parliamentary elections, Libya’s political class is in absolute alignment on one matter: to maintain the status quo which enables it to continue to access the state coffers.

A recent manifestation of ruling class quarreling was last year’s food fight over the management of Libya’s most prized sovereign institution, the Central Bank of Libya, which fully erupted in August 2024. The internationally-recognized governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, had held the position for 13 years, during which time the board of governors rarely met, if at all, with the governor monopolizing all fiscal and monetary decisionmaking.

When his relations with the Tripoli authorities soured, Kabir turned his sights east, funding the rival government operating under Haftar’s thumb. This spurred the Tripoli-based presidential council (PC) to summarily dismiss the governor, plunging Libya into a full-fledged and dire economic and financial crisis.

The PC pushed the country ever closer to the abyss by not adhering to the 2015 Libyan Political Agreement’s strictures on the selection of sovereign positions (a decision that is monopolized by the country’s two dysfunctional and usually dueling legislative bodies), and by not respecting the narrow authorities granted to them by the 2021 Libyan Political Dialogue Forum. Thanks to adept U.N. mediation, the central bank crisis was resolved, but the underlying causes of the rivalry over control of vital institutions remain untreated.

The post-Gadhafi ruling class has consistently preferred to continue cutting the cake, playing musical chairs, and engaging in endless “muhassasa,” or power-sharing arrangements.

Effective state-building and good governance require a degree of national consensus on what kind of state citizens desire and their relationship to those who govern them. This is not helped by the fact that almost 14 years after Gadhafi’s demise, Libya still lacks a constitution that determines the nature of the state—whether it is a centralized or decentralized model, whether it is a presidential system or a mixed presidential-parliamentary one—the relationship between the citizen and the state, and importantly, how the country’s resources are apportioned and managed. Rather, the post-Gadhafi ruling class has consistently preferred to continue cutting the cake, playing musical chairs, and engaging in endless “muhassasa,” or power-sharing arrangements.

A gaping lack of accountability

A related fourth factor that caused that huge loss in Derna is Libya’s gaping absence of accountability. Good governance requires accountability. Accountability is also needed to check the endemic corruption, abuses of power, and flagrant violations of basic human rights that have plagued Libya for the last 50-plus years. The rule of law rather than the rule of the gun must prevail.

Too often, it is the small fry, the minor officials, who are arrested and held for abuses of power or stealing from the public treasury. Meanwhile, the real predators, those who engage in patronage politics, wholesale plundering, organized crime, and crony capitalism, remain at large, free to continue forging their dirty deals. In the case of Derna, in a decision shrouded in mystery, 12 unnamed civil servants were reportedly given prison sentences for their role in the dams’ collapse.

One form of accountability should normally come through the ballot box. However, as I can attest, it is much easier to talk about elections in Libya than it is to produce them. The members of the ruling class, desperate to hold on to power, have buried the elections project by refusing to allow advancement on the constitutional process and the required (and consensually agreed to) electoral laws, and they and their institutions are now entirely bereft of popular legitimacy.

Elections are surely not a panacea, and if the conditions are not ripe, they can lead to further conflict, as was the case 10 years ago. However, it is also clear that the pursuit of an electoral process in Libya is absolutely key in order to remind the current legislators, who have been in power for more than 12 and 10 years respectively, that over 3 million of their compatriots have consistently demanded the right to democratically and regularly elect their representatives.

An inclusive political process that goes beyond the same old faces and that incorporates the full panoply, richness, and diversity of the Libyan body politic is being relaunched by the United Nations and deserves the full support of Libyans and international actors. We came rather close to such a formula first in 2018 and 2019 with the building of the National Conference, the holding of which was aborted by Haftar’s attack on Tripoli.

Then, in 2020, after the guns were silenced and we in the U.N. facilitated the signing of the nationwide ceasefire agreement, we convened the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF), an inclusive gathering, to produce a detailed and time-bound roadmap that resulted in the formation of an interim government and a call for elections.

The nationwide ceasefire continues to hold but the LPDF’s lofty goals have yet to be achieved. Unfortunately, many in the international community mistook the congeniality that accompanied that political agreement in early 2021 for a true desire to push forward the electoral project. Using the pretext of “respecting” Libyan sovereignty, the international community allowed the LPDF roadmap to be cynically abandoned, and decision-making was returned to the hands of the very architects of the political stalemate.

