Author - ab_mnbr

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Priming the pump

Alongside these structural changes, a massive fuel smuggling scheme between Saddam and Russia took off, which the new NOC tried to mask.

Moscow needed Libya to bypass Western sanctions on Russian fuel exports. Russian petrol and diesel exports into Libya suddenly exploded in September 2022, rising from sporadic shipments of a few thousand barrels per day (bpd) delivered over several months to almost 20,000 bpd that month alone. Russia did this covertly, with Turkish companies often acting as brokers.

By spring 2023 the exports had reached almost 90,000 bpd, exceeding 100,000 bpd by January 2024. (They only declined after that as Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries increased.) Russia exported $2.6bn worth of fuel to Libya, making it the largest seller of fuel and covering 28% of all the country’s imports (up from 4% in 2021).

But things seem to work the other way around, too. It is illegal to export fuel from Libya. Yet according to Libya’s audit bureau at least 40% of Libyan fuel is smuggled out of the country using a combination of land and sea routes.

This looks a lot like another Saddam and Wagner collaboration. The sea exports go through Benghazi’s old harbour, which conveniently sits adjacent to the Brega company’s marine oil terminal at Ras al-Minqar.

This harbour was previously used by Saddam Haftar to export scrap metal, but has been gradually upgraded to allow for covert and more efficient fuel transfers. Between March 2022 and September 2024, 48 tankers of ever greater sizes were identified making 185 visits to the harbour, and smuggling at least 1.125 million tons of diesel.

These tankers then either offload via ship-to-ship transfers near Malta or Sicily or they smuggle fuel directly to destinations such as Italy or Albania. Italy estimates that it alone loses $3bn a year in unpaid taxes from illicit fuel smuggled in. The paperwork on seized vessels often points to Brega being the provider of fuels, despite it not having the legal authority to export.

Convoys of fuel trucks have also been spotted going into Jufra airbase. From there, Wagner smuggled them onwards to other theatres such as Sudan and Mali. The other major route is through the southern city of Sebha, which saw an increase in delivered fuel from 600,000 litres per day in September 2022 to 1.2m litres per day by summer 2023.

This is far more than a city of roughly 200,000 could need. Ironically, Sebha routinely suffers from some of the worst fuel shortages in Libya, with most of these deliveries continuing onwards to Niger and Chad. Again, Russia is reportedly using these deliveries to deepen ties with Chad’s president Mahamat Déby and supply allied forces in Sudan.

Afrikansky Korpus

Wagner and Saddam Haftar’s fruitful relationship was crudely interrupted when Prigozhin’s jet exploded, killing him, in August 2023. But by then, Libya was the linchpin of the African entente roscolonial—despite Moscow’s lack of formal political relations with Tripoli. This meant Moscow was using its Libya platform to bolster operations elsewhere on the continent, enhance its profitability and weaken Europe. The biggest change was the formalisation of Russia’s involvement with the Haftars.

Dropping the front

In Prigozhin’s place, General Andrei Averyanov—notorious for leading the GRU unit dubbed “the bridgehead of Russian interference in Europe”—was appointed to oversee PMC operations. Alongside him, deputy defence minister Yunus Bek-Yevkurov was appointed head of Africa Corps, the Wagner successor. Yevkurov had even visited Khalifa Haftar the day before Prigozhin’s “accident”, framing this as “the first official” Russian military trip to Libya. Yevkurov and Averyanov spent the rest of the summer touring Wagner’s African equities, again starting with Libya.

This resetting of the relationship stratified Africa Corps deployments. The relationships with Libya, the logistical hub of Russia’s Africa cluster, were formalised to maximise its utility as a forward operating base. Meanwhile, more dangerous theatres like Mali retained the PMC model. By December 2023, the Russian ministry of defence officially began recruiting for Africa Corps with the aim of building it into a 20,000 strong legion.   

The formalisation of Haftar’s relationship with Africa Corps allowed the Kremlin to salvage a strained relationship that was also being eroded diplomatically. Since 2021, Saddam and Wagner’s smuggling partnership had financed the LAAF’s consolidation and allowed it to retain a patronage network (the system of political power in Libya). Alongside this, LAAF-Russian cooperation within a broader alliance involving the UAE had given Haftar some geopolitical ballast that allowed him to survive the tense years after his failed assault on Tripoli.

