Author - ab_mnbr

 Jacob Wirtschafter 

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

What to know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Split country

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

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

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

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

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

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Jacob Wirtschafter – Special to The Washington Times

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Göktuğ Çalışkan

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

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

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

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

Assassination before diplomacy

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

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

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

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

Ankara’s channel to Haftar

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

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

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

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

Keeping both doors open

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

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

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

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

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

From Benghazi to El Alamein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tahani Elmogrbi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Tracks

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

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

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

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

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

A Question of Legitimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Washington Institute

Elis Gjevori

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A crisis decades in the making

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wolfram Lacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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Wolfram Lacher

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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Ferhat Polat

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

***

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

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

The evolution of Turkish-Libyan relations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic and energy cooperation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current situation in Libya

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

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

***

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

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Driss Rejichi 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haftar’s appointment to key position

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calls for resignation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oil and security sideline democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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Dr. Youssef Mohammad Sawani

The Strategy of Institutional Bypass

For years, the international community’s approach to fixing Libya has focused on top-down elite-driven deals. UNSMIL, currently under the leadership of Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) Hanna Tetteh, has effectively transitioned from an objective mediator into a manager of the status quo convening endless dialogues, structured or otherwise, to shuffle the same discredited political cards. These processes are bound to fail because they ask the very members of the cartel to sign their own political death warrants.

The failure of international mediation in Libya stems from a flawed mental image that reduces the nation to a negotiable corporate project. Since 2011, it has been defined by a series of top-down UN-led initiatives that have struggled to gain traction in a landscape of deep political fragmentation and foreign interference. Following the 2011 NATO intervention, UNSMIL was established to guide the transition, but these efforts often suffered from a lack of local ownership and a failure to meaningfully include civil society. Landmark attempts at consolidation such as the 2015 Skhirat Agreement Libyan Political  (LPA) ultimately resulted in elite power-sharing arrangements that failed to achieve public legitimacy or resolve the country’s institutional divides. 

In recent years, diplomacy shifted toward a “three-track” approach to address political, military and economic issues, yet as  analysts observe, these processes have frequently been undermined by the competing geopolitical agendas of external actors and the influence of entrenched armed groups. Consequently, international mediation has often been criticized for prioritizing quick-fix political formulas over the inclusive, Libyan-led reconciliation necessary to build sustainable, long-term stability. 

Rather than treating Libya as a society with deep-rooted needs, mediators frequently operate on a transactional logic viewing the country as a set of power maps to be rearranged by elite deal-making. This approach treats the state as a business to be restructured and its people as secondary details assuming that stability can be achieved simply by dividing power and resources between competing factions. 

Massad Boulos, Senior Advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs, has proposed an initiative that epitomizes this transactional failure by treating Libya as a corporate puzzle to be solved through elite power-sharing rather than a sovereign nation. The plan proposes a multi-year transition to unify state institutions centred on a deal between the Dbeibah and Haftar families, notably involving Ibrahim Dbeibah and Saddam Haftar.

Ibrahim Dbeibah is national security advisor to his uncle, Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah. He plays a central role in the administration of the western-based Government of National Unity. Saddam Haftar is the Deputy General Commander of the eastern-based Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF. a.k.a. the Libyan National Army (LNA)). His importance and role stems from him being the son of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, commander of the LAAF. Saddam is widely viewed as a successor to his father and a key player in U.S.-backed efforts to unify the country’s leadership. 

Against this backdrop of entrenched domestic rivalry, international efforts to ‘fix’ Libya have shifted toward transactional economy-first initiatives such as the so-called unified budget, control over oil revenues and security coordination via AFRICOM that reduces the state to a negotiation between armed and financial stakeholders. 

While Boulos continues to press his framework with considerable vigour, the initiative is encountering firm resistance. Armed and political groups in Misrata and elsewhere as well as radical Islamists and the head of the Presidential Council have denounced the proposal as a ‘forced marriage’ imposed upon Libyans and as a threat to the democratic process. 

Yet, such objections warrant more than just caution. The invocation of democratic principle here functions less as a genuine defence of the public good than as a rhetorical shield deployed by actors who fear that an accommodation between the Dbeibah and Haftar camps would marginalize them and strip away their access to power, position and resources.

Framing the contest as one between military rule and democracy, therefore, oversimplifies the complexity of what is at stake. What is unfolding is not a struggle over the character of the political order but a struggle among entrenched networks over their place within it. These factions are, in effect, signalling that any settlement which does not retain them at the centre of the emerging architecture constitutes a threat to their interests. Consequently, the language of democracy is being appropriated to defend positions of privilege entrenching divisions rather than fostering the reconciliation any durable settlement would require.

More importantly, this top-down corporate-style restructuring bypasses the Libyan people entrenching elite influence while ignoring the fundamental need for institutional legitimacy and grassroots consensus. Through a de-colonial lens, it becomes evident that international initiatives such as those currently attributed to U.S. presidential advisor Massad Boulos are rooted in a structural “mental image” that treats Libya as an object of negotiation rather than a sovereign nation. By operating on the logic of corporate restructuring rather than inclusive national reconciliation as a pre-condition for state-building, these interventions systematically undermine the prospects for sustainable peace.

Libya’s history since 2011 has shown that such top-down deals which ignore the complexities of Libyan society and the necessity of institutional legitimacy—as seen in the power-sharing deals based on the 2015 Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) establishing the Government of National Accord (GNA) as well as the establishment of the current Government of National Unity (GNU) through the UN-led Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF)—fail to resolve the crisis. 

By prioritizing the interests of factional power brokers over the construction of a sustainable state, these interventions treat sovereignty as a negotiable item and transform political discourse into a competition for government seats rather than a pursuit of justice. Consequently, local elites often succumb to opportunistic justifications shifting their principles to align with whatever external deal promises them a share of influence. 

Ultimately, this “deal-making” mindset ignores the Libyan collective memory; there is a fundamental crisis that exists because of the people’s distrust in the political process and the lack of legitimacy in the militias who cling to power at any cost.

By focusing on balancing armed and financial powers, international mediation risks turning peace efforts into fuel for future conflict. True stability cannot be manufactured through external blueprints but rather through a national project built on institutional authority and societal consensus rather than the temporary and exclusionary distribution of power.

Transformative stability will never be delivered by the current political apparatus. It must be claimed from below through an aggressive strategy of “institutional bypass”: Since the centralized state is thoroughly compromised, a coordinated civic mobilization must bypass the corrupt political centre and systematically activate local governance structures.

Currently, elected Libyan municipal councils possess an organic legitimacy that the central cartel can never buy despite some exceptions. By shifting the focus of administrative and financial accountability to the local level and demanding the direct decentralized management of oil revenues to municipalities, the oxygen feeding the proxy system can be cut off. Without centralized funds to distribute to their armed appendages, the cartel’s leverage collapses.

To turn this resistance into a permanent national framework, a strategic alliance between parallel localized networks and emergent non-factional political parties must champion four non-negotiable pillars:

• Convene a Constituent Assembly: A transparent bottom-up process to draft an indigenous social contract that guarantees equitable decentralized wealth distribution.
• Establish a Unified National Democratic Agenda: Political organizing driven by programmatic parties focused on national cohesion explicitly rejecting zero-sum elitist power-sharing deals.
• Enforce the Exit of All Foreign Forces: Unifying civic and political pressure to demand the immediate unconditional expulsion of all foreign troops and mercenary structures.
• Institutionalize Direct Referendums: Returning veto power to the Libyan street by forcing direct public votes on critical macroeconomic and constitutional decisions.

Reclaiming the Future

While some critics dismiss the use of constitutional tools such as representative assemblies and referendums as an uncritical adoption of Western Westphalian state models, this view is misguided. Rather than an ideological surrender, employing these mechanisms is a form of strategic capture allowing for the reclamation and redirection of the state’s machinery toward genuine sovereign objectives. 

By anchoring these tools within local social realities and community consent, the formal legal structure is stripped of its top-down imperialist baggage and repurposed as a defensive shield to protect Libyan sovereignty from external predation. Sovereignty is not an international grant distributed by foreign capitals or UN envoys but a right to be reclaimed. The most urgent task facing the country’s civic forces is to completely strip foreign “guardians” and domestic kleptocrats of their analytical legitimacy. By casting off the myth of the failed state, Libyans can starve the cartel of its financial oxygen, dissolve the architecture of tutelage and finally become the sole architects of their own destiny.

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Dr. Youssef Mohammad Sawani is Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Tripoli, Libya, and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow, International Centre for Dialogue Initiatives (New York). He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research and Policy Integration in Africa (IRPIA), and an Advisory Board Member at Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL).

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Mehmet Rakipoğlu

Although the U.S. and Türkiye have different priorities in Libya, the two power brokers are finding common ground for a more stable country.

When the wave of Arab uprisings that swept through Tunisia, Egypt and Syria finally reached Libya, Muammar Gaddafi’s four-decade rule ended. The 2011 NATO-backed intervention delivered on that promise, toppling the regime, but it left nothing resembling a functioning state in its place. What followed was a vacuum that has defined Libya ever since. For 15 years, the country has been split between the U.N.-recognised Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, and the Haftar family’s Libyan National Army (LNA) in the east.

When Türkiye became militarily involved in the Libya crisis, Khalifa Haftar’s assault on Tripoli halted, and the involvement has underpinned a fragile military equilibrium ever since. This year, however, the picture changed notably. In April, the conflicting parties jointly signed Libya’s first unified budget in 13 years. Then, on June 18, a trilateral power-sharing agreement emerged, brokered not through the U.N. process but directly by Washington. Those developments raise three interlocking questions: what is driving the transformation in U.S. policy toward Libya, how much of it owes to the fallout from the war with Iran, and where does Türkiye actually stand in this evolving picture?

Washington’s oil calculus

Oil sits at the center of the U.S.’s Libya policy, though it does not fully explain it. The plan pursued under Massad Boulos, senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs and concurrently as senior adviser for Africa, aims to bring the country’s rival factions under a single governing umbrella, for a straightforward reason: the internationally recognized government sits in Tripoli, while the oil fields and export terminals that matter most remain under Haftar’s control. Without an agreement between the two sides, neither large-scale investment nor durable stability is realistically achievable.

What is being constructed, then, is less a democratization project in the tradition Washington usually invokes, and more a power-sharing formula between the Dbeibah and Haftar households. Publicly, the initiative is framed as inclusive; in practice, the priority has been persuading the two families to formally share executive authority. That helps explain why, even as an election timetable is floated for February 2027, the substance of the deal rests on something narrower: a new Presidential Council under Saddam Haftar paired with a Dbeibah-led government, with military command divided along family and geographic lines rather than folded into unified institutions.

Washington has pursued this objective along three tracks simultaneously. Diplomatically, a process that began with a secret meeting in Rome last September has culminated in the June agreement. Economically, American and European energy majors have signed multibillion-dollar exploration and development deals, most notably the $20 billion, 25-year Waha agreement with TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips. Militarily, the Flintlock 2026 exercises in Sirte brought eastern and western forces under joint command for the first time, largely as a symbolic gesture.

Yet political momentum alone has not made Libya investable. The National Oil Corporation has gone without an approved budget, the dinar has been repeatedly devalued, fuel smuggling has siphoned off billions of dollars in a single year, and infrastructure continues to decay. Washington’s intent is unambiguous, but the ground it is building on remains unstable, which is precisely why the deal risks freezing at the level of an elite bargain rather than maturing into genuine institutional reform. Libyan critics have been blunt about this: the initiative, they argue, has been built around personalities rather than institutions, and neither women’s groups nor civil society were represented at the table in Rome.

Oil market instability

The timing of Washington’s renewed interest in Libya cannot be separated from the war with Iran. The conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran triggered a serious crisis around the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. Prices climbed above $115 a barrel, and Washington was compelled to release roughly 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of a coordinated drawdown with International Energy Agency members, pushing reserves to their lowest level since the early 1980s.

Against that backdrop, Libya has become attractive precisely because it offers an alternative that does not depend on Hormuz: proximity to Europe, and a light, sweet crude that suits European refineries particularly well. The country’s constraint, as analysts have repeatedly noted, is governance rather than geology. With political stability, production could rise well above 2 million barrels per day, offering a buffer against further disruption in the Gulf. The Iran war, in this sense, functions as an accelerant and a public justification for an interest that predates the conflict, though its limits should not be overstated. Libyan output cannot decisively reshape global supply on its own; its real effect operates through market expectations and confidence rather than raw volume.