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Jonathan M. Winer

Endemic corruption in Libya continues to deter foreign investment, cripple public services, and erode trust in government. In the past year, Libya fell to its lowest-ever ranking in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, tying for 173rd place with Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, and Eritrea — just four spots from the bottom. Similarly, the US Department of State’s 2024 foreign investment evaluation found that business licenses in Libya are typically granted through corruption and exploitation rather than objective criteria. The World Bank’s Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance has consistently given Libya a score of zero out of five, reflecting a system entirely bereft of transparency or accountability.

These dismal rankings mirror the ongoing power struggles among Libya’s political and military elite, who have not permitted parliamentary elections since June 2014. The country’s internationally recognized governing bodies still derive their authority from the 2015 Libyan Political Accord, and to maintain power, they rely on extensive patronage networks. These networks, in turn, depend on corruption to siphon off Libya’s oil revenues, distribute lucrative government contracts to loyalists, facilitate oil smuggling, abuse letters of credit, and traffic Syrian-produced Captagon. Corruption also extends to the judicial system, where courts are manipulated to conduct sham trials for political and financial gain — an issue comprehensively documented in The Sentry’s November 2023 report, Libya’s Kleptocratic Boom.

Over the past decade, local kleptocratic militias have provided muscle to both the Tripoli-based (and internationally recognized) “Government of National Unity,” headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, and its rival, the provisional “Government of National Stability” in Benghazi, backed by warlord Khalifa Hifter, his sons, and House of Representatives Speaker Aguila Saleh Issa.

The military stalemate that has remained since Hifter’s failed 2019-20 effort to seize Tripoli by force has been maintained in part through an array of illicit revenue-sharing arrangements involving Libyan oil exports. But as the rivals do business, they are intensifying efforts to weaken other potential threats. Instead of attacking one another, bad actors in both Libya’s east and west have undertaken a spree of arbitrary arrests and detentions that the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) has now warned are not only illegal, but creating “a climate of fear.”

Politically motivated arrests

In its March 22 public statement, UNSMIL found that hundreds of Libyans had been illegally arrested and detained by a range of Libyan security forces, including prosecutors, lawyers, and even officials appointed by the government whose bodies arrested them. Significantly, this last category includes Mohammed Mensli, head of the Libyan Asset Recovery and Management Office (LARMO), just as he was on the verge of making potentially significant recoveries of stolen Libyan assets.

In late December, officials at the Tripoli-based Administrative Control Authority (ACA), a post-Gadhafi anti-corruption investigative body, accused Mensli of unauthorized asset recovery efforts and holding dual nationality — charges he has denied. Notably, the decision was made immediately after a Libyan Supreme Court ruling had affirmed LARMO’s exclusive authority over such recoveries.

Mensli voluntarily returned to Tripoli to confront these allegations, only to be arrested on Jan. 7 and placed in pre-trial detention. Since then, his captors have continued to hold him without trial, in direct violation of Libyan law, which mandates that detentions cannot exceed 30 days without referral to public prosecution. More than 75 days have passed, yet no such referral has been made, leaving Mensli in legal limbo without any hearing or presentation of evidence against him. As UNSMIL found, those holding Mensli have largely denied him access to legal representation and medical care amid concerning reports of his deteriorating health.

On March 3, the Social Council of the Warfalla Tribes, Mensli’s tribal group, demanded his immediate and unconditional release, condemning his detention as “a blatant violation of all local laws and international conventions.” The council also warned that his imprisonment was part of an orchestrated effort by “corruption networks … to loot the Libyan state.”

LARMO’s mission and the threat to

Libya’s stolen wealth

Since his appointment as director-general of LARMO in 2021 by Prime Minister Dbeibeh, Mensli has led efforts to trace, recover, and manage stolen Libyan assets worldwide. Under his leadership, LARMO has reportedly identified tens — possibly hundreds — of billions of dollars in stolen assets, including stocks, bonds, real estate, jewelry, gold, aircraft, and yachts, held across Africa, Europe, and North America. Over a four-year period, Mensli had been consulting international bodies such as the United Nations and European Union, and national law enforcement agencies like the US Department of Justice and the UK National Crime Agency, with a program to ensure both that stolen Libyan assets would be recovered safely and then protected from raids by corrupt Libyan actors.

In pursuit of these twin objectives, LARMO has insisted on establishing internationally supervised financial controls to prevent recovered Libyan stolen assets from being looted again. Mensli has maintained that, with such safeguards in place, recovered funds should ultimately be used for Libyan hospitals, schools, infrastructure, sustainable energy, and food security — but only after national elections restore legitimacy to Libya’s government.