Nevertheless, relations between Prigozhin and Khalifa Haftar remained tense. Wagner’s autonomy in Libya to the extent of barring the LAAF from bases it technically owned without Russian approval was a humiliation for the field marshal. Wagner operatives had also damaged relations with major Libyan tribes and if Haftar wished to regain autonomy, he would either have to rebuild the tribal forces that were once the backbone of the LAAF or use tribes to build up the praetorian units under his relatives.

Over 2023, the US began a diplomatic push to try to wean its one-time asset off its dependency on Russia. CIA director William Burns visited eastern Libya in January, followed up by assistant secretary of state Barbara Leaf in March. Haftar, for his part, resurrected his pre-2019 strategy of using US-Russian rivalries to his benefit, telling visiting delegations that he needed them to provide him a military deterrent against Turkey to break from Russia. 

This would include Turkish military withdrawals alongside supplies of advanced aircraft and patriot missiles. But the threat perception of Turkey declined as Ankara grew closer to Abu Dhabi and built commercial partnerships with the Haftars, culminating in cooperation with Saddam in the energy sector.

Eventually Haftar and the US found a middle-ground of continuing relations through a process to unify Libya’s militaries; which helped to legitimise Haftar, politically bolster his position, and strengthening his praetorian units without him having to give anything in exchange.   

Any potential US gains were wiped out by Yevkurov’s offer to replace Wagner with an official Russian presence. This offer likely appealed to the ageing Haftar. After all, he was far more familiar with state-to-state relations than these new-fangled (and disrespectful) PMCs. Moreover, an official relationship would bolster Haftar geopolitically: it would improve his position in the region, shore up the defence Russia already provided and most importantly could even revitalise his aspiration to rule all of Libya.

In September 2023, Yevkurov helped the Haftars stabilise a volatile situation after a catastrophic flood devasted eastern Derna. Haftar then returned to Moscow for the first time since storming out in January 2020, where he met Putin to frame the new relationship. Haftar saw this as an opportunity to upgrade the LAAF; demanding new aircraft, air-defences, and training for pilots and special forces. In exchange, existing Russian bases could be upgraded to enhance Russia’s presence there.

These were substantially similar discussions to those Haftar held with US representatives; the biggest difference being in the response he received. Haftar’s requirements resonated with a Kremlin that had clarity over what it needed from Libya, a long-term presence, and was less sensitive about exclusivity given that Russia felt safer amid its broader partnership with the UAE, and to a lesser extent

Turkey. Ultimately Russia was seeking to build something, meaning Moscow and Haftar could find an accommodation; whereas the US was merely seeking to block Russia, with no grander vision for Libya in place.

***

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

_____________________

Milad Elharathi

Changes in Leadership and State’s

Political System

The quick current revolt spread rapidly from Tunisia to Egypt, and then from Egypt to Libya, in one timing date, threatening entrenched regimes and the status quo. For example, Libya’s revolted turned into a bloody civil war, and spilling over of armaments, everywhere in the country.

By the end of 7th of February 2014, the General National Congress ended its mandate, which led into political vacuum in the country. In contrary, there are effectively two rival governments. One is in Tripoli, where is a coalition of Islamist armed groups from (Msrata).

The other is in (Tobruk), where a newly elected Council of Representatives (COR) and a cabinet have convened by the majority of the Libyan people. While, in Tunisia, the Muslim movement (Nahdi Party) led the country into social unrest, only in the end of January 2014, and after four years, Tunis launched its new constitution.

In addition, Egypt and its revolt turned into Christian-Muslim confrontations, and it turned its destination twice (January uprising, 2011 and the road to 30 of June, 2013) with widespread of unrest and instability between the civic moments and the ousted Brotherhood.

This progress led by the military rule under the Commander, Assisi, who called his Egyptian people to march against the Brotherhood presidency, Morsi, in 30, June, 2013, with widespread of unrest and instability between the civic moments and the ousted brotherhood.

As result, this move, also, led to create interim government, and hunting all the brotherhood elites and became under arrest. While many observers have drawn matches with the rising of the American control of the International Order and the domination of the Western alliances, and its major leading role in combating terrorism, and the eastward spread of democracy to Eastern Europe, the outcome of the Libyan revolt is far from bringing political and social stability in this stateless.