Türkiye’s regional vision

Türkiye’s stake in Libya rests on a fundamentally different logic than Washington’s. For Ankara, the priority has never been oil, but rather Libya’s stability, the preservation of its territorial integrity, and the fulfillment of popular demands, chief among them free elections and legitimate representation. That distinction becomes clearer when set against the last decade’s trajectory on the Libya file.

In 2019, as Haftar besieged Tripoli and threatened to overrun the internationally recognized government, Türkiye signed a military cooperation agreement and a maritime boundary memorandum with the GNU (Government of National Unity), then got involved to halt his advance in 2020. That involvement did more than save Tripoli; it also unsettled the geopolitical order that Greece, France and others had been assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean, since the Turkish-Libyan maritime agreement effectively nullified its legal and practical basis.

Around the same period, Türkiye backed the Syrian people’s revolutionary demands and, through cross-border operations, dismantled the PKK’s attempt to entrench a proto-state structure in northern Syria, which culminated in the fall of the Assad regime. Ankara also impacted the regional balance in the Caucasus through its support for Azerbaijan, and played an active role in breaking the blockade imposed on Qatar.

Taken together, these moves transformed the Libya file from a theater where Türkiye was operating against unfavorable odds into one where it became the decisive actor on the ground.

The implication for Washington is straightforward: no durable settlement in Libya is achievable without accounting for the military and political balance Türkiye has actually built. That recognition appears to underpin the shift crystallizing in the Boulos process, which is not an attempt to sideline Ankara, but an effort to work alongside it.

The recent meeting between Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin and Lt. Gen. Saddam Haftar in Benghazi, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s participation in a Cairo meeting alongside Boulos, the Turkish navy’s visit to Benghazi, and the first joint exercises bringing together forces from both halves of Libya, all point to the same conclusion: these are not signs of rivalry, but of two actors increasingly working from the same script.

U.S.-Türkiye co-op in Libya

What deserves particular emphasis is that Washington and Ankara are not running competing projects in Libya. Rather, the U.S. appears to have concluded, after more than a decade of policies aimed at containing Turkish influence in the region, that the strategy has not delivered the results it once promised, and that the Libya file simply cannot be managed without Ankara. That recognition suggests the rapprochement that began over Syria is finding a parallel expression in Libya.

Türkiye’s priority remains stability and territorial integrity rather than hydrocarbons; Washington’s remains energy security and investment conditions. But these no longer function as competing objectives; they have become complementary ones. A stable Libya serves both capitals, and Washington seems to have accepted that Türkiye is the actor best positioned on the ground to help deliver it.

The parallel with Syria is instructive. In both cases, Washington finds itself adjusting to a Türkiye capable of shaping outcomes independently, one that has repeatedly outmaneuvered efforts to contain it. Whether this translates into a concrete partnership in Libya will depend on how the Haftar-Dbeibah negotiations unfold, and on whether Türkiye can play its role in that process without compromising the priorities that have defined its Libya policy from the outset: stability, unity, and the fulfillment of legitimate popular demands.

For now, what is visible is a shift away from confrontation and toward a working understanding between two actors pursuing different priorities but converging, for the moment, on the same objective: a stable Libya. It remains the clearest test case for what this emerging model of cooperation can actually deliver.

***

Mehmet Rakipoğlu – Lecturer at Mardin Artuklu University, Department of Political Science and International Relations and Director of Turkish Studies at Mokha Center.

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Dr. Youssef Mohammad Sawani

For over a decade, international commentary on Libya has been trapped in a patronizing loop. It’s time to emerge from that narrative.

Whenever a new political deadlock paralyzes Libya or localized clashes between powerful rival militias break out on the streets of the capital Tripoli, the global policy establishment dusts off its favourite phrases: “failed state,” “security vacuum,” and “primordial tribalism”.

This lexicon serves a very specific purpose. By framing Libya’s fragmentation following the fall of the previous regime of Muammar Qaddafi as an inevitable product of native institutional incapacity and ancient internal feuds, the international community achieves a convenient double victory. It blames the victims of the crisis while completely absolving the outside architects of Libya’s ongoing paralysis.

The reality on the ground is far more calculated. Libya is not a broken state suffering from a spontaneous institutional breakdown. It is a highly functional system of “managed chaos” in an undeclared modern theatre of tutelage where a domestic kleptocratic cartel and foreign powers work in tandem to lock the country in a state of permanent instability.

This ensures that Libya’s vast sovereign wealth remains easily extractable and its population permanently disenfranchised. To understand how Libya arrived here, we must dismantle the comfortable myths of the post-2011 era and look directly at the raw mechanics of what has become a highly lucrative “Cartel State”—a governance structure where formal state authority is captured by armed groups and political elites or cliques that treat national resources as their own spoils.

The Myth of the Humanitarian Rescue 

The baseline narrative of modern Libya began in 2011 with the NATO-backed intervention under the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine. Framed as a noble rescue mission to save civilians from the security apparatus of the Qaddafi regime’s reported violent suppression of protesters during the 2011 uprising and his explicit threat to ‘cleanse‘ opposition-held cities (much similar to Srebrenica), the R2P intervention was framed as a triumph of global moral conscience. In practice, it was a geopolitical bait-and-switch. 

Once the regime collapsed, the international coalition did not stick around to help; Libya was in a fragile situation beset by a security vacuum and the mushrooming of armed militias. The coalition here could have shepherded the country toward a viable sovereign transition. Instead, they packed up leaving behind a structural vacuum that was immediately hijacked by regional capitals. Far from safeguarding the Libyan people, this selective intervention turned the country into a testing ground for foreign weapons and proxy ambitions. 

Regional powers such as Turkey, the UAE, and Russia used Libya as a laboratory for advanced drone warfare and the deployment of mercenaries like the Syrian fighters and the Wagner Group to project influence without the political cost of direct state-on-state confrontation. Sovereignty was reduced to a conditional luxury dependent entirely on how local well-armed actors aligned with the strategic desires of outside capitals.

Today, this manifests in a state of soft occupation where thousands of foreign mercenaries from Russian paramilitary networks to Turkish-backed forces and external intelligence agencies permanently dictate the security landscape. The mechanics of occupation via mercenaries in Libya function as a privatized multi-layered system where foreign patrons outsource their strategic ambitions to local Libyan militias and foreign combatants. This creates a soft occupation where state sovereignty is effectively bypassed by these entrenched networks.

The Mechanics of the Cartel State

This artificial environment of managed instability birthed a predatory domestic model: the Cartel State which capitalized on decoupling the country’s current legislative and executive bodies from popular representation. Libya has experienced a decade-long political impasse where un-elected transition-era leaders entrenched themselves as permanent fixtures prioritizing the protection of their own power and financial interests over the democratic mandate of a populace that has not had the opportunity to vote for its representatives since 2014.

The major political factions locked in a power play are the Tripoli-based internationally-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) and the eastern-based House of Representatives (HoR) and its Government of National Stability (GNS) in alliance with the Khalifa Haftar-led Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF, a.k.a. Libyan National Army) maintain a loud superficial theatre of ideological warfare.

Behind closed doors, however, they share a deep mutual interest in preserving the status quo. By keeping the country divided, these elites can indefinitely postpone national elections while monopolizing the state’s financial pipelines. This profound lack of democratic legitimacy has incentivized these entrenched factions to treat the state’s finance and monetary institutions as a prize to be seized and the true nature of this arrangement was laid bare during the explosive 2024 political warfare over the Central Bank of Libya (CBL).    

When the Government of National Unity and the Presidential Council, without the approval of the House of Representatives, forcefully removed  the Central Bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, who had previously restricted government spending by blocking out-of-budget expenditures, this triggered a retaliatory oil shutdown by eastern factions exposing the fundamental truth of the Libyan crisis: the state is not “failing” but is being actively fought over as a financial prize—a vast, state-managed oil and gas reserves coupled with a highly centralized financial control over these revenues.

This makes the Central Bank and the National Oil Corporation (NOC) the ultimate keys to the treasure enabling whoever controls them an almost complete monopoly and control over the nation’s wealth without the need for taxation or popular consent as the case with rentier economy. The international community working through the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) swooped in not to implement a democratic resolution but to broker another elite power-sharing deal over bank leadership.

UNSMIL mediated a narrow deal between rival political elites to resolve the 2024 CBL crisis, therefore, effectively restarting the broken status quo by allowing competing factions to carve up the bank’s leadership and board positions among themselves. They managed the crisis just enough to get the oil flowing back to international markets while leaving the kleptocratic structure completely intact. By treating the CBL crisis as a technical issue that could be managed via board appointments, the international community avoided the difficult work of addressing how Libya’s political economy actually functions.

They achieved the immediate objective of oil flowing back into international markets, but they did so by reinforcing the power of the exact same actors who had caused the crisis in the first place. This implied that the next crisis is merely a matter of time. This systemic reality was formally confirmed in a March 2026 UN Panel of Experts report which explicitly concluded that Libya’s armed groups have entrenched themselves as the dominant drivers of governance exerting a “coercive and cartel-like control” over the nation’s economic institutions. Nowhere is this explicit exploitation more visible than in the energy sector. 

Libya sits atop Africa’s largest proven oil reserves, yet, there exists an opaque production-sharing agreement bypassing competitive bidding. State-sanctioned fuel smuggling networks and deliberately convoluted central bank letters of credit systematically divert billions in subsidized fuel to foreign markets allowing entrenched political and militia factions to siphon off national wealth while maintaining a veneer of institutional legitimacy enriching an oligarchic elite and their foreign sponsors. 

The Libyan people, meanwhile, are reduced to price-takers in their own land. Following successive central bank devaluations of the dinar, citizens endure runaway inflation, chronic electricity blackouts and critical cash shortages. While billions of dollars in oil revenues (As of June 2026, Libya’s crude oil production has reached approximately 1.49 million barrels per day) flow through a centralized pipeline directly into the hands of the cartel, ordinary Libyans plunge into artificial poverty. 

Following the Central Bank’s 14.7% devaluation of the Libyan dinar in January 2026, inflation has surged into the double digits reaching approximately 14% by mid-year. This economic strain is compounded by a sharp increase in the cost of essential goods with the national Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB) spiking by over 10% in April 2026 alone further eroding household purchasing power amidst chronic cash shortages at banks and ATMs. This is a highly sophisticated transnational extraction racket operating under a veneer of international diplomatic legitimacy.

De-exoticizing the Social Fabric

When international observers try to explain this breakdown, they invariably fall back on Orientalist tropes, pointing to Libya’s “tribal nature” as the fundamental barrier to a modern democratic state. This analysis fundamentally misreads Libyan society. Traditional kinship structures and local social networks are not primitive relics causing state failure. 

Historically, they have been the literal bedrock of societal resilience. When the centralized state collapsed in 2011, it was these organic local networks functioning through deeply embedded codes of collective liability and conflict mediation that prevented total societal dissolution. The tribe in Libya has historically acted as a conscious civic shield against centralized authoritarian overreach and foreign occupation. These structures, most notably the Wisemen and Elderly and Notables Councils that emerged nationwide, stepped in to act as the primary authorities in the absence of a functioning judiciary and adjudicated everything from property disputes to blood feuds. 

In the Nafusa Mountains, regional councils successfully mediated complex inter-tribal tensions between groups like the Mashahiya and Zintani that the central government could not reach. Meanwhile, in Libya’s neglected south, social councils unified their communities to provide basic services where infrastructure had disintegrated. These grassroots initiatives demonstrated that even as the formal state apparatus failed, Libyans utilized deeply embedded social frameworks to prevent total societal dissolution. 

However, we must draw a sharp line between this authentic socially cohesive fabric and the opportunistic armed groups dominating the current landscape who inverted the state into an upside-down relationship: Whereas the government should command the security forces, the security forces in the new Libya were dictating to the government how it should perform, ensuring that any political arrangement is contingent upon their approval and continued access to state wealth. 