A power grab disguised as a

criminal investigation

Patience and safeguards are both critical to properly recovering and protecting stolen assets, as reflected in Mensli’s methodical effort to design a mechanism to ensure funds turned over to LARMO have sufficient controls to prevent them from being stolen again. Mensli’s continuing imprisonment suggests that those associated with his captivity are attempting to force him to disclose sensitive financial intelligence with the goal of enabling them to seize control of recovered assets for their own gain in the absence of any controls at all.

In the past weeks, Mensli’s unlawful detention has been escalated to senior officials in multiple countries, as UNSMIL worked behind the scenes to secure his release. Unable to make progress, UNSMIL then issued last weekend’s scathing statement, which warned that the wave of illegal arrests and detentions simultaneously threatened political dissent, judicial independence, and rule of law.

UNSMIL’s call for Mensli’s release and that of other Libyans unlawfully languishing in prison has yet to be echoed publicly by other major international actors with interests in Libya. Senior US and British officials responsible for Libyan policy were told about Mensli’s arrest within a few days of his arbitrary detention, and they have continued to meet with Dbeibeh and a wide range of other relevant Libyan actors, while Mensli has languished in prison. Now that UNSMIL has weighed in loudly to call for his release, it will be important for them to express their views publicly, too.

It is clear why corrupt Libyan officials might see an opportunity to profit from Mensli’s removal, but it is far less clear why the Dbeibeh government, which appointed him, has remained silent. By failing to intervene, Dbeibeh’s administration is not only jeopardizing Libya’s recovery of stolen wealth but also reinforcing the very corruption that has crippled the country for years. In the meantime, Mensli’s indefinite detention serves as yet another dark proof-point in Libya’s ever-deepening history of state-sanctioned corruption. Should he be released, Libya still has the opportunity to build out mechanisms for recovering its lost wealth to enable such funds to be used at some future point as a foundation to help the country rebuild.

 ***

Jonathan M. Winer is a Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He previously served as the United States special envoy for Libya and the deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement. 

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Stephanie T. Williams

Some 17 months ago, in the early hours of September 11, 2023, thousands of residents of the quaint port city of Derna, nestled at the foot of the Jabal al-Akhdar (the Green Mountains) on Libya’s eastern coast, were washed out to sea by catastrophic flooding caused by Storm Daniel and the collapse of two dams that had been built in the 1970s during Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.

So great was the devastation and the loss of life that to date, thousands of bodies remain unrecovered and the death toll could well be close to 20,000; another 40,000 people were displaced (out of an overall city population of 90,000).

I can find no better words to describe the tragedy than those spoken by my former boss, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, when he mourned the loss of so many innocents: “They were victims many times over. Victims of years of conflict. Victims of climate chaos. Victims of leaders – near and far – who failed to find a way to peace. The people of Derna lived and died in the epicenter of that indifference – as the skies unleashed 100 times the monthly rainfall in 24 hours – as dams broke after years of war and neglect … as everything they knew was wiped off the map.”

This essay intends to use the Derna tragedy and its lessons to cast light on Libya’s long-running governance crisis and to propose a way forward. It is reasonable to ask whether Storm Daniel’s unusual magnitude would have caused death and destruction regardless of the state of Derna’s dams—that this was an act of nature, a freak storm of the kind we have increasingly witnessed as global warming wreaks havoc on the planet. Yet, this is at best a partial explanation, and it therefore cannot obscure the fact that there were other factors at play, explanations that are rooted in Libya’s history and its present.

I have identified five factors that led to the dreadful outcome in Derna: the legacy of statelessness left by Gadhafi; the historic marginalization of populations on Libya’s periphery; post-2011 conflicts and the irresponsibility of the current ruling class; the overall lack of political accountability; and the international community’s indifference.

From the onset, I wish to note that in my capacity as a U.N. mediator, I endeavored to avoid the inevitable reductionist narratives surrounding the Libyan conflict, such as the facile proposition that the 2011 revolution led to the division of the country into two parts. Rather than a split, what occurred in 2011 was a full-scale and deep societal implosion, resulting in the atomization in which Libya has languished.

Therefore, as a mediator, I believed that my primary task was to try to somehow reassemble all those fragments into a coherent whole. Indeed, some kind of societal cohesion is a vital ingredient for state-building. No less important is a common national identity. Both are absent in today’s Libya. Following Gadhafi’s demise, the grinding conflict in Libya has produced a bitter and unresolved contest over which Libyan figure has the capacity to assume the dictator’s two most salient qualities: his monopoly over the use of violence and his role as the (capricious) allocator-in-chief of the country’s vast riches.