This popular revolt has challenged authoritarian rule in the whole region, and highlighted the widespread desire for a responsible government.

Libya, in particular, is an evidential and exclusion example among other Arab revolts, that NTO played a major powerful militarized intervention in the name of supporting Obama’s terminology of “ Arab Spring”. In this regard, Libyan revolt could be described a career of immune factor towards democratic transition and transformation, revolts stolid in, overthrowing some regimes and shaking each other.

Four years (2010/2014) have passed since the arrival of the Arab uprising, turmoil, and leaders and decision-makers have been trying to analyze such historic transformation in order to find traction in the region that has been looking different from bad to worse, with new dynamics, unknown elites and political topography.

Observers noticed, during these events, the timing of the whole changes in leadership and state’s political system, and new elites occupied the political landscape of the region. This would suggest that the external factor was an essential motive in advancing such stages of sudden changes in the region.

Libya’s political development since

the Arab Spring

Libya aſter the assassination of Qaddafi is divided. Since mid-2011, the country has spiraled toward civil war. Rival armed groups are fighting for control of Libya’s capital. In the east, the Libyan armed forces led by a retired general, (Kalifa Haſter) is shelling Islamist armed groups in and around Benghazi for 6 months, during 2014.

By the mid-October 2014 the Libyan military brigades have entered the city heat of Benghazi and declared curfew from mid-noon to the next morning . In addition, there are effectively two rival governments.

One is in Tripoli, where is a coalition of Islamist armed groups from (Msrata). The other is in (Tobruk), where a newly elected Council of Representatives (COR) a cabinet have convened by the majority of the Libyan people.

Libya’s armed forces, both official and unofficial, are essentially at war with one another, with each faction strengthened by an arrangement of tribes and towns. As a result, Libya’s armed forces, both official and unofficial, are essentially at war with one another, with each faction bolstered by assemblage of tribes and towns.

Moreover, we are oſten lured toward a one-dimensional reading of Libya’s turmoil. It is easy to explain Libya’s breakdown as a political struggle between Islamists and secularists: the Justice and Construction Party (JCP) affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and more jihadi factions like Al-Qaeda versus the secularists. Components of all these dimensions are at play, but none of them alone has sufficient explanatory power, either political solutions to the elusive revolution.

At its core, Libya’s instability is an intensely local and regional affair, stemming from deeply entrenched sponsorship networks batiling for economic resources and political power in a state tortured by a gaping institutional vacuum and the absence of a central mediator with a multitude of force .

In crux, Libya suffers from a balance of weakness among its political factions and armed groups; no single entity can force others to act purely through coercion, but every entity is strong enough to veto the others . The current panorama of political polarization and the broken security sector presents the Western led coalition of 2011 military campaign with profound dilemmas.

A previous approach of supporting state institutions is problematic when those institutions, whether the governmental bodies, are successfully split between two warring factions.

Correspondingly, a long-planned determination to train the Libyan army can only proceed aſter a ceasefire and a political compromise that produces a clearly defined road map toward the reform of security institutions .

Consequently, the eventual solution for Libya’s security anguishes lies in context-specific security solutions, a broad political pact and constitution. This is an area where outsiders can lend advice and measured assistance, but where the ultimate burden must be borne by Libyans themselves, solutions for Libya are only Libya solutions

The Islamist Armed Groups

Too oſten, Libya’s armed groups are thought to be outside of Libyan society and of the state. In fact, they are deeply intertwined into both. One of Libya’s challenges is that nearly all the armed groups claim legitimacy from their affiliation with competing organs of the weak and fractured government.

Government subsidization of these groups arose from the enfeebled state of the formal army and police . The results of this prearrangement in Libya have been mixed and highly dependent on location.

In some homogenous communities where the armed groups enjoyed organic roots and social ties, the forces played a role akin to a local gendarmerie, performing functions like tranquillizers interdiction, guarding schools and hospitals, and even street maintenance.

But in mixed or strategically important locales, namely Tripoli and Benghazi, they have evolved into dangerously parasitic and destructive entities, pursuing agendas that are at once criminal, political, and ideological

Conflicting to some expectations, no one faction is blameless on this front.