It needs to be highlighted that the militias running rackets in western regions, particularly Tripoli, or controlling smuggling routes in the margins are not “tribal warriors”. They are hyper-modern mercantile appendages of the Cartel State itself. When they wear tribal names, they do that purely as camouflage to mask raw economic predation and racketeering. By labelling these heavily armed state-subcontracted criminal networks as “tribes,” or considering them representatives of regions, ethnicities or cities, the international community perpetuates a harmful narrative that blames indigenous culture for a political crisis that was manufactured by an international security vacuum.

***

Dr. Youssef Mohammad Sawani is Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Tripoli, Libya, and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow, International Centre for Dialogue Initiatives (New York). He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research and Policy Integration in Africa (IRPIA), and an Advisory Board Member at Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL).

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Christopher M. Blanchard

Key Takeaways:

Libya Remains Deeply Divided and Unstable: Fifteen years after the 2011 uprising and NATO intervention, Libya is split between rival eastern (LAAF/Haftar) and western (GNU) factions, with postponed elections, foreign-backed militias, and disputes over oil revenues, institutions, and security preventing a unified transition.

U.S. Engagement Focuses on Institutional Unity: The Trump Administration is actively promoting a new inclusive executive authority, unified national budget, and security/financial reforms through high-level visits and diplomacy, while supporting UN efforts and balancing relations with competing Libyan actors.

Key Challenges Include Terrorism, Foreign Influence, and Migration: Libya continues to face terrorism risks, Russian and other foreign military presence, and serves as a major transit route for irregular migration to Europe, with ongoing U.S. sanctions and oversight concerns shaping congressional and executive policy.

Fifteen years after a 2011 uprising and U.S.-backed military intervention that toppled longtime authoritarian leader Muammar al Qadhafi, Libya has yet to make a transition to stable governing arrangements. Elections and diplomacy have produced a series of interim governments, but militias, local leaders, and subnational coalitions backed by competing foreign patrons have remained powerful. Rival networks in western and eastern Libya have competed for national control.

After the eastern Libya-based Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF, alt. Libyan National Army) coalition attempted to seize the capital, Tripoli, in 2019, UN-backed diplomacy halted fighting and produced a Government of National Unity (GNU). Planned elections were postponed in 2021, and Libyans have remained mired in confrontation, with a rival government re-emerging in the east.

A lack of national consensus over electoral and constitutional arrangements and factional disputes over energy, financial, and security issues have prolonged Libya’s instability.

The Trump Administration has attempted to help Libyans unify security, financial, and administrative institutions, reportedly proposing the creation of a new, inclusive executive authority to govern until elections can be held.

Senior Adviser to the President for Arab and African Affairs Massad Boulos, Chargé d’Affaires Jeremy Berndt, and U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) officials have visited Libya repeatedly since 2025, encouraging agreement in April 2026 on Libya’s first unified national budget in over a decade and promoting bilateral and intra-Libyan security cooperation. 

Successive U.S. Administrations have sought to prevent Libya from serving as a permissive environment for transnational terrorist groups while managing the consequences of Libya’s internal divisions and interventions there by other countries.

The increased presence and influence in Libya of Russian officials and security actors since 2020, paired with the effects of ongoing conflict and political instability to Libya’s south, have appeared to motivate successive U.S. Administrations to seek to unify Libyan institutions.

Hurdles have included deep-seated Libyan animosities and lingering international and local concerns about the behavior, legitimacy, and intentions of prominent actors in eastern and western Libya. 

In 2025, the Trump Administration made changes to U.S. foreign aid programs and implementing agencies, resulting in changes to or termination of some U.S. assistance efforts in Libya, including programs under the Global Fragility Act (GFA, Title V of Division J, P.L. 116-94).

Since 2024, Congress has provided funds to support additional U.S. diplomatic engagement in Libya and to enable the future reestablishment of a full-time U.S. diplomatic presence. 

War, Ceasefire, and a Deferred Election

After Qadhafi’s ouster and killing, Libya’s 2012 election produced governing arrangements that devolved into conflict in 2014, effectively dividing the country along ideological, geographic, and institutional lines.

Conflict re-erupted in 2019, when the LAAF, a coalition of eastern Libya-based armed groups led by Qadhafi-era military defector Khalifa Haftar, attempted to seize Tripoli from the then-internationally recognized government. Russia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and leaders of Libya’s House of Representatives (HOR, an interim parliament elected in 2014) backed the LAAF. With Turkish military support, anti-LAAF western Libyan militias forced the LAAF to withdraw.

Libya has remained effectively divided since, with foreign forces still present, and opposing coalitions separated by a line of control west of Sirte.

A UN mission supports implementation of an October 2020 ceasefire. Haftar’s forces have asserted more influence and security control in southern Libya, partnering with local forces in the southwest toward Algeria and south toward the remote borders with Niger, Chad, and Sudan.

In 2021, the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL, established by the UN Security Council) backed a Libyan-led process that selected a three-member Presidential Council and Government of National Unity (GNU), with a mandate to serve until elections or through June 2022.

Abdul Hamid Dabaiba was chosen as GNU Prime Minister. Elections were postponed indefinitely amid disputes over electoral laws and sequencing. Dabaiba has remained in power in Tripoli, challenged by an LAAF-backed government in the east, led by Osama Hamad.

To break the deadlock, UNSMIL has proposed a roadmap and convened dialogues on electoral arrangements and other national issues. Libyan political bodies in June 2026 set a 2027 target for presidential and parliamentary elections.

Intense Libyan competition for control over the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and Central Bank fueled confrontation and crises through 2024; these institutions govern the oil operations, revenues, and public sector payments on which most Libyans (and both rival governments) rely.

The UN Panel of Experts for Libya reported in March 2026 that leaders from the west and east have colluded with NOC officials and others to provide “an umbrella of impunity” for large-scale irregular financing schemesthat have drained state coffers.

Libya holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, and its ~1.4 million barrel per day output provides nearly all state revenues. 

Since 2024, the LAAF has improved its military capabilities (including drones) and strengthened its control in the east and south. Khalifa Haftar’s sons have assumed leadership roles in reconstruction and security bodies.

In May 2025, GNU forces killed a prominent militia figure, setting off violence and protests in Tripoli. In May 2026, militia fighting resumed in the western port of Zawiya. Major east-west fighting has not resumed since 2020. 

Division, Unity, Elections, and U.S. Policy

U.S. engagement is expanding in a context shaped by continuing Libyan division and fragile security. U.S. naval ships have visited western and eastern Libya, and, in 2026, AFRICOM held part of its annual FLINTLOCK exercise near Sirte.

U.S. officials have engaged actors across Libya’s internal divides, travelling frequently to Libya and also hosting GNU and LAAF envoys in Washington, DC, including separate June 2026 visits by GNU Deputy Defense Minister Abdulsalam Al Zoubi and LAAF Deputy Commander Saddam Haftar (Khalifa’s son).

U.S. officials have promoted commercial ties, including 2026 oil and gas agreements with Chevron and a $20 billion production improvement deal with ConocoPhillips and TotalEnergies.

UNSMIL mediation is continuing in parallel, with Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General (SRSG) for Libya and head of UNSMIL Hanna Tetteh proposing and seeking Libyan and international support for a roadmap to elections and an end to Libya’s transition.

In June 2026, Tetteh briefed the Security Council on the recommendations of an UNSMIL-convened Structured Dialogue, which she said “call for the restoration of unified, effective, legitimate and accountable state institutions” and emphasize “the need for broad political consensus on credible national elections and through clear legal frameworks, with adequate resources and effective governance across institutions including the security sector.”

Boulos has described U.S. policy as “completely complementary” to UNSMIL’s efforts and a short-term initiative to stabilize the country in support of UNSMIL’s longer-term vision. Some observers argue U.S.-backed unity talks risk further entrenching fractious Libyan elites. 

Terrorism and Foreign Military Forces

Terrorists killed four U.S. personnel in Libya in the 2012 Benghazi attacks, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. UN and U.S. reports describe transnational terrorist threats in Libya as much reduced since peaking circa 2015-2016, when U.S. military strikes helped local forces defeat an Islamic State affiliate. 

Egypt, Turkey (Türkiye), the UAE, Russia, France, and Italy all have pursued discrete interests, influencing the actions and positions of Libyan groups. U.S officials have balanced Libya goals with other priorities in bilateral relations with these countries.

Successive U.S. Administrations have sought to foster the departure from Libya of foreign military forces and mercenaries. U.S. officials have expressed concern about Russia’s presence in Libya since 2018, including reported transfers of Russian personnel and weapons systems to LAAF-controlled eastern and southern Libya.

Since 2024, Libya reportedly has been a growing logistical hub for Russian operations in North Africa and the Sahel. LAAF-controlled areas reportedly also have served as a conduit for support to the Rapid Support Forces in neighboring Sudan. Turkish military advisers have trained and assisted western Libyan forces, while cooperating at times with the LAAF.

UN Bodies and UN and U.S. Sanctions

The UN Security Council has authorized UNSMIL through October 2026. The Security Council has established an arms embargo on Libya and financial and travel sanctions on entities threatening peace there, undermining the political transition, or supporting others who do so. 

Resolution 2819 (2026) addresses the arms embargo and illicit oil exports. In February 2026, President Trump extended for one year the national emergency related to Libya cited in Executive Orders 13566 and 13726 that provide for comparable U.S. sanctions.

UN sanctions have frozen tens of billions of dollars in Qadhafi-era state assets abroad, and Libyans have sought access and accommodations to enable fund management.

Migration

Libya remains a transit point for irregular migration to Europe, and migrants remain vulnerable to extortion, detention, sexual violence, and other abuses. In 2026, UN agencies have identified more than 936,000 foreign migrants, and nearly 113,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Libya, most of the latter of whom are new arrivals since 2023 from Sudan.

The State Department reported in 2025 that “armed groups, militias, and criminal networks infiltrated the administrative ranks of the government and engaged in illicit activities, including human trafficking.”

Issues in the 119th Congress

Congress appropriated funding for transition support, stabilization, security assistance, and humanitarian programs for Libya from 2011 to 2024. In 2025, the Trump Administration terminated some programs undertaken pursuant to a March 2023 10-year GFA plan for Libya. International Military Education and Training (IMET) assistance has continued in support of efforts to promote unity among military officers affiliated with western and eastern forces.

Since 2014, U.S. officials have operated from a Libya External Office (LEO) at the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia. Congress has made funds available for an interim Diplomatic Travel and Support Operations Facility in Tripoli and to eventually resume embassy operations.

Congress may conduct oversight of and/or seek to shape the Administration’s policy, including on aid, engagement with the LAAF and others, security cooperation, commercial ties, frozen Libyan assets, and the U.S. diplomatic presence.

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Christopher M. Blanchard, Specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs

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Livia Sanchez, Joanne Levine

Why it Matters

Fifteen years after the U.S. backed military intervention that toppled Muammar al-Qadhafi, Libya remains a fractured state split between rival governments, a breeding ground for Russian expansion, and a transit hub for hundreds of thousands of migrants. A newly updated Congressional Research Service (CRS) report reveals how the Trump administration is trying to stitch the country back together—and the stakes Congress faces in overseeing that effort.

The political fragmentation, security competition, and corruption that plague Libya create openings for adversaries. Russia has expanded its footprint in the country since 2020, reportedly using Libyan territory as a logistical hub for operations across North Africa and the Sahel. Meanwhile, the country’s vast oil reserves and strategic location make it highly valuable for opportunist outsiders, even as millions of displaced people pass through its territory seeking escape.

The Big Picture

Libya has remained politically fragmented since the 2011 fall of Qadhafi, with the country divided since 2014 along a line of control near Sirte. Two rival governments now compete for legitimacy: Abdul Hamid Dabaiba leads the Government of National Unity (GNU) in western Libya, while Osama Hamad leads an Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF)-backed government in eastern Libya. The LAAF attempted to seize Tripoli in 2019 but failed after UN-backed diplomacy halted fighting and produced the GNU.

Elections have proven elusive. Planned elections in 2021 were postponed amid disputes over electoral laws and constitutional arrangements. In June, Libyan bodies set a new target of 2027 elections, but a lack of national consensus over electoral and constitutional arrangements has prolonged the country’s instability, as have factional disputes over energy, financial, and security issues.