Gadhafi’s legacy: An enduring

statelessness

In assessing the Libyan governance conundrum through the lens of the devastating Derna flood, the first factor to consider is the glaring absence of a strong, representative, and capable state, the achievement of which has eluded Libyans for many years. Indeed, a state (re)building project presumes the existence of a strong state prior to the upheaval in 2011.

In fact, as scholars such as Dirk Vandewalle in his book “A History of Modern Libya” have noted, what characterized both the Sanussi monarchy (1951-1969) and the Gadhafi (1969-2011) eras was something much closer to statelessness than a state in the modern sense of the word.

Following the nascent and unfinished institution-building efforts of the short-lived monarchy, Gadhafi—who disingenuously labeled himself as the “Brotherly Leader” or “Guide of the Revolution”—engaged in a 42-year experiment dedicated to the centralization of power and state deconstruction, epitomized by his frequent upendings of the status quo and declarations of one “revolution” after another, not to mention his swings from pan-Arabism to pan-Islamism and finally, pan-Africanism.

The net effect of these eccentric and theatrical perturbations was to keep Libyans off-balance, distrustful of each other, and perpetually in a state of flux and insecurity. To the extent that there were institutions during the tumultuous Gadhafi period, they were penetrated by a coterie of regime loyalists, fellow tribesmen, and their allies. Gadhafi also built a powerful internal security and intelligence system, ruthlessly punishing those who questioned his rule.

All of this turmoil had a direct impact on the building and maintenance of critical infrastructure, such as the dams in Derna, which were originally built in the 1970s but whose structural weaknesses were identified in the early 2000s. The regime waited for five years to address the maintenance issues and then got caught up in the maelstrom of the 2011 revolution.

In the euphoria that accompanied Gadhafi’s ouster in 2011, his Libyan successors and their foreign backers failed to adequately tackle the ‘day after’ challenge.

In the euphoria that accompanied the dictator’s ouster in 2011, his Libyan successors and their foreign backers failed to adequately tackle the “day after” challenge, which is not an easy task given authoritarian regimes’ tendency to capture institutions. The regime’s collapse rendered what was left of those institutions entirely brittle and vulnerable to predation by armed actors. This lack of institutional “puissance” (or power) continues to plague Libya today.

At the same time, the vengeful 2013 Political Isolation Law did not help in ensuring some continuity as it cast even minor “regime” officials (including those who had publicly and bravely joined the opposition) into purgatory and alienated many others who could have helped with the state-building task.

The absence of meaningful disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration and security sector reform efforts further contributed to the chaos that ensued, causing the ranks of the “revolutionaries” to swell from 30,000 to 300,000 personnel by the time I arrived in Libya in 2018.

In the years following Gadhafi’s downfall, the logic of perpetual conflict and the resort to arms soon overtook the pursuit of state and institution building. The state-building task, such as it existed, was assigned internationally to a United Nations political mission that often lacked the resources and personnel to tackle Libya’s unique set of issues.

Furthermore, for four and a half years, between mid-2014 and early 2019, due to ongoing conflict and instability in Libya, the U.N.’s international personnel were based in Tunisia. Places like Derna were entirely beyond our reach in this period, not to mention Libya’s south, which had fallen into the hands of extremist groups and thugs engaged in every type of illicit trade imaginable.

During my nearly four years working on Libya, from early 2018 through mid-2022, I would struggle to identify Libyan officials who were interested in any state-building exercise that would impede their ability to plunder and engage in patronage politics. The prime minister’s office was staffed by 900 people but only a few of these officials made any decisions.

On the other side of the country, former CIA asset Khalifa Haftar had launched his own project, building a military machine to seize control of the capital and render the “state” a mere appendage to his decidedly authoritarian project.

As for the rest of the international community, it did not appear to be prepared to invest much in what would be a painstaking, tedious, and long-term institution-building process. Instead, it seemed to have been converted to the paradigm of “stabilization” and the containment of issues such as terrorism and migration rather than the harder task of state-building.

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Tom Kington

Donald Trump turned geopolitics on its head this month with his determination to do business with Vladimir Putin while pouring scorn on America’s allies.

But there is one country in the world where tense competition between the United States and Russia continues apace, keeping the Cold War vibe alive with no nod to rapprochement.