Islamists, armed groups have all used force or the threat of force to pressure the country’s elected institutions, capture smuggling, or seize strategic assets like border checkpoints, oil facilities, armories, ports, and, perhaps most importantly, airports.

The Islamist armed groups in the east reflect that region’s longtime alienation from the center and increasing embrace of moral devotion and transparency.

***

Milad Elharathi – Visiting Fellow, at Clare College, University of Cambridge UK

____________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Neighbouring sounds

Finally, the network also seems to have ambitions in Libya’s neighbouring countries. In December 2020 the TBZ deployed to south-western Libya. There Haftar’s unit entered into a low-burning series of skirmishes with GNA-affiliated forces to gradually claim control of the city and region, relying on intelligence, logistical and surveillance support from Wagner operatives stationed nearby in Brak al-Shati military airbase.

The oasis city of Sebha is notable as a crossroads for smuggling routes from Chad and Niger into southern Libya, as well as gold that is mined in southern Libya and the Tibesti mountains just across the border in Chad.

In September 2021 the TBZ again deployed. This time it was against the remnants of Chadian opposition group FACT (which had previously fought alongside Haftar in 2020, based out of Jufra). Back then, Wagner distrusted the group because of its close relationship with France, and now the group was licking its wounds after a failed attempt to invade its homeland earlier that year.

The TBZ struggled, suffering significant casualties over a four-day battle. But laser-guided artillery and airstrikes of foreign origin allowed Saddam Haftar’s alliance to significantly degrade FACT’s force. The rebel group blamed France for providing this foreign support. But it is more likely that it came from Wagner. Airstrikes from Jufra would have been easier to deploy and conceal than any French activity, and Wagner had experience working with the LAAF as spotters for guided artillery during the Tripoli war.

This operation could also be read as initial alliance-building from the Emirati-Russian coalition with Chad’s new dictator, Mahamat Déby, the son of the former autocratic president Idriss Déby who had been killed by rebel forces during the recent incursion. This coalition’s relationship-building with the new president would eventually displace France in N’Djamena and lay the ground for Chadian support for the RSF in Sudan as Russia found the opportunity to pursue its “first approach” once more in Chad.

Whatever the aims, when the battle ended, the TBZ with Wagner was able to enforce greater control over the region’s smuggling routes. This bolstered its revenues from people and drug smuggling, and Libya’s gold mining. Most of all, however, it enabled fuel smuggling.

There will be blood

Wagner’s modus operandi was always to lever its military support for frail dictators against a nation’s assets. By 2020 this model was already well-established in Syria and the Central African Republic. But no Wagner target-state ever had quite the resources of Libya; nor quite the international congestion around it. Libya underwent Moscow’s most sophisticated example of asset hijacking, as the country became a chip in the Kremlin’s efforts to squeeze out geopolitical rivals and eventually evade international sanctions.

Securing the bag

When Wagner then abandoned Haftar on the Tripoli front from May 2020 onwards, it did not just fall back to secure Jufra and other military bases. It pre-emptively claimed Libya’s oil installations. Wagner operatives and Syrian mercenaries (flown in by who else but Cham Wings) moved into the Ras Lanuf refinery and the oil crescent’s export terminals; seizing worker housing, large quantities of aviation fuel, and installing powerful S-300 air defence systems.

Simultaneously, other Wagner units alongside Sudanese mercenaries secured oil fields in the south, notably Libya’s largest field al-Sharara, reinforcing an oil blockade that had begun in January 2020.

This control over oil flows gave Russia the cards for its failed solution to the conflict. As the ceasefire that followed the Cairo declaration slowly fossilised, Europeans and Americans tried to transform a misshapen ceasefire of necessity into a more sustainable peace. Moscow, for its part, flexed its control over Libya’s oil. Not only did it continue enforcing the 2020 blockade to shape negotiations, but it used its position to pre-emptively move against an American initiative with the UN and the NOC that would have led to the demilitarisation of oil sites.

In September 2020 the Kremlin snuck one of its GNA assets Maitiq (the Sarraj deputy mentioned in the “Losing the war” section of this paper) to a Russia-Africa summit in Sochi. He was joined by Khaled Haftar, who had been given military responsibilities and designated the official interlocuter for Russia as part of Haftar’s post-war consolidation.