The CRS report, updated on July 21, documents how competing power centers have weaponized state institutions. A UN Panel of Experts reported in March that western and eastern Libyan leaders colluded with National Oil Corporation officials to create an umbrella of impunity for large-scale irregular financing schemes, draining state coffers. Libya holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, with output of approximately 1.4 million barrels per day providing nearly all state revenues, making control of the energy sector a flashpoint for confrontation.

There have been glimpses of progress. Libya achieved its first unified national budget in over a decade in April, and major east-west combat has not resumed since 2020 (though militia fighting did erupt in the western port of Zawiya in May, and the GNU killing of a militia figure in Tripoli in May 2025 sparked violence and protests).

Political Stakes

The Trump administration has made Libyan unity a priority, dispatching Senior Adviser Massad Boulos, Chargé d’Affaires Jeremy Berndt, and AFRICOM officials on repeated visits since 2025 to broker the country’s reunification. The administration has proposed a new, inclusive executive authority to govern Libya until elections can be held and has promoted bilateral and intra-Libyan security cooperation.

In June, the administration hosted both GNU Deputy Defense Minister Abdulsalam Al Zoubi and LAAF Deputy Commander Saddam Haftar in Washington. That move signals a willingness to engage both sides, though it also raises questions about U.S. alignment with the LAAF, which has expanded military capabilities including drones and strengthened its control in the east and south since 2024. Khalifa Haftar’s sons have assumed leadership roles in the LAAF, concentrating power within the family.

The administration has also pursued commercial ties with Libya, promoting oil and gas deals with Chevron and a $20 billion production improvement deal involving ConocoPhillips and TotalEnergies. Those moves, although they may help to restore Libya’s energy sector, could complicate efforts to address the corruption and collusion that the UN identified among oil officials and political leaders.

In 2025, the administration terminated some programs, pursuant to a March 2023 Global Fragility Act plan for Libya. However, it has continued International Military Education and Training (IMET) assistance aimed at fostering unity among military officers from both factions.

Congress has already appropriated funding for transition support, stabilization, security assistance, and humanitarian programs for Libya from 2011 to 2024, and since 2024 has provided funds to support additional U.S. diplomatic engagement and to enable the future reestablishment of a full-time U.S. diplomatic presence in Libya. The CRS report notes that Congress may conduct oversight of and seek to shape the Trump administration’s policy on Libya aid, engagement with the LAAF, security cooperation, commercial ties, frozen Libyan assets, and the U.S. diplomatic presence.

Humanitarian and Security Challenges

The humanitarian toll of Libya’s instability is staggering. UN agencies identified over 936,000 foreign migrants in Libya in 2026, along with nearly 113,000 refugees and asylum seekers. Most foreign migrants arriving since 2023 are Sudanese, fleeing their own conflict. The State Department’s 2025 report noted that armed groups, militias, and criminal networks have infiltrated the administrative ranks of the Libyan government and engaged in illicit activities including human trafficking.

Russia’s expanding presence poses a separate challenge. Russian officials and security actors have increased their presence and influence in Libya since 2020. Libya has reportedly become a growing logistical hub for Russian operations in North Africa and the Sahel since 2024, and LAAF-controlled areas have reportedly served as a conduit for support to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. U.S. officials have expressed concern about Russia’s presence since 2018, and the UN Security Council has authorized the continuation of the United Nation’s Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) through October 2026 to monitor compliance with an October 2020 ceasefire.

The Bottom Line

Libya’s path to stability depends on whether rival factions can agree on power-sharing arrangements and elections before external actors—Russia in particular—deepen their foothold in the country. The Trump administration’s engagement with both the GNU and the LAAF suggests an inclusive approach to unity, but that strategy carries risks. Promoting commercial deals and hosting LAAF officials could be read as tacit acceptance of a military-dominated settlement that sidelines democratic processes and entrenches corruption.

Congress faces a choice: whether to support the administration’s approach to Libyan unity as currently configured, or to condition assistance on concrete progress toward the kind of unified, effective, legitimate and accountable state institutions that UNSMIL has called for. The stakes extend beyond Libya itself: how the U.S. manages its Libya policy will shape whether the country becomes a platform for Russian expansion or a partner in regional stability.

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Tim Eaton

Libyan anti-corruption investigations reveal the limitations of a US push to reunify the country without improving governance.

In recent weeks, Massad Boulos – President Trump’s senior adviser on Arab and African affairs – has stepped up efforts to break through Libya’s political deadlock. The country is split between two rival administrations: the UN-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli – controlled by the Dabaiba family – and the Benghazi-based Government of National Stability (GNS), aligned with Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forced (LAAF). The US plan is to bring the Haftars and the Dabaibas together with other key constituencies and form a unified government.

In June, LAAF deputy commander Saddam Haftar travelled to Washington to meet with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as Boulos seeks the Haftar family’s agreement on power-sharing. The Dabaiba family did not travel to Washington but Boulos still hopes to convince them to support the deal.

For the deal’s opponents – and there are many – it looks like the return of family rule and a way to legitimize the two rival families. It also appears to be more of the same for ordinary Libyans as the deal focuses on power-sharing between elites rather than how the state can deliver for its citizens.

Reports reveal scale of corruption

in Libya

Two recent reports released by a coalition formed between Libya’s Audit Bureau and its National Anti-Corruption Commission highlight the cost for Libyan citizens of the co-existence between the Haftars and the Dabaibas and the vested interests of politicians and armed groups.

The initiative has been supported from the outset by Chatham House which has provided guidance on the development of the coalition’s programme.

The reports look at the supply chains that manage the provision of subsidized fuel and subsidized medicine, respectively. They make for grim, but important, reading. The provision of fuel has been a major source of controversy in Libya in recent years. In 2022, a change in leadership of the National Oil Corporation – brokered between the Haftar and the Dabaiba families by the UAE – led to a rapid expansion in fuel procurement.

Despite being an oil producing country, Libya has a deficit of refining capacity, which means it must import fuels for its domestic market. Famously, petrol is provided at the pump at a cost of $0.02 a litre. But the report reveals that the cost of the subsidy has become astronomical.

The report found that the import bill had reached over $9 billion by 2024, the equivalent of nearly $1,200 per person in Libya. The volume of imports had more than doubled since 2021, an increase not justifiable by any reasonable estimation of market demand.

The report details all aspects of this supply chain, revealing the problems of Libya’s fragmented state. Assessment of demand for fuel was found to lack a ‘scientific’ basis, with Libyan state agencies demanding ever greater quantities for which they rarely paid.  Libya’s patchwork of state-affiliated armed groups increased their diesel consumption by 1,527 per cent in 2024 compared to 2021, while consumption at Tripoli South Power Plant increased by 1,368 per cent.

These findings point towards a reality where vested interests are controlling lucrative flows of goods, a significant proportion of which are likely sold on the black market at much higher rates or smuggled internationally.

And it is not only Libyan elites who benefit, there is also an international dimension to such activities. The number of suppliers of imported fuels was cut from 17 in 2021 to just six in 2024 and the report raises several significant regulatory concerns over these – mostly newly created – foreign companies. The report highlights that the prices paid by the Libyan state for its fuel became increasingly uncompetitive as the number of suppliers shrunk. For example, the increase in the cost, insurance and freight premium for diesel increased by 450 per cent, resulting in a near $600 million loss in 2024 alone.

The report on the supply of medicines illustrates strikingly similar dynamics, finding that there is no national framework regulating medicines supply and that the estimation of needs is based upon a ‘speculative’ methodology.

The system for registering pharmaceutical companies was found to be deeply flawed. The report noted that a small number of companies had grown exponentially in terms of profit and market share in recent years. Some were found to have direct ties to state officials and members of parliament. This represents a direct conflict of interest, as it is these same officials and parliamentarians that shape the very procurement policies from which the companies benefit.

The limitations of power-sharing 

So, how is this relevant to attempts to form a unified government? The rationale behind the need for the unified government is that it will bring a stability from which economic development can emerge, particularly in the oil sector. The report on fuel is particularly relevant in the context of the US push for unity. Boulos is seeking to scale up US investments in Libya’s oil sector if the two rival factions work together.

But the findings of the reports throw into question whether simply formalizing the modus vivendi between rival players in Libya would really constitute a basis for development. Power-sharing might simply make corruption worse by reducing existing constraints on rising state expenditure. It would also not be a positive outcome for international oil companies, who are reluctant to make significant capital investments in a market where legal enforcement comes at the whim of feuding ruling families whose competition would likely continue inside the new government.

A key lesson of the anticorruption agencies’ reports is that looking at the operating system of Libya’s governing authorities is critical, and that there must be clear conditions as to how any future government should manage the state’s finances. These conditions must include greater transparency and emphasis on the provision of public services, not private enrichment. The fact that a US-mediated unified budget for Libya agreed in April has not yet been meaningfully implemented shows that political breakthroughs without an implementation plan do not change realities on the ground.

Of course, such conditionality would be resisted by Libya’s elites and make the pathway to forming a new government more difficult. Practically, it will also bind the US into a role of monitoring implementation of whatever is agreed. But it is the only way to secure the base conditions for investment that Boulos seeks.

Mediators versed in the challenges of finding agreement between rival leaders in Libya understandably question what the alternative is to an elite bargain between the Haftars and the Dabaibas. But if a new government formed on the basis suggested by Boulos does not actually improve governance, its utility is at best limited. 

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Lilia Sebouai

New documentary sheds light on an alleged secret network that is fuelling Sudan’s war

Sudanese rebel fighters are being trained to use drones, heavy machine guns and rocket launchers in a network of secret camps in Libya, investigators have claimed. Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch non-profit media organisation, alleged that southern Libya has become a key hub for training and supplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group that has been repeatedly accused of war crimes and genocide in Sudan’s civil war.

Drawing on interviews with RSF defectors and Libyan National Army (LNA) officers, and open source analysis, the investigators detail how Sudanese fighters receive training from UAE-backed Colombian mercenaries and Libyan soldiers.

The video investigation, which was produced in conjunction with Sudan War Monitor, a group of journalists and open-source researchers, and Evident Media, a non-profit visual investigation organisation, is the latest contribution to a growing body of evidence that the conflict in Sudan has evolved into a regional proxy war.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that thousands of RSF fighters had undergone training in a secret camp in Ethiopia. The UAE has long been widely accused of backing the RSF – allegations it has repeatedly denied.

The Dutch investigators identified four previously undocumented camps in eastern Libya – territory controlled by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the UAE-backed commander of the LNA and de-facto ruler of half of the country. At one of the sites, Camp 17, an LNA facility about 12 miles outside Benghazi, mercenaries trained RSF fighters brought to Libya by land and air in how to use drones and heavy weapons systems, according to an RSF defector and Libyan sources.

Ahmed, an RSF defector, who spent three months at the camp and whose name has been changed to protect his identity, said the trainers were neither Libyan nor Sudanese, were covered in tattoos, spoke English, and “had a special rank in that camp”. The recruits believed that the trainers were Colombian, and that the UAE had brought and paid for them.

It has been widely reported that the UAE has paid for hundreds of Colombian mercenaries, some still teenagers, to train and fight with RSF paramilitaries on the frontlines of Sudan’s war. Last year, the Sudanese government told the United Nations Security Council that Emirati private security companies including the Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group (GSSG) were behind the recruitment of the South American guns for hire.

A convoy of trucks near Kufra is en route toward Chad and Sudan on a notorious trafficking route in southeastern Libya Credit: Srdjan Stojiljkovic/Lighthouse Reports. “I was with the squads in charge of training for heavy weaponry,” said Ahmed.

“They trained us on heavy weaponry […] DShK heavy machine gun, multiple rocket launchers. There is also… RPGs,” he said, referring to a Soviet-designed heavy machine gun which is now used around the world. Ahmed said he spent three months at the camp, describing it as a logistics hub. “That camp had the supplies, and everything sent to support [the war] is dropped there,” Ahmed told the investigators.

The equipment enters Libya through Benghazi’s port and on cargo flights landing at several bases across the country’s interior, before moving south toward staging areas near the Sudanese border, according to investigators.

Despite efforts by the Libyan authorities to keep these operations under wraps, RSF soldiers stationed in Libya have posted thousands of videos on social media since April 2023, when open fighting erupted between Sudanese army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti”, who heads the RSF.