Libya has just had a training visit from a USAF B-52 bomber as U.S. generals try to tempt local leaders to eject the ever increasing number of Russian troops stationed in desert bases in the country.

The U.S. visit last month was aimed at winning over Gen. Khalifa Haftar, the military commander who runs the eastern half of the North African country and is allowing Russia to use it as a bridgehead to back regimes further south which are hostile to Washington.

The February visit came after Haftar and his sons, Saddam and Khaled, paid a call to Russia’s close ally Belarus, a sign of ever closer ties with Moscow.

Jalel Harchaoui, an analyst at the RUSI think tank in London, said U.S. attempts to win over Haftar were being led by the Pentagon.

“The Biden administration had no real policy to peel him away from the Russians, and the Trump administration has had no time for Libya, so the Pentagon is conducting its own diplomacy here,” he said.

Visitors from U.S. Africa Command who held ground targeting exercises as two B-52H Stratofortress bombers flew overhead invited military personnel from Haftar’s forces as well as from Eastern Libya, which is run by a separate government in Tripoli.

The two sides of the country split in 2014, three years after the ousting of Ghadaffi.

“Haftar tells the U.S. he would work with them but says Russia gives him air defenses and military training. The U.S. tells him it would give him more if only he would distance himself from Russia,” said Harchaoui.

After the U.S. visit, Russia’s deputy defense minister, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, was back in eastern Libya for another of his frequent visits.

“Meanwhile at Libya’s Brak al-Shati airbase, the number of Russians stationed there has risen from 300 to approximately 450 since November,” said Harchaoui.

Ben Fishman, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he was “very skeptical” about Haftar turning away from Russia.

“Those B-52s won’t change his mind, nor will attempts by the U.S. to unite the two militaries, since Haftar’s forces are a real mechanism while in the west local militias are more influential than the army,” he said.

Mohamed Eljarh at consultancy firm Libya Outlook was more optimistic, claiming Haftar’s son Saddam – who commands eastern Libya’s land forces – is seeking ties with the United States.

“There is a belief the Russians were playing a double game in Libya with both Haftar and Ghadaffi’s son, Saif Al-Islam. Saddam is leading efforts to be closer to the U.S. and visited the U.S. last year,” he said, adding, “The Russians are understandably concerned and want him to visit Moscow but that seems off the table for now.”

If Saddam engages with the U.S., it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will reciprocate, said Umberto Profazio, an analyst at the IISS think tank.

“There is no sign of the Trump administration yet, and given its unorthodox view of Russia and wish to disengage with overseas theaters, we may see the U.S. providing leeway for the Russian presence in Libya,” he said.

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Tom Kington is the Italy correspondent for Defense News.

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Senussi Bsaikri

US Africa Command (USAFRICOM) has deepened its interest in Libya following the developments in the country after the military attack launched by the House of Representatives-affiliated leadership on the capital, Tripoli, in 2019. One of the most dangerous consequences of this attack was the direct military presence of foreign forces, particularly the Russians and Turks.

Turkish forces are not a concern for the US, but Russian presence on Libyan soil has deepened the concerns of the Americans and their European allies, as evidenced by the statements issued by their officials and their movements on the ground. The repeated visits by senior USAFRICOM officers to Libya have been linked to these concerns.

US Africa Command (USAFRICOM) has deepened its interest in Libya following the developments in the country after the military attack launched by the House of Representatives-affiliated leadership on the capital, Tripoli, in 2019. One of the most dangerous consequences of this attack was the direct military presence of foreign forces, particularly the Russians and Turks.

Turkish forces are not a concern for the US, but Russian presence on Libyan soil has deepened the concerns of the Americans and their European allies, as evidenced by the statements issued by their officials and their movements on the ground. The repeated visits by senior USAFRICOM officers to Libya have been linked to these concerns.

USAFRICOM has played a prominent role in containing military and security tensions between the parties to the Libyan conflict.

The calm on the front lines and in the areas of contact cannot be separated or disconnected from US interventions, the ceasefire agreement and negotiations through the 5+5 Joint Military Committee (JMC), as well as another official but unannounced path.