In Sochi, Russia brokered a deal that would see oil exports resume and a new committee formed to manage and distribute oil revenues between eastern and western Libya. The deal outraged the elite in western Libya. Sarraj and key financial players such as the central bank governor rejected it as opaque, illegal and favouring Haftar.

Maitiq, who had no authority to make such a deal, was blocked from going to Sirte for its signing ceremony. Despite this, the mere existence of the rejected deal now meant the GNA and NOC looked like the bad guys.

This pressure worsened as the US, UN and key European states pushed Libyans to accept the Sochi deal as an important step towards stability, a permanent ceasefire and new political process. But acquiescing to this deal represented nothing of the sort. Rather, it legitimised the divvying up of Libya’s oil wealth and was the first major chip in the NOC’s integrity.

It was also a boon for Russia’s stature in Libya and provided another stream of funding to help reconstitute Haftar in the east after his defeat. Finally, it meant the UN and the West had discarded perhaps the strongest leverage they had to expel Wagner from Libya’s oil sites.

They had also given Russia a pretext for future shutdowns—since the full administrative provisions of the deal could never have feasibly been implemented. As with the Cairo declaration, embracing the Sochi deal happened under the illusion of securing a short-term stabilising win that the UN could improve later and despite warnings from Libyans. The oil flowed once more. But Russia retained control.

Flexing control

In the spring of 2022, a couple of months after Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, oil prices were rocketing and Europe’s energy crisis was already well under way. Meanwhile Libya’s political divisions had worsened in the wake of the 2021 electoral debacle. Dbeibeh, the internationally recognised premier, had outlasted his mandate, as the elections he was appointed to oversee failed.

This led the House of Representatives to appoint Bashagha as prime minister in a deeply flawed process (that would have installed half of the Turkish-Russian dream team for 2020 into power). But Dbeibeh exploited the procedural violations to cling on to power. Then on April 18th Libya’s oilfields, then its oil terminals, began to shut down.

This was framed by Haftar-aligned media as a popular protest against Dbeibeh’s unwillingness to cede to Bashagha. But it was an LAAF operation that could not have happened without the support of the Wagner operatives camped at these installations.

The shutdown cut off key Italian and other European refineries from a major source of energy supplies. Shortly after the oil blockade, the chair of the NOC sent a letter to Libya’s chief prosecutor asking him to take action against the fuel-smuggling tankers. But the blockade went on for three more months until the UAE negotiated a breakthrough deal between Dbeibeh and Saddam Haftar.

The terms of this deal were that Haftar would switch the oil back on, but he could appoint a new chairman of the NOC and would get additional funding from the body. This was the natural evolution of the Sochi deal: it again exploited the crisis of an oil blockade to solicit huge financial and structural concessions for Haftar at the cost of the structural integrity of both Libya and the NOC.

The new NOC chair, Farhat Bengdara, was a former central bank governor with no experience in the oil industry. According to those familiar with the deal, he was appointed as a result of his financial expertise. [20] Alongside this change, $6bn was released by the Central Bank of Libya, ostensibly as financing for the NOC.

Yet it seemingly ended up moving through a subsidiary to Saddam Haftar who then allegedly used it to pay Wagner. Within a year, Saddam’s loyalists were appointed to management positions over key subsidiaries, most notably the Brega Company that was responsible for all of Libya’s fuel imports.

***

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

_____________________

I- Introduction

Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), has been under UN Security Council sanctions since 2011. Founded by Muammar al-Qadhafi in 2006, the LIA is now a $70 billion fund with assets ranging from stocks to real estate. Until the Council decided to let the LIA reinvest cash assets in January 2025, the sanctions regime on the investment authority had not changed, aside from minor modifications to the asset freeze made by the Council.

This regime requires that all states freeze any money held in their jurisdictions that belongs to the LIA or those acting on its behalf. The sanctions also apply to the Libya African Investment Portfolio, an Africa-focused investment fund under the LIA’s ownership.

Libyan authorities have long called on the Council to modify the sanctions, and in 2023 the LIA stepped up its campaign for sanctions reform. It drafted an investment plan, proposing five actions for the Council that it said would mitigate the sanctions’ harmful impact on the LIA’s value.