One video featured in the documentary shows eight RSF soldiers lounging in the desert, waving to the camera. Another shows two young men in uniform surfing down sand dunes on what appears to be a broken piece of a car door.

Two Libyan National Army sources told Lighthouse that RSF fighters continue to be trained by foreign instructors at Camp 17. Ahmed said the foreign instructors at Camp 17 initially trained Libyan soldiers, who then passed on those skills to Sudanese recruits. “At first [the Colombians] train Libyans, when [the Libyans] get it, then Libyans would train the Sudanese… when they were training Libyans, we would be sitting there,” he said.

But Colombians were not the only foreign presence identified at the Libyan bases. Another RSF defector who spent time in Jufra, in central Libya, said Russian personnel were in operational command of the base, while Libyan staff handled administrative roles. Ahmed also witnessed weapons, military vehicles and boxes of ammunition regularly arriving in Libya by plane. Though most were unmarked, he said that at least one type of armoured vehicle bore explicit “Made in UAE” markings.

“It’s all Emirati. Emirates is the one supporting the RSF,” he said. “They would bring [weapons] from their country by plane to here, and from here we would receive them and deliver them to Sudan”. Lighthouse corroborated Ahmed’s account by analysing satellite images of Camp 17 and its surrounding terrain, as well as drone footage of training areas and vehicle compounds, and open-source videos posted from southern Libya.

They identified Toyota Land Cruiser 79-series pickup trucks – the same vehicles that had previously been linked to alleged UAE arms transfers to the RSF by UN investigators. Investigators said the vehicles appeared repeatedly in RSF-linked social media content and at staging areas in Libya, which they claimed was evidence of an organised supply network.

All together, the investigators analysed thousands of videos across TikTok, Facebook and Telegram confirmed “close collaboration” between the LNA and RSF. Hemedti, leader of the RSF, featured heavily in the posts, alongside Haftar. Libyan officials denied that the RSF operates from Libyan territory.

When asked if some LNA units were working with the RSF, Lt. Fattah Ehniesh, from the Subul al-Salam Brigade, said: “No, these are all rumours spread by people trying to start a fight between the Sudanese army and the Libyan army”. The RSF also rejected allegations that the force receives external military support or operates training camps outside Sudan.

Dr Alaa El-Din Nugud, spokesperson for the RSF-aligned Tasis administration, said: “There are many allegations that are not true, and we have issued statements rejecting them”. Asked directly about alleged training camps in Libya, he replied: “It’s all our own. Our training camps are within our borders.” The UAE foreign ministry denied providing military or financial support to any side in the conflict.

“The UAE has not provided and is not providing military or financial support to any warring party in Sudan,” it said in a statement. The investigation comes amid reports of a looming RSF assault on the central Sudanese city of El Obeid, the strategic capital of North Kordofan state, which has become the new frontline in the war.

Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, last week warned the city was on the “precipice of atrocity”, with the RSF increasingly using drones to target civilian infrastructure and sever access to basic services. The UK was recently criticised again for its handling of the conflict. Last week, Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health, the humanitarian group tracking war crimes from space, told Parliament that Britain 

Mr Raymond said Britain had been uniquely placed to prevent the slaughter of an estimated 60,000 people in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, in October last year, but did not intervene forcefully enough. As the UN security council “penholder” on Sudan – meaning it leads on drafting resolutions and co-ordinating the council’s response to the conflict – Britain was, Mr Raymond said, still the world’s “best hope” of preventing atrocities.

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 Karam Nama

When Massad Boulos, the US President’s Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs, chooses to meet senior Libyan officials from both East and West Libya in Malta rather than in any Libyan city, he resembles a man calling the faithful to prayer from an island where no one hears the call. Libyans continue to pray to the rhythm of their own cities — Tripoli, Misrata, Benghazi, Sabha — while Boulos raises his voice from Malta, a place that neither expects nor responds to such a summons. The metaphor is not ornamental; it captures the entire political moment. Libya’s crisis cannot be resolved from a Mediterranean balcony. It can only be resolved where Libyans actually live, negotiate, fight, and resist: on Libyan soil.

The choice of Malta is not a logistical detail. It is a political signal — a compressed expression of Washington’s approach to the Libyan conflict. The United States prefers to remain at a safe distance from the core of Libya’s fragmentation, managing its tensions, monitoring its lines, and calibrating its tempo without assuming responsibility for pushing the rival factions toward a real settlement.

When Libya’s “rival brothers” gather abroad, they do so as representatives of competing territories and authorities — not as partners in a single state. They return home more convinced that the solution lies elsewhere, waiting for another signal from abroad.

Boulos’s statement describing the Malta meeting as “constructive” reflects the familiar diplomatic vocabulary Washington has used for years: broad phrases about a “unified Libya,” “stability,” and “economic and security partnership,” without touching the core of the crisis or demonstrating any willingness to push Libyan actors toward painful concessions — the kind required to build a single state with unified institutions. The American initiative circulating in political circles, which proposes merging the Government of National Unity with the parliament‑appointed government and forming a new Presidential Council, is not a solution. It is a redesign of the same division, a repackaging that preserves the privileges each faction gained from chaos.

Seen in this light, the Malta meeting becomes another link in a long chain of external conferences: Berlin three times, Paris twice, Abu Dhabi twice, Geneva three times, and the Moroccan rounds in Skhirat and Bouznika. All carried the banner of a “Libyan solution,” yet all reproduced the crisis because the Libyan participants were unwilling to relinquish the advantages of territorial control, armed power, resource access, and dual legitimacy. The failure was not simply because these meetings were held outside Libya. It was because the “rival brothers” treated them as opportunities to improve their negotiating positions, not as moments to end a division that has made a family owning two homes — one in Tripoli and one in Benghazi — feel as though it lives in two separate countries.

Washington’s current posture, expressed through Boulos, is not a departure from this pattern but an extension of it. The United States is not seeking a final resolution to Libya’s crisis; it is seeking to manage it. A controlled suspension of the conflict prevents a full‑scale collapse while preserving Washington’s ability to influence energy flows, migration routes, and regional balances — without committing itself to the arduous work of state‑building.

This explains why Boulos speaks of “institutional unification” without addressing the essential question: who will pay the price of such unification? Who will surrender authority on the ground? Who will accept becoming part of a state with a single center and a single decision‑making structure? The rumored details of the initiative answer clearly: no one. Merging the two governments under Abdulhamid Al‑Dbeibeh and forming a new Presidential Council headed by Saddam Haftar merely stabilises the duality in a new form. It ensures that Libya remains suspended between East and West, between two governments and two competing projects, while the world is told that an “American solution” is underway.

Mohamed al‑Menfi, head of the Presidential Council, understood this contradiction when he insisted that any political settlement must be inclusive, sustainable, and conducted through direct dialogue among Libya’s official institutions. His position is not a polite diplomatic reservation; it is a recognition that any solution crafted outside Libya, away from its institutions, will be temporary and fragile, reproducing the division in a new guise. Al‑Menfi knows that involving Libya’s institutions is not a procedural demand but the only path to a consensus capable of surviving the pressures of armed groups, financial interests, and regional influence.

Yet the problem does not lie solely in Washington. It lies equally — and decisively — with Libyans themselves. The solution, if they truly desire it, is in their hands: abandoning the privileges chaos has granted them and accepting that a single state cannot be built on the foundation of two governments or on territories behaving like independent entities. Every external initiative, American or otherwise, will remain trapped in a circular loop unless Libya’s “rival brothers” decide that the era of personal and regional privilege has ended. Continuing these privileges means continuing Libya’s fragmentation and keeping the country open to foreign intervention.

The man calling to prayer in Malta, in the old Arab proverb, exerts effort in vain — raising his voice in a place that neither expects nor responds to the call. Massad Boulos today is calling from Malta, while Libyans pray to the rhythm of their own cities, moving according to the realities of power on the ground, not according to diplomatic statements issued from Washington or a Mediterranean island. Any meeting held in Malta or elsewhere, without addressing the roots of Libya’s division and without compelling Libyan actors to relinquish their privileges, will be nothing more than another episode in a long series of “calls to prayer in Malta” — gestures that change nothing in a country trapped since 2011 in perpetual transition, between two governments, two legitimacies, and two competing visions of a state that has not yet been allowed to exist.

Until the center of gravity shifts from Malta, Washington, Berlin, and Paris to Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata, and Sabha — until dialogue moves from hotel rooms abroad to Libya’s own institutions — the man in Malta will continue calling, and Libyans will continue praying in their cities, each to his own call, in a country split into two, waiting for a solution that will never arrive until it is first decided that it must be Libyan before it can be anything else.

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Sarah Shamim

The plan, led by Trump relative Massad Boulos, promises oil investments if rival factions work together. But analysts have doubts about whether it could work.

Fifteen years after NATO’s intervention in a Libyan uprising set the stage for a prolonged period of chaos and political crisis, the United States is leading a diplomatic push for a reunification plan in the North African country. Led by Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump’s top adviser on Arab, Middle Eastern and African affairs – he is also the father of Trump’s son-in-law Michael Boulos – the plan aims to turn a growing financial crisis in Libya into an incentive for warring factions to cooperate.

Libya has been split between rival eastern and western administrations since a civil war broke out after the 2011 NATO operation helped topple longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. Here’s what we know about the US plan for Libya:

What US mediation is taking place

in Libya?

The US is pushing to unify rival factions in Libya. Libya remains politically and militarily split between two primary rival administrations and their allied militias: the United Nations-recognised Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli and an eastern-based administration aligned with Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces, commonly known as the Libyan National Army (LNA).

Starting in 2020, most formal mediation has been led by the United Nations, particularly the UN Support Mission in Libya, but the US has become a key behind‑the‑scenes broker. In May 2021, it appointed Ambassador Richard Norland as special envoy to Libya to shuttle between rival factions and regional capitals and lead high-level diplomatic efforts in the country.

 “The US is leading a negotiation to create a unified government among Libya’s rival elites,” Tim Eaton, a senior research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera.  “While the US public messaging is that this is about creating an inclusive government, their efforts really hinge on getting the Haftar and Dbeibah families to formally agree to be part of the same government,” said Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, a businessman-turned-politician and the prime minister in the internationally recognised Libyan government.

What is the situation in Libya?

Beginning on March 19, 2011, a NATO-led coalition, including the US, United Kingdom and France, conducted an air campaign in Libya that provided essential support for rebels fighting Gaddafi’s regime. Gaddafi had been in power since 1969. After rebel fighters captured and summarily killed Gaddafi in October 2011, Libya was left without a viable successor state. This left a power vacuum. Libya has since had multiple competing governments, militias and armed groups.

Who are the different factions, and what do they all want?

The GNU is based in western Libya and is the official government of the country, recognised by the UN and most countries. Despite that diplomatic recognition, it does not hold sway over vast parts of the country. The Haftar-led LNA controls the east, including the strategically critical port city of Benghazi. It has historically received support from the United Arab Emirates and Russia. With Libya essentially divided, its central bank has been trying to finance two parallel governments.

What do we know about the US plan?

Boulos has been travelling to Libya since 2025, early in Trump’s current term. But the details of his plan only became public through an interview he gave to the Financial Times in June.

At the heart of the Trump initiative is a promise: If the two warring factions come together to try to jointly govern Libya, the US would encourage its companies to invest in Libya’s sizeable oilfields. Because the UN recognises the government in Tripoli, any oil deal would need to be signed with it. But it is Haftar’s forces that control the actual part of Libya that is home to its oilfields and terminals. Only if they work together can international investment be made into Libya’s oil sector.

Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Libya has made it clear that it cannot sustainably continue to finance both governments. That combination of a looming crisis and the promise of an opportunity is what, analysts said, Boulos and Trump appear to be hoping will persuade the two Libyan factions to come together. Leaked details of Boulos’s plan also suggest that the US has proposed a power-sharing agreement: Dbeibah would continue to lead the government while Saddam Haftar, son of Khalifa Haftar and the LNA’s army chief, would in effect serve as president.

Why is the US plan controversial?