Germany-based USAFRICOM supported the main points of agreement reached by the 5+5 JMC: a ceasefire and stabilisation, the withdrawal of mercenaries and foreign forces, and the unification of the army. These points were supposed to be implemented sequentially, meaning that the withdrawal of mercenaries would follow the ceasefire, followed by the unification of the army. However, matters did not progress well regarding the withdrawal of mercenaries and foreign forces. While a number of foreign fighters from Chad and Sudan were withdrawn, this did not apply to the Russian and Turkish forces, for well-known reasons related to geopolitical developments across a larger area of North, Central and Southern Africa, and the subsequent military and security repercussions.

It appears that the Americans resorted to the plan of unifying the “army” as a key factor contributing to the withdrawal of foreign forces, especially since the reliance on political consensus and the settlement of disputes between Libyan factions regarding the constitution and elections is facing major challenges.

This is perhaps confirmed or hinted at by a report issued by African Defence Forum magazine, affiliated with USAFRICOM, which indicated the interest of American officials and their emphasis on the need to unify the divided military institutions in order to impose security stability and confront the risks posed by the presence of foreign mercenaries and illegal trafficking networks. The report did not reveal any progress on this path, other than praising the cooperation of the parties to the Libyan conflict and their agreement on mechanisms for US cooperation with the Libyan parties to overcome the obstacles preventing the unification of forces in the west and east.

What has hindered the rapid implementation of the military and security points agreed upon by the 5+5 JMC is the link between the interests and influence of the Libyan conflicting parties and the external support (Russia and Turkiye), and the insistence on all forces being subordinate to the General Command headed by Khalifa Haftar, whose position and powers are beyond dispute with regard to the eastern front.

It appears to be counting on making progress in unifying the General Staff Command. It may achieve positive results on this front, but efforts to meet the requirements for army unification require political stability and the resolution of outstanding issues causing the current state of institutional division.

America’s ongoing efforts to restructure the military institution to address security challenges within Libya and the region, and to protect Libyan sovereignty from any external interference, as stated in the report, require a restructuring of the military and security structure. This will clash with the interests and impact of influential forces in the west and east. The influential forces in the west, especially the capital, Tripoli, whose powers and authority are greater than that of the armed forces, will not accept a unified army that follows the model implemented in the east, where the army controls military, security and even political affairs.

The hammer of expelling the Russians and the anvil of the complex military, security and political situation could prompt USAFRICOM’s plan to produce a deformed embryo and an entity lacking in effectiveness and influence. This is in addition to the ambiguity surrounding the White House’s approaches and options under President Donald Trump, and its handling of Russian ambitions, which may go in a direction different to that planned by US Africa Command.

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Kaan Devecioglu

Concerns of Italy and Europe

Over Russia’s Presence in Libya

Russia’s withdrawal from Syria and focus on Libya stands out as a development that threatens Italy’s geopolitical interests in particular. Libya is a priority country for Italy in terms of energy security, migration management and regional stability.

Russia’s increasing influence in Libya by settling in strategic bases such as Tobruk and Maaten al-Sarra could weaken Italy’s control over energy infrastructures and deepen instability in Libya, while also increasing migration flows to Europe. Indeed, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has evaluated these moves by Russia as a threat and called on the European Union and NATO to be more active in this regard.

Russia’s activities in Libya directly affect not only Italy but also the energy security and migration policies of the European Union. While European countries are trying to turn to alternative energy suppliers to reduce their energy dependence on Russia after the Ukraine War, Russia’s access to energy infrastructure in Libya jeopardizes these efforts.

Although the European Union has made diplomatic and economic efforts to ensure stability in Libya, full coordination has not been achieved among member states on this issue. While France is focusing more on Libya with its decreasing influence in the Sahel region, Germany is adopting a more cautious policy and prioritizing economic aid. However, Russia’s increasing influence requires Europe to develop a more comprehensive strategy.

Italy is one of the European countries that has been following the developments in Libya most closely, and its geographical proximity to the country increases Italy’s sensitivity over Libya. The presence of major Italian energy companies such as ENI in Libya is an important factor shaping the efforts of the Roman government to maintain stability in the region. However, Russia’s increasing influence in Libya through its military and paramilitary forces threatens Italy’s interests in the region.

Italy is making great efforts to establish a more effective Libya policy within the European Union and to strengthen security on NATO’s southern flank. However, the success of these efforts depends on Europe’s capacity to develop a common strategy. If an effective response is not given to Russia’s presence in Libya, not only Italy but all of Europe will feel the negative consequences of this geopolitical competition.

As a result, Russia’s withdrawal from Syria and its focus on Libya is creating a new balance of power in both the Mediterranean and Sahel regions. Moscow’s focus on strategic bases such as Tobruk and Maaten al-Sarra are remarkable steps taken to consolidate its military presence in the Mediterranean and to create new spheres of influence deep in Africa.