 The Council responded in 2023 by pledging to consider changes to the asset freeze. A year later, the LIA proceeded to submit its investment plan, which the Panel of Experts, a Council-mandated group that advises on the sanctions’ implementation, reviewed. In early January 2025, the panel made recommendations to the Council concerning how to respond to the LIA’s requests.

Soon thereafter, the Council decided to grant some of the LIA’s requests, notably by allowing the fund to reinvest its cash reserves. 

This report, a joint output of Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa and U.S. Programs, details the history of Security Council sanctions on the LIA. It examines various views of the sanctions, as well as the Council’s recent adjustments, and recommends further measures aimed at removing curbs on the fund’s growth and setting a path to long-term reform.

The report is based on dozens of interviews with diplomats, financial professionals, lawyers, sanctions experts, Libyan politicians, executives and civil society figures in Washington, New York, Tripoli, Tunis, Rome, London and elsewhere from 2022 through early 2025.

It is also informed by interviews with LIA staff, including the chairman, and a review of documentation, including unpublished material the LIA provided to Crisis Group. The UN Panel of Experts for Libya declined to be interviewed. Most, but not all, Libyan interlocutors were men, reflecting the gender-based power divide in the country, while women and men were represented approximately equally among international interlocutors such as diplomats and experts. 

II- The History of Sanctions on

Libya’s Wealth Fund

…

A. Protecting Libyans from

Qadhafi’s Abuses

Qadhafi established the LIA in 2006, just after the U.S. lifted sanctions on the country in exchange for his commitment to dismantle Libya’s nuclear program, destroy its chemical and biological weapons stocks, and renounce terrorism, and three years after the UN had lifted the sanctions it imposed in the wake of the 1988 Lockerbie air crash.

Starting with $40 billion in capital, the LIA’s initial investments spanned sectors including finance, agriculture, real estate and hydrocarbons.

Its stated purpose was to invest Libya’s oil wealth abroad for the benefit of future generations. While it was widely regarded as a slush fund for Qadhafi and his cronies, it nonetheless increased in value to approximately $56 billion by the start of the civil war. 

When war broke out in Libya in 2011, in the midst of uprisings across the Arab world and following mass protests in the country, the UN Security Council authorised a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace and enacted stringent sanctions – a travel ban, an arms embargo and an asset freeze – against powerful Libyan institutions and individuals.

Soon afterward, the Council froze the funds of Libyan economic institutions including the Central Bank, the National Oil Corporation and the LIA. Member states feared that Qadhafi would plunder these accounts to fuel the violent repression of his opponents.

With the fighting still under way in mid-2011, foreign backers of the anti-Qadhafi forces recognised the rebel-led National Transitional Council (NTC) as the legitimate governing authority of Libya. They requested that Libyan state funds be put at the NTC’s disposal to pay for salaries and other state services as well as for rebuilding.

The UN responded in September 2011: The General Assembly formally recognised the NTC, and the Security Council lifted sanctions on the Libyan National Oil Corporation and one of its subsidiaries.

In October 2011, the Security Council also modified the asset freeze on the Central Bank of Libya, the LIA and other listed Libyan financial institutions, making funds inside Libya available to the interim authorities while maintaining the freeze on funds held outside the country.

In December 2011, the Security Council removed the sanctions on the Central Bank of Libya and the Libyan Foreign Bank, thus lifting restrictions on all the Libyan institutions that it had blacklisted during the civil war – except for the LIA. The fund’s foreign assets remained frozen. 

B. Prolonged Sanctions

It is a fluke of history that the UN kept the LIA sanctions in place after the revolution. Council members were reluctant to lift the restrictions on the LIA when it delisted other institutions because, at the time, the fund had no board of directors and its head was a holdover from the Qadhafi regime.

The Council did commit to delist the LIA and its subsidiary, the Libya African Investment Portfolio, “as soon as practical to ensure the assets are made available to and for the benefit of the people of Libya”. 

Yet when a new board chairman was finally appointed to the LIA in April 2012, he advised the new Libyan leadership to wait until the LIA had completed a full audit of its assets before requesting that sanctions be lifted.