In essence, many analysts said, what the US is trying to achieve is a patchwork solution – at best – to stop the fighting and without any input from Libya’s 7 million people. “The US is currently trying to promote a power-sharing deal between the two de facto ruling families of Libya,” said Tarek Megerisi, a visiting fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations, a Berlin-based think tank.

Such a deal, Megerisi told Al Jazeera, “would spell the end of Libyan hopes for elections and finish the revolutionary transition that began in 2011 by formalising a new authoritarian, despotic system.”

Why is the US mediating?

The US has several motives to mediate in Libya. For one, the country has large oil and gas reserves – the largest proven oil reserves in all of Africa. In January, Dbeibah announced that the country had broken a 12-year oil production record last year, producing 1.37 million barrels per day.

“For special adviser Massad Boulos, Libya appears to offer a theatre in which political stability could provide a springboard for increased US commercial engagement in Libya’s oil sector,” Eaton said. “If done right, there is a win-win here as long-term investment from major international oil companies would benefit Libya.”

That oil is also very strategically located. Libya loads its oil on tankers on the Mediterranean Sea, and they can reach Italy in two days. At a time when the US-Israel war on Iran and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced the world to consider alternative routes to source energy, unblocking Libya’s resources could help Europe and the West in particular. Libya’s light and sweet grades of oil match what European refineries are best equipped to handle.

Ending the crisis in Libya would also serve the West’s desire to curb irregular migration via the country into Europe. “However, the question is whether Boulos’s plan would actually provide the stability needed or whether it will simply entrench deeply flawed powerbrokers,” Eaton said, referring to Haftar and Dbeibah. “Most Libyans see such a deal as no recipe for stability and as a return to family rule.”

What progress has mediation made?

Eaton said that so far, the most successful element of the mediation between the Dbeibahs and the Haftars has been the agreement of a unified national budget for 2026. This landmark agreement was signed in April and was the first unified budget in Libya in more than a decade. “Until now, there is, however, no agreement on the formation of a unified government.”

It is believed that Saddam Haftar has expressed his support for the initiative. He met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, DC, last week, Eaton said. “But the Dbeibahs have not yet signed up. Such a deal is fraught with risk for them because of widespread opposition to the Haftars in western Libya,” he added. “And even if they are able to get a deal through, the Dbeibahs would want guarantees that the Haftars will not use the agreement as a springboard to a military takeover of the state. It’s unlikely that the US will provide such a guarantee.”

A summary of a proposed “Libya reunification plan” shared with the Reuters news agency sets out a 36-month transitional power-sharing arrangement under a body called the Government of National Consensus and Presidential Council. Reuters also reported on Monday that Pakistan has joined the mediation efforts. The Reuters report quoted two unnamed Pakistani sources. Al Jazeera has not been able to independently verify this report. However, Pakistan’s military chief, Asim Munir, met Saddam Haftar last month in Rawalpindi, a meeting that was followed days later by Haftar’s visit to Washington, DC.

The US Department of State said in a statement at the time that Rubio welcomed Libyan leaders’ efforts to overcome divisions and reaffirmed US support for Libyan unity. While analysts view Pakistan as a secondary player in Libya – where the US, UAE, Turkiye and Egypt have for years wrestled for influence – Islamabad has maintained ties with both sides that other regional actors may be lacking.

Pakistani officials have pursued defence ties with the eastern-based LNA, including the possible sale of JF-17 fighter jets and Super Mushshak trainer aircraft despite a UN arms embargo. But the rival western GNU also recently sought direct talks with Pakistan, according to an unreported document seen by Reuters. “There has been little tangible progress so far on the actual power-sharing deal. There have been some milestones reached on tangential issues,” Megerisi said, such as the budget agreement.

“Both sides remain distrusting of one another and are engaging in this mediation with a view to domination rather than cooperation.”

 ________________

Karem Mezran

On June 29, Lieutenant General Saddam Haftar—deputy commander of the eastern-based Libyan National Army and the designated heir of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar—was received in Washington by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. During that same timeframe, another Libyan was also brought to the US capital: Abdul Salam al-Zoubi, deputy defense minister of the internationally recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli and one of the pillars of Tripoli’s ontologically volatile security system. Zoubi met Senior Advisor to the US President Massad Boulos, Deputy Commander of US Africa Command Lieutenant General John W. Brennan, members of the National Security Council, and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau—one rung below the secretary himself.

In diplomacy, form is substance, and the choreography matters. The formal representative of Libya’s recognized government was handled a tier down, while the heir of an armed faction that calls itself a national army—but still functions as a militia—was elevated to the secretary of state. In Washington’s protocol of honors, legitimacy and force have quietly traded places.

What Rubio’s handshake blesses is a plan described as a form of “familistic consociationalism”: a peculiar form of power-sharing arrangement built not on inclusive and impersonal institutions but rather centered on formalizing existing and dominant family networks. This type of settlement does not so much unify Libya as freeze its current balance of power by formalizing the families and patronage networks that already dominate it.

Under the framework promoted by Boulos, GNU Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah—or his nephew Ibrahim—would keep the premiership, while Saddam Haftar would head a new presidential council, with national elections deferred to a later, unspecified phase. For months, this was Boulos’s initiative. Now the US secretary of state has put his own weight behind it.

The method is the problem. Libya’s transition has not stalled by accident. It has been engineered by domestic spoilers who persist precisely because they expect foreign patrons to shield them from consequences. A deal that rewards the strongest of those spoilers with Washington’s recognition does not break that logic, it merely ratifies it. It turns managed instability into a formal settlement.

It also bypasses the very people it is supposed to be helping. Elections might not be an immediate panacea: a rushed national vote in a country still partitioned among armed factions could entrench a “winner take all” logic of its own. But that risk does not mean that settling Libya’s future in the hands of a handful of families is a good answer.

The August 2025 municipal elections suggest where Libyans actually stand. Turnout reached 71 percent in the twenty-six municipalities where voting was allowed to proceed, even as the vote was suspended in the east and south and electoral offices were torched in the west. That local, bottom-up exercise revealed less an appetite for any particular ballot than an exhaustion with top-down, externally brokered arrangements that pass over young Libyans and whole communities. A pact negotiated over their heads offers them precisely more of the same.

The economic case for the deal is just as thin. Libya is pumping oil at the highest rate in a decade, yet the windfall does not reach households and their purchasing power keeps declining steadily. The central bank devalued the dinar twice in under a year, and the World Food Programme’s minimum expenditure basket rose nearly 20 percent in twelve months. In February, protesters across western cities demanded the removal of the entire political class they blame for the cost-of-living crisis. The wealth exists, it is simply captured before it reaches the public.

Most damaging of all, the plan writes off an entire generation. Libya’s median age is roughly twenty-eight, nearly half the population is under twenty-five, and youth unemployment hovers near 50 percent: among the highest rates in the world. These are young Libyans raised between the diaspora and a post-revolutionary homeland that promised them a state.

This stalemate has delivered a society held back by violence and nepotism, where power and opportunities pass by surname and connections rather than by vote and skill. It tells young Libyans that 2011 was not a new beginning but a mutation of the old order—familism and patrimonialism under a new name. That is not a formula for stability, it is a deferred detonation.

Nor are the clans the cohesive blocs the plan assumes. Misrata, once the symbol of unity in the wake of Muammar Qaddafi’s rule, is now split between pro- and anti-Dbeibah factions, and an externally imposed settlement is as likely to ignite that fracture as to contain it. Within the Haftar camp, resentment is already building over the concentration of power in Saddam’s hands, starting with his brothers. Washington is wagering Libya’s future on the durability of networks that may not outlast their patriarchs.

There is a better use of American leverage. The United States should tie its recognition and its support to measurable progress toward elections, joint oversight of oil revenue, and protection for the institutions Libyans actually turned out to choose—not to the elevation of those very same men who have spent a decade obstructing all three. The choice was visible in this week’s guest list: Washington chose the militia over the ministry.

In throwing its weight behind an elite accord that commands no genuine popular consent—save from those who profit directly from the status quo—Washington is making a dangerous bet. The wager may even pay off at first: Such an arrangement could hold, and appear to work, for its opening months. But its many structural contradictions will surface soon enough, and when they do, they risk bringing the whole edifice down in violence.

That is the part of the story the architects of this short-sighted compromise would rather not hear. But it is essential that they do. What is at stake is not only the Libyan crisis but a more general approach to stability across the globe. The US must understand that preserving a fragile stability today while increasing the risk of a much larger crisis tomorrow is neither a sustainable nor a wise approach.

***

Karim Mezran is the director of the North Africa Initiative and a resident senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council.

Simon Watkins

• Libya has boosted crude production to a 13-year high of nearly 1.5 million bpd and is targeting 2.1 million bpd within three to five years, supported by OPEC’s stronger long-term oil demand outlook.
• Western energy majors including Eni, BP, TotalEnergies, Shell, and KBR are expanding investments in Libya.
• Political instability remains the biggest threat to Libya’s oil ambitions, as disputes over revenue sharing, governance, and rival factions continue to raise the risk of future export blockades despite growing foreign investment.

At around the same time as OPEC raised its long-term oil demand forecast for the third consecutive year — now expecting global consumption to rise 19 million barrels per day (bpd), or 18%, by 2050 — Libya’s state-owned National Oil Corporation (NOC) announced that the country’s oil production is now at the highest level in 13 years.

Its current 1.487 million bpd crude output is just a whisker away from the NOC’s short-term strategy of producing 1.5 million bpd of oil, which opens the way for the long-term strategic target of 2.1 million bpd to be achieved within the next three to five years. The reason underpinning OPEC’s latest increase in long-term oil demand — governments increasingly prioritising energy security, rather than aggressively transitioning away from hydrocarbons — has also been key to the rise in foreign investment and oil developments in Libya, especially from Western firms. Since the onset of the Russian war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, they have been busily sourcing new oil and gas supplies around the world to make up for those lost due to sanctions on Russia’s energy exports. So, how realistic does Libya’s long-term 2.1 million bpd oil output target look?

From a geological standpoint, nothing stands in the way of Libya reaching much higher production levels. The country holds around 48 billion barrels of proved crude reserves — the largest in Africa — and before Muammar Gaddafi was removed in 2011, it had no difficulty sustaining output of roughly 1.65 million bpd of high?quality light, sweet crude.

The flagship grades, Es Sider and Sharara, were especially prized in the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe for their strong gasoline and middle?distillate yields. Production had also been on a steady upward path, rising from about 1.4 million bpd in 2000, even if still far below the more than 3 million bpd achieved in the late 1960s. Crucially, the NOC had already laid out plans before 2011 to deploy enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques across maturing fields. Its estimate that EOR could add around 775,000 bpd of capacity looked entirely credible, and Western interest in new upstream developments showed no sign of fading at the time.

In late 2021, the country’s Government of National Unity (GNU) approved the sale of the 8.16% stake in the country’s giant Waha oil concessions held by the U.S.’s Hess Corporation to the remaining stakeholders. Those were France’s TotalEnergies (with a 16.3% share), and ConocoPhillips (also 16.3%), each of which was to be offered half of Hess’s stake.

This followed positive news in April last year after the meeting between NOC chairman, Mustafa Sanalla, and the chief executive officer of TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanne. The French firm agreed to continue with its efforts to increase oil production from the giant Waha, Sharara, Mabruk and Al Jurf oil fields by at least 175,000 bpd and to make the development of the Waha-concession North Gialo and NC-98 oil fields a priority, according to the NOC.  The Waha concessions — in which TotalEnergies took a minority stake in 2019 — had the capacity to produce at least 350,000 bpd together, according to the NOC.

At around the same time, news emerged that Shell was looking to return to Libya, after senior representatives of the company met with NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla during their visit to Tripoli. Shell had ceased its operations in Libya in 2012, partly due to contract terms but mainly because of the deteriorating security situation after the removal of Gaddafi.

However, by mid-June 2022, another blockade of Libya’s oil had begun, as key elements of the landmark peace agreement negotiated on 18 September 2020 to end the previous mammoth blockade had not been implemented.

At the time, Commander of the rebel Libyan National Army (LNA), General Khalifa Haftar, had made it clear to the opposing side with which the deal had been struck —  Tripoli’s U.N.-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) —  that it would be an interim arrangement only while a solution was worked out on how the country’s oil revenues would be distributed over the long term.