This situation poses serious risks, especially for Italy and other European countries, in terms of energy security, migration management and regional stability. The European Union and NATO’s failure to develop a common strategy against these developments in Libya could pave the way for Russia to further increase its influence.

In this context, it is critical for Italy to take on a leadership role and strengthen Europe’s efforts to protect its interests in Libya. However, the success of these efforts depends on the capacity of European countries to act together and to develop a comprehensive political vision that supports peace and stability in Libya. Otherwise, the current power struggle in Libya could create greater problems for Europe’s security and economic interests.

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Tarek Megerisi

In January, the Italian government helped a notorious Libyan torturer escape an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. Osama Njeem, a senior militia leader who commands Libya’s judicial police, was detained in Turin, in northern Italy, under an ICC warrant for suspected crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against detainees at Mitiga prison, which he oversaw in Libya’s capitol, Tripoli. But soon after his arrest, Njeem was unexpectedly freed by Italian authorities on what they claimed was “a legal technicality” and flown on an official Italian state aircraft back to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome from his fellow militiamen.

The ICC made clear that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government had not consulted the court before defying the warrant for Njeem’s arrest. Helping Njeem escape the docket in The Hague was an act of sabotage against the international order, universal justice and multilateralism itself—from a founding member of the ICC, no less. Under the Rome Statute that established the ICC, Italy is required to hand over wanted individuals to the court for trial in The Hague.

In the chaotic aftermath of outraged recriminations, Italian ministers claimed their hands were tied by improperly filed paperwork, before being trumped by their own prime minister in a fiery sermon on social media. Facing investigation from Italian prosecutors for her actions, Meloni claimed she had no regrets about doing what was necessary to protect her country from this supposed lone threat (in fact, an unarmed, overweight, already detained individual). “I can’t be blackmailed, I can’t be intimidated,” she declared, casting the investigation against her as desperation by political rivals who don’t want to see “Italy change, to become better.”

Meloni then doubled down on the subterfuge, dispatching Italy’s spy chief, Giovanni Caravelli, to Tripoli to brief Libya’s deeply unpopular, increasingly repressive government on who else was under sealed indictment from the ICC. According to Italian media, Caravelli assured Libyan leaders that none of the motley crew of 86 accused war criminals in Libya reportedly on the ICC’s list would be arrested on Italian soil, in order to avoid any embarrassing replays of the Njeem affair.

Meloni’s calculation is as simple as it is cynical. Since she came to power on an anti-immigrant platform, promising to close Italy’s borders to migrants and asylum-seekers, she depends on these torturers, criminals and militias in Libya to “manage” migration flows to Italy, which have already gone up 33 percent from this time last year. Meloni’s commitment is not to international law and the ICC, but instead to a shadowy agreement with Libya to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean. Had she allowed international justice to take its course, with Njeem and other torturers under arrest in The Hague, Meloni probably feared that the migrant agreement with Libya would collapse. In a callous act of revenge, Libyan officials may even have emptied their infamous migrant dungeons, sponsored by the European Union, in Italy’s direction.

This entire episode exposes who European countries are partnering with to “curb” or “manage” migration from North Africa, undermining any stated commitment to human rights. But it is also perhaps the most glaring example yet of how international actors are sabotaging the prospects for change in Libya and the chance that Libyans might finally realize the hopes of their revolution in 2011. It is a tale of the myopia and short-term imperatives of outside powers that don’t have any strategic plan or policy in Libya, instead only what now amounts to extortion rackets. They are consumed by trying to contain what once may have been considered the revolution’s fallout, but is increasingly the fallout of their own failed policies since the end of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. The result is that each year, the state that Libyans dreamed of gets farther away, and the Pandora’s box that Libya has become gets harder to keep shut. 

This time it was Italy, but they’re far from the only ones trading their values and their interests for ever-smaller and ever-shorter gains. Libya is where international law has risen and fallen, like a phoenix in reverse. In 2011, Libya’s revolution—and Gadhafi’s violent response, calling on his soldiers to “cleanse” Libya “house by house”—sparked fears of impending massacres that led to the one-and-only armed intervention on the grounds of the international humanitarian principle of “responsibility-to-protect,” or R2P. When the United Nations Security Council authorized NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from Gadhafi’s forces, it was seen by advocates of R2P as the crowning achievement of international law.

But Libya today is a wasteland of international law, the state effectively split into two rival territories. Whether in western Libya under its internationally recognized but failed and kleptocratic government, or in eastern Libya under the breakaway authoritarian regime of Gadhafi-era general Khalifa Haftar, there is no international law in action, only misguided games of realpolitik.

Just a week after the Njeem debacle, a U.S. diplomatic and military delegation posed smiling with Saddam Haftar, the filial heir apparent of eastern Libya’s dictator. It was a curiously timed display of legitimizing support, given that it coincided with the publication of a report by a U.N. panel of experts highlighting Saddam Haftar’s role as cocaine baron, smuggler-in-chief and prolific violator of the U.N. arms embargo on Libya. The U.S. goal in its dealings with Haftar is even more ethereal and quixotic than Meloni’s. Washington’s vain hope is drawing the Haftar family away from its ever-deepening relationship with Russia, their key financial and military patron, through shallow meet-and-greets and other empty gestures like participation in training exercises.

A few months earlier, Saddam Haftar had also been briefly detained in Italy, as part of a Spanish investigation into his attempts to illegally import military drones to Libya. The younger Haftar was predictably outraged. He is used to sharing in his father’s absolute impunity, which even involves visiting British and European ambassadors watching his forces parade their collection of weaponry obtained in violation of the U.N. arms embargo. Saddam Haftar’s response was to shut down Libya’s largest oil field, co-operated by a conglomerate of European oil companies, of which Spain’s Repsol is the most prominent.

Libya’s recent history has been an utterly predictable demonstration of cause and effect. Europe and the U.S. have not been the drivers of Libya’s decline, but they have been its sentinels, watching over, protecting and easing every deleterious step, believing it was in their interests to do so. But whether that interest lays in migration, geopolitics, energy or even some general but nebulous “stability,” those pillars have all degraded along with the position, power and influence of these Western sentinels.

Nothing symbolizes this decline better than Italy’s Meloni breaking the law to protect Libyan warlords and their people-smuggling gangs. This, almost ten years on from Italy’s first foray to co-opt Libya’s human-trafficking militias into becoming Europe’s counter-smuggling “partners.”

The same pattern applies to all these other Western interests in Libya. Desperation to stop Libya’s civil war spinning completely out of control in 2020 pushed Western states to collectively bless a deeply flawed cease-fire plan originating from Moscow. The same desperation led to hushing Libyan demands for accountability for Haftar’s numerous war crimes and for assurances that Libya’s key military bases and oil installations would be demilitarized under government control. Today, Libya is the linchpin of Russia’s Africa operations and, according to the U.N., “armed groups in Libya have achieved an unprecedented level of influence over state institutions,” including vital oil infrastructure.

Libyan oil, as Libyans had warned, was shut off in 2022 in another collaboration between Haftar and Vladimir Putin that had two aims: to politically strengthen Haftar and help Moscow torch international energy markets after invading Ukraine. President Joe Biden’s desperation to lower global oil prices enabled a shady deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates—Haftar’s other key patron—to restart Libyan oil production in exchange for effectively handing Libya’s oil governance over to armed groups. As a result, Libya’s vast oil wealth has been diverted to Haftar’s so-called Libyan National Army and mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group, helping Russia escape Western sanctions over Ukraine and fueling other African conflicts like the civil war in Sudan. Meanwhile, the Libyan state tumbles into ever deeper financial crisis.

As egregious as Meloni’s recent depredations are, they are merely symptomatic of a long trend of Western policymakers letting desperation lead when strategy should, trading their policy pillars for the equivalent of magic beans. The continuous result is watching the Western world, supposedly committed to the international rules-based order, dismantle the international laws, frameworks and mechanisms that not only uphold that order around the world, but protect their interests in Libya and represent their vehicle to finally stabilizing the country post-2011. With every piece of leverage the U.S. or Europe give up, with every tool of influence they destroy, they become more dependent on the arsonists who promised they would stop lighting fires once they were sure they wouldn’t be threatened with water.

Libyans, Libya’s neighbors and Europe have always been in this together, as they all suffer at the same hands. The only way out of this inferno is to shepherd Libya toward elections that replace the current crew of arsonists in power. That requires using what outside leverage remains to strengthen accountability that can restrain these arsonists and establish transparency over Libya’s oil industry and revenue, to help cut off their fuel. The fate of Libya, and of the international order itself, depends on it.

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Tarek Megerisi – Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the North Africa and Middle East program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

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