The key to this in his view, and supported by the GNA back then, would be the formation of a joint technical committee, which would: “Oversee oil revenues and ensure the fair distribution of resources… and control the implementation of the terms of the agreement during the next three months, provided that its work is evaluated at the end of 2020 and a plan is defined for the next year.”

To address the fact that the then-GNA effectively held sway over the NOC and, by extension, the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) in which the revenues are held, the committee would also “prepare a unified budget that meets the needs of each party… and the reconciliation of any dispute over budget allocations… and will require the Central Bank [in Tripoli] to cover the monthly or quarterly payments approved in the budget without any delay, and as soon as the joint technical committee requests the transfer.”

None of these measures had been sufficiently put into place at that point in 2022 to avoid another major blockade following the one in 2020, and they still have not. Instead, 11 April this year saw rival factions enact a national budget for 2026, with a total value of LYD190 billion (US$29.6 billion). The budget framework also explicitly allocates a LYD12 billion ring-fenced operational budget directly to the NOC to guarantee energy production and stability.

Although the budget idea was heavily supported by the recently appointed Governor of the CBL, Naji Mohammed Issa, alongside international mediation by U.S. Senior Adviser Massad Boulos, various factions see it as an elite-driven, anti-democratic carve-up. For example, independent military councils and militias in western Libya (Tripoli, Misrata, and Zawiya) characterise it as the financial baseline for a U.S.-brokered political roadmap that would leave Abdul Hamid Dbeibah as Prime Minister while elevating Saddam Haftar (one of Khalifa Haftar’s sons) to the presidency.

Moreover, major institutional players within the western region’s governance structure — including the Presidential Council and High Council of State — have formally rejected the political arrangements underlying the budget, arguing that the deal bypasses the UN-led peace process.

Additionally, Libya’s highly influential Grand Mufti, Sheikh Sadiq al-Gharyani, has fiercely opposed the budget on the basis that it amounts to “handing over full power” to Khalifa Haftar and his sons. He has publicly called on Western region military forces and Prime Minister Dbeibah to abandon the pact, framing it as an existential betrayal of the Western region’s autonomy. And finally, several factions maintain that instead of fixing state corruption, the budget has simply institutionalised it into a better-organised and more clearly coordinated framework for theft.

Although this backdrop looks just as possible as the previous one to result in future oil blockades in the country, Western countries and their firms appear undaunted. “There’s a basic view that it’s [Libya] been trouble since 2011 and may well continue to be, but at some point it may work itself out, and there aren’t too many other [oil and gas] options of that size available right now,” a senior source who works closely with the European Union’s (E.U.) energy security complex exclusively told OilPrice.com last week.

So, as it stands, Italy’s Eni recently announced new offshore gas discoveries in Libya, near the Bahr Essalam field, Libya’s largest producing offshore gas field, with preliminary estimates being that there is more than 1 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of gas in place. This deepwater drilling underlines Western firms’ confidence in their ability to continue their business in Libya over many years, as it requires long-term capital and security guarantees.

Great Britain’s BP is also working alongside Eni in the Sirte basin’s Matsola exploration prospect in Contract Area 38/3 in the Mediterranean Sea. The joint venture is committed to drilling a further 16 wells in Libya, across onshore and offshore areas, while BP recently signed a memorandum of understanding to evaluate options for redeveloping the giant Sarir and Messla onshore fields, and to assess potential unconventional oil and gas development.

Meanwhile, TotalEnergies also recently announced the restart of production at Libya’s Mabruk oil field, illustrating its “long-term commitment in Libya,” according to the firm. And U.S.-based technology and engineering giant KBR was recently awarded a contract to provide project management and technical services for the South Refinery Project (SRP) in Ubari, southwest Libya, in line with KBR’s efforts to advance key oil and gas infrastructure across the country.

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Wael Hamed A. Maoti

Libya is one of the most significant hydrocarbon producers in Africa, with a long history of hydrocarbon exploration and development. According to OPEC data, Libya’s proven natural gas reserves stood at 26 Tcf in 2025, making it the fifth-largest holder of proven natural gas reserves in Africa, behind Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, and Mozambique, but ahead of Cameroon and Angola.

Even more interesting is Libya’s unconventional gas potential. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates the country’s technically recoverable shale gas resources at 122 Tcf. This figure is nearly five times larger than its proven conventional reserves. To put this into perspective, Libya’s technically recoverable shale gas resources are broadly comparable to the estimated gas resources of the Levant Basin, which the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates at around 122 Tcf. Discoveries in the Levant Basin have transformed the Eastern Mediterranean into one of the world’s most attractive hydrocarbon provinces for international oil companies.

Despite its vast resources, Libya remains one of the least explored and least developed gas frontiers in the Mediterranean region. Political instability, security challenges, and years of underinvestment following the 2011 conflict have significantly constrained exploration and development activities, leaving much of the country’s gas potential untapped.

If its conventional and unconventional gas resources can be successfully developed, the economic and energy-sector implications could be transformative. New gas production could help meet Libya’s rapidly growing domestic demand, reduce chronic power shortages, revive upstream investment, and potentially restore the country as a more significant supplier of gas to Europe. Achieving this, however, will require a stable investment environment, clear energy policies, substantial capital expenditure, advanced technologies, and a regulatory framework capable of balancing economic development with environmental and social considerations.

Supply Volatility and the Tightening Domestic Balance

From a production perspective, Libya remains a relatively modest gas producer. Gross natural gas production reached a record high of around 3,400 MMscfd in 2019, but output has since fluctuated due to recurring disruptions in oil production and upstream operations. Associated gas accounts for approximately 40% of total gas production, linking gas supply closely to disruptions in oil production.

More importantly, less than half of Libya’s gross gas output is marketed for domestic consumption. Large volumes are consumed through reinjection into oil reservoirs to enhance oil recovery, while additional quantities are flared or used in field operations and processing facilities. As a result, marketed gas available for domestic consumption and exports represented only about 45% of gross production in 2025.

While marketed gas production has broadly stagnated over the past five years, domestic demand has continued to rise, driven primarily by the electricity sector. Local gas consumption increased from around 788 MMscfd in 2015 to more than 1,150 MMscfd in 2025, absorbing an ever-larger share of available supply. As domestic demand has increased, the gap between marketed production and local consumption has narrowed dramatically, reducing the quantities available for export. Consequently, GreenStream gas exports to Italy have fallen from nearly 700 MMscfd in 2015 to less than 100 MMscfd in 2025.

This widening imbalance between supply and demand represents one of the most critical challenges facing Libya’s gas sector. Without significant investment in new gas developments, flaring reduction projects, and infrastructure upgrades, future production growth may not be sufficient to meet local demand. This situation could necessitate LNG imports to bridge the supply-demand gap or leave the power sector with prolonged power cuts.

Monetizing Waste: Flare Gas Recovery as a Supply Source

Gas flaring remains a major source of inefficiency in Libya’s gas sector. Despite rising domestic demand and declining exports, the country flared an average of 614 MMscfd in 2024.

Recognizing the economic value of these lost volumes, Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) has launched initiatives to recover flared gas through new gathering and processing infrastructure.

In 2025, NOC successfully reduced gas flaring by nearly 100 MMscfd through a series of flare gas recovery projects implemented in collaboration with its subsidiaries. This helped bring total flared gas down to approximately 514 MMscfd. Looking ahead, NOC aims to cut flaring by a further 120 MMscfd in 2026 and achieve a 60% reduction from current levels by 2030, unlocking additional gas supplies for domestic consumption and exports while improving the overall efficiency of the hydrocarbon sector.

Upstream Renaissance: Renewed Exploration and Institutional Momentum

After more than a decade of underinvestment and intermittent disruptions, Libya’s upstream gas sector is showing signs of renewed momentum. Since 2024, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) has intensified efforts to attract international oil majors, accelerate exploration activities, and monetize the country’s untapped gas resources.

The lifting of exploration restrictions and the launch of Libya’s first licensing round in nearly two decades have helped restore investor interest in one of the Mediterranean’s most prospective yet underexplored gas provinces.

Early results indicate a gradual recovery in investor confidence and exploration activity. In 2026, Eni announced three gas discoveries in Block D, south of the giant Bahr Essalam field. According to Eni, the first two discoveries are estimated to contain more than 1 Tcf of recoverable gas, while a third discovery was announced shortly afterward, further strengthening the resource base of the offshore Sirte Basin. In parallel, NOC signed a memorandum of understanding with Chevron covering exploration opportunities in the Sirte, Murzuq, and Ghadames basins, highlighting growing confidence among international energy companies in Libya’s long-term potential.

Although these discoveries will not alone immediately transform Libya’s gas balance, they demonstrate that the country’s upstream sector remains highly prospective and capable of delivering commercial gas volumes. More importantly, they provide the foundation for future production growth that could help reverse the decline in export availability observed over the past decade.

Institutional Stabilization and Offshore Megaprojects

A critical turning point for the monetization of Libya’s resource base occurred in April 2026, when the country’s rival legislative bodies approved a unified state budget of 190 billion Libyan dinars ($29.95 billion). This milestone marks the first unified national spending framework in more than 13 years.

The fiscal breakthrough allocates 12 billion dinars ($1.9 billion) directly to the National Oil Corporation alongside a broader 40-billion-dinar capital allocation earmarked for strategic development infrastructure.

This enhanced fiscal stability provides the long-awaited financial foundation for the landmark Structures A&E offshore gas development project. Operated by Mellitah Oil & Gas, a 50-50 joint venture between NOC and Italy’s Eni, this $8 billion infrastructure development targets the extraction of deepwater fields in Block D.

Scheduled to deliver first gas in 2027, the two structures are expected to reach a combined plateau production rate of 750 MMscfd. Beyond its significance for the upstream sector, the project is expected to play a pivotal role in strengthening the country’s gas balance by supplying additional volumes to the domestic market, supporting power generation, and potentially increasing export availability through the GreenStream pipeline to Europe.

Libya’s Role in Europe’s Diversification Strategy

The significance of a recovery in Libyan gas production extends beyond its domestic market. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, the European Union has taken several measures to diversify gas supply sources and reduce dependence on Russian imports.

While LNG has played a critical role in offsetting lost Russian supply, pipeline gas remains an attractive option due to its lower delivered supply costs and reduced exposure to global LNG market volatility.

Libya is uniquely positioned to contribute to Europe’s diversification strategy through the existing GreenStream pipeline, which directly connects Libya with Italy and has a capacity of 775 MMscfd. However, the pipeline is currently operating far below its design capacity because of limited gas volumes available for export.

Any meaningful increase in Libyan gas production could therefore provide Europe with an additional source of nearby and relatively low-cost gas supply. For Italy in particular, higher Libyan exports would further strengthen its ambition to become a Mediterranean gas hub connecting North African producers with European consumers.

In 2025, Libya’s share of the European Union’s gas import mix fell to just 0.3%, reflecting the sharp decline in GreenStream exports and underscoring how far current export levels remain below historical volumes.

The Trans-Saharan Transit Opportunity

Beyond direct exports to Europe using its own resource base, Libya could also play an important role in regional gas integration initiatives.

One of the most ambitious proposals is the Nigeria-Niger-Libya pipeline, which aims to transport Nigerian gas reserves through Niger to Libya and eventually European markets.

Although the project has traditionally focused on Algeria as the export gateway through the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline (TSGP), Libya’s extensive pipeline infrastructure, strategic Mediterranean location, and proximity to European markets could provide an alternative export route in the future.

The participation of Libya would enhance regional energy cooperation while increasing supply diversification options for Europe. However, significant political, security, financing, and commercial challenges must still be addressed before such a project can move beyond the planning stage.

Conclusion: The Monetization Paradox and the Path Forward

Libya’s gas sector presents a striking paradox. The country possesses one of Africa’s largest conventional gas resource bases and substantial shale gas potential, yet it remains a relatively modest producer and a relatively small exporter compared with its resource potential.

Rising domestic demand, infrastructure constraints, high flaring rates, and years of underinvestment in the upstream sector have steadily reduced export availability despite abundant resources. Recent developments, however, suggest that the sector may be entering a new growth phase. Ongoing flare reduction initiatives, renewed exploration activity, major gas discoveries, and growing interest from international oil companies are creating opportunities to expand supply and improve the country’s gas balance.

The country’s principal challenge is not resource availability, but its ability to translate geological potential into commercially viable and sustained production growth. Success in this regard will determine whether Libya remains primarily focused on meeting domestic demand or re-emerges among gas exporters to Europe in the medium term.

In the medium term, Libya’s gas production is expected to increase gradually as new projects come online. The Structures A&E development alone is expected to add around 750 MMscfd of production from 2027 onward, while ongoing flare gas recovery projects could unlock an additional 200–300 MMscfd by 2030.

Together, these developments could significantly improve the country’s gas balance and support a partial recovery in exports through the GreenStream pipeline. However, rising domestic demand will likely absorb a large share of the new supply.

As a result, Libya is expected to remain primarily focused on meeting domestic needs, although export volumes could recover from less than 100 MMscfd in 2025 to around 300–500 MMscfd by the end of the decade, provided that political stability and investment momentum are maintained.

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Michael Rubin

The U.S. Should Recognize That Having Dual Capitals, Rather than Centralization, Is Necessary for Stability in a Diverse, Tribal Society.

On June 18, 2026, U.S. Special Envoy Massad Boulos unveiled a plan to end years of division inside Libya. “Our plan is to have one unified government and to unify all the institutions,” he said.

That makes sense. Since the fall of Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi in 2011 against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Libyan unity has shattered. Initially, dozens of armed groups—Islamist, nationalist, and tribal—arose. Eventually they consolidated, keeping Libya unified in name but effectively divided.

Today, Prime Minister Abd al-Hamid Dbeibeh rules about 30 percent of the country from Tripoli, while Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar and his son Saddam, leaders of the Libyan National Army, control the remaining 70 percent, from Benghazi.

In effect, both Tripoli and Benghazi have become capitals. For the State Department, this bifurcation is bad. Often, such divisions are. But, in Libya, such strident conclusions display ignorance of history.

After Qadhafi seized power in Libya in 1969, he made Tripoli the unitary capital of Libya. Almost every living U.S. and European diplomat has lived in a world where Tripoli has been Libya’s sole capital. But this was not always the case. Libya is a relatively recent construct.

Italy seized what is now Libya from the Ottoman Empire in 1911 and 1912. At the time, the region was composed of two territories: Cyrenaica, whose largest city is Benghazi, and Tripolitania, centered around Tripoli.

Only in 1934 did Italy unite Cyrenaica and Tripolitania under a single administration. It was then that the international community and, to a lesser extent, the local population began referring to their country as Libya and themselves as Libyans.

During World War II, the British and French invaded the region. In 1949, the Emirate of Cyrenaica won both independence and British recognition, while the British continued to occupy Tripolitania.

Two years later, representatives of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and the southern desert Fezzan region joined to form the Kingdom of Libya, with each region having autonomy. The Kingdom considered Tripoli and Benghazi as co-equal capitals.

Indeed, Article 188 of the 1951 Libyan Constitution declared, “The Kingdom of Libya has two capitals: Tripoli and Benghazi.”

Nor would Libya be the only country to have multiple capitals. Bolivia, the Netherlands, the Côte D’Ivoire, and Malaysia all have two capitals; South Africa has three. While the European Union does not have an official capital city, it has administrative and institutional centers in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg.

Back to Libya: Qadhafi consolidated control over the country in Tripoli, often chafing those in Benghazi and the broader Cyrenaica who saw their local autonomy eroded if not purposely disrespected.

While Qadhafi often excused his repression of Benghazi and its environs in terms of counterterrorism, the irony is that Tripoli today remains the center of Islamist terrorism and Benghazi is more outwardly tolerant, secure, and cosmopolitan.

Still, U.S. and European policy—largely because of the West’s own historical ignorance—has been more Qadhafi-like than Qadhafi, at least in terms of centralization. Such inflexibility has undermined Libyan security and given sustenance to extremists and terrorists.

While Islamists lost the 2012 elections badly, 48 percent to 10 percent, with several smaller parties taking the rest, fear that the Qatar- and Turkey-backed Islamists might turn to violence put European officials and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton into appeasement mode. Western diplomats negotiated a big-tent government so the Islamists could participate.

After various elections and constitutional iterations since, the State Department and international community have widely sought to promote unity, but they have done so through the lens that unity must come through broad recognition of the Tripoli-based government, rather than any understanding, acceptance, or recognition that the Benghazi-based government enjoys greater legitimacy among its people, better defends Libyan sovereignty against outside powers, and enjoys greater stability and security.

Boulos has declared, “Our plan is to have one unified government and to unify all the institutions.” That is noble. But, Boulos should not double down on the failed strategies pursued by the Obama and Biden administrations, nor should he operate on the assumption that the government in Benghazi is lesser or illegitimate because it is not in Tripoli. Instead, the United States should recognize that having dual capitals, rather than centralization, is necessary for stability in a diverse, tribal society like Libya’s. The United States should accommodate regionalism as Libya’s founders did, rather than doubling down on Qadhafi’s centralization.

Boulos also should not assume that the international recognition granted to Tripoli is legitimate or wise; the United States should recognize its arbitrariness and the fact that any democratic legitimacy Tripoli’s leaders once could claim has long since expired.

Unifying the armed forces is wise and would be low-hanging fruit. Both the Libyan Armed Forces and the Libyan National Army coordinate and largely understand they face a joint challenge, not from each other but from the militias that Dbeibeh protects. The same is true with the intelligence services. Tripoli’s intelligence chief already coordinates with Benghazi and, when he visits, the trust is strong enough that he does so with minimal security.

This leaves politics. Libyans have reportedly agreed to elections in February 2027. The United States should support these, and international observers should monitor them. The White House should not repeat the mistake of George W. Bush administration when, in the rush to see Palestinian elections, the State Department acquiesced to the participation of groups like Hamas that wielded militias. If Dbeibeh continues to protect militias, the U.S. State and Treasury Departments should designate him a terrorist.

Indeed, Libyans repeatedly show they want a nationalist, not an Islamist, future. The United States should support that ambition, even if it means dual capitals and the Haftars expanding their influence throughout the entirety of the country.

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Safiyah Nassif

After more than 100 days of conflict, energy markets appear to be approaching a turning point.

The United States and Iran are moving closer to a formal agreement that could lead to the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy corridors. President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that shipping through the strait will return to normal under a deal, while oil traders have already begun pricing in the prospect of lower geopolitical risk.

Yet the Hormuz crisis is not over. Commercial shipping remains below normal levels, insurers continue to monitor security conditions, and market participants are waiting for evidence that maritime traffic can resume without disruption. The agreement may be close, but implementation will matter just as much as the announcement itself. For Libya, however, the more important question lies beyond the ceasefire negotiations.

What happens if Hormuz does reopen?

Over the past three months, Libya emerged as one of the clearest beneficiaries of uncertainty in global energy markets. As concerns grew over Gulf exports and maritime security, Libya’s Mediterranean location became increasingly valuable. Buyers searching for alternative supply routes took a fresh look at Libyan crude, while investors and analysts once again highlighted the country’s strategic position between Africa’s largest oil reserves and Europe’s energy demand.

Throughout the crisis, reports argued that Libya’s opportunity extended beyond higher oil prices. Now a new challenge is emerging. Can Libya convert a temporary geopolitical advantage into a permanent competitive one?

The Real Legacy of the Hormuz Crisis

Most discussions surrounding the conflict have focused on oil prices. That is understandable. Any disruption to the Strait of Hormuz immediately affects global markets because a significant portion of global crude exports pass through the waterway.

Yet the most important consequence of the crisis may not be found in the price of oil. Instead, it may be found in the behavior of energy buyers. For more than three months, refiners, commodity traders, shipping companies, and governments confronted a simple reality: a single maritime chokepoint can disrupt a substantial share of global energy trade.

The crisis reminded markets that supply security cannot be taken for granted. Many buyers responded by diversifying supply sources. Others reassessed procurement strategies and geopolitical exposure. Some revisited suppliers that had previously attracted less attention. Those decisions do not automatically disappear when tensions ease. The memory of disruption often outlasts the disruption itself.

Why Libya Attracted Attention

Libya did not benefit from the Hormuz crisis because it dramatically increased production. It benefited because of where it sits on the map.

Unlike Gulf producers, Libya exports crude directly through the Mediterranean. Tankers loading from Libyan ports do not need to transit Hormuz. For European refiners in particular, that distinction became increasingly important as the conflict escalated. The country’s proximity to Europe already offers commercial advantages. Shipping times are shorter than many competing producers. Transportation costs are often lower. Libyan crude grades remain familiar to many European refiners.

During the crisis, those advantages gained strategic importance. The issue was no longer simply finding oil. The issue became finding oil with lower geopolitical exposure. That shift in thinking may prove more significant than any short-term price movement.

Hormuz May Reopen, But Risk Has

Not Disappeared

A future agreement between Washington and Tehran could reduce tensions significantly. It will not eliminate risk. The events of the past three months have demonstrated how quickly geopolitical shocks can affect energy markets. Investors, refiners, and governments now have fresh evidence that major supply routes remain vulnerable to regional conflicts.

The Strait of Hormuz will continue to carry enormous volumes of global energy exports. It will remain one of the most important shipping corridors in the world. However, market participants may emerge from this crisis with a stronger appreciation for diversification. That creates an opportunity for producers located outside traditional chokepoints. Libya falls squarely into that category.

The country’s strategic value does not disappear simply because shipping through Hormuz resumes. In many ways, the crisis has helped reinforce that value.

The Next Test Is Reliability

Attention alone will not secure Libya’s position. The country must now prove that it can transform strategic relevance into long-term commercial confidence. This is where reliability becomes critical. During periods of market disruption, buyers often seek alternative barrels wherever they can find them. Once conditions stabilize, however, they become more selective. They prioritize suppliers that can offer consistency, predictable exports, and confidence in future deliveries.

Libya possesses several advantages. It holds Africa’s largest proven crude oil reserves. It enjoys close proximity to European markets. International energy companies have shown renewed interest in exploration and production opportunities. Recent licensing activity has also helped improve investor sentiment. Yet investors continue to watch developments closely.

Production interruptions, political disagreements, infrastructure constraints, and regulatory uncertainty remain concerns that buyers cannot ignore. The next phase of competition will not revolve around geography alone. It will revolve around trust. Countries that can consistently deliver supply often gain a stronger position than countries that simply possess large reserves.

Turning Strategic Geography Into

Investment

Perhaps the greatest opportunity created by the Hormuz crisis lies in investment rather than exports. For years, discussions surrounding Libya’s energy sector focused largely on political risk. Investors acknowledged the country’s vast reserves but often viewed instability as the dominant factor shaping future prospects.

The crisis introduced another perspective. It reminded markets that Libya occupies a highly strategic location in the Mediterranean. That advantage cannot be replicated. As companies reassess supply chains and geopolitical exposure, Libya can position itself as more than a resource-rich producer. It can present itself as a strategically located supplier capable of serving European demand while reducing exposure to some of the world’s most vulnerable energy chokepoints.

This argument becomes particularly relevant as international oil companies look beyond immediate market conditions and evaluate opportunities over the next decade. The countries that attract investment are often those that combine resources, geography, and reliability. Libya already possesses two of those three ingredients. Strengthening the third may determine whether the current opportunity becomes lasting.

Beyond the Crisis

The future of Libya’s energy sector does not depend on whether oil prices rise or fall after a U.S.-Iran agreement. Nor does it depend solely on whether shipping through Hormuz returns to normal. The larger issue concerns how global energy markets adapt to the lessons of the crisis.

Over the past three months, buyers gained a renewed appreciation for supply diversification. Governments rediscovered the importance of energy security. Investors paid closer attention to alternative export routes. Those trends could continue long after the headlines disappear.

For Libya, that may be the most important outcome of all. The country’s opportunity was never simply to benefit from temporary market anxiety. The real opportunity lies in becoming part of a longer-term shift toward diversified and resilient energy supply chains.

If Libya can strengthen reliability, attract investment, and continue expanding production, it could emerge from the Hormuz crisis in a stronger strategic position than it occupied before the conflict began. The Strait of Hormuz may soon reopen. The questions raised by the crisis are likely to shape energy markets for years to come.

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