Shortly afterward, the country tipped toward chaos again, with rival factions fighting on the streets of Tripoli. The Security Council was reluctant to lift the sanctions amid escalating violence. Its members worried that the LIA’s funds could be used to fuel the unrest and could not be managed effectively at a time when the Libyan authorities could not maintain basic order.

They hoped that elections, scheduled for June 2014, would bring about a unified government with a popular mandate and conditions more suitable for unfreezing LIA assets. 

The 2014 elections were contested and split [Libya] into two rival authorities, one in the east and another in the west, each backed by a military coalition.

That did not happen. Instead, Libya continued to lurch from crisis to crisis and the sanctions remained in place. The 2014 elections were contested and split the country into two rival authorities, one in the east and another in the west, each backed by a military coalition. Both claimed to be legitimate. They were intermittently at war until 2020.

As this new divide between east and west took hold, a feud over the control of LIA also broke out. Two rival managers – Hassan Bouhadi, working from Malta with the backing of the government in Libya’s east, and Abdulmajid Breish in Tripoli, supported by powerbrokers in the west – claimed to be the legitimate LIA chief executive officer.

A leadership feud within the Tripoli-based camp further complicated matters. In June 2014, the Tripoli government sought to sideline Breish and appoint Abderahmane Ben Yezza as interim chairman in his place; then, in late 2015, a new UN-backed government in Tripoli installed a loyalist, Ali Hassan Mahmoud, to head the fund, but throughout this period Breish refused to step down. In the meantime, another former chairman, Mohsen Derrigia, who had been appointed in 2012 and was replaced by Breish in 2013, asserted that he was still the rightful leader of the LIA. 

By that point, at least four people were claiming to be boss. Their competition resulted in the intermittent use of violence and intimidation, with reported cases of militias using force to eject or instal those who claimed to be the LIA’s leaders at the fund’s headquarters in Tripoli. As the Panel of Experts wrote in 2017, “the security personnel in control of the Tripoli Tower has the final say as to who occupies the Authority’s head office, a situation that is not tenable”. The feud was also repeatedly litigated in courts in Libya and abroad. 

Jockeying over the LIA’s helm finally ended in 2020, when a court in the United Kingdom ruled that Ali Hassan Mahmoud was the legitimate chairman by virtue of having been appointed by the internationally recognised government of Libya. The ruling in effect ended challenges to his leadership. It also coincided with a short-lived political calm following a UN-mediated negotiation to appoint a unity government under a new interim prime minister, Abdulhamid Dabaiba, in early 2021.

While the government split again into two rival administrations in 2023, the LIA leadership based in Tripoli was, for the most part, undisputed.

________________________

Milad Elharathi

Abstract:

Libya is the most predisposed to internal divisions and instability. At the same time it’s also the only North African state to have failed to do away with the ethnic and tribal barriers and to create a national identity.

The main barrier to achieving this goal has been and still is geography and wealth along with the tribal segmentations in the country. This article presents current state of affairs in Libya after the uprising which led by the NATO’ campaign in March 2011.

In other word, the analysis is based on the context of the “Arab Spring”, in which we under the aspects of the current Libya’s military politics, and analyzing the prospects of the ongoing democratic control and the transitional attempts from the revolutionary to the institutional state status.

Geography and Wealth

First of all, by now we are familiarized with the idea that geography 1 plays almost always, if not always, the determining role in how a state evolves internally. The difference between states is that for some geography has a negative impact, while for others a positive one.

Libya is one of those states which is geographically disadvantaged, its territory having no major sources of water, no mountains or fertile areas (like the other North African countries have for example) which to enable large-scale agriculture.

It is simply a desert. In the absence of a geographic element which to inhibit ethnic and tribal differences, isolated communities have persisted (usually formed around sources of water) each with its own identity, in some cases dating back hundreds or thousands of years.

In addition, the only important resources of the country are oil (which for example is of higher quality than the Russian oil) and gas, but neither of those did nothing to contribute in a positive way in homogenizing the Libyan population, mostly because they were always under the control of a small group of people.

In contrast, energy resources have deepened the division within Libya due to the emergence of two producing regions, one producing mainly oil and the other producing mostly gas, each with its own bureaucracy and infrastructure.

Although, until the fall down of the Kaddafi regime in October 2011, Libya was a highly centralized and stable state, the authoritarian apparatus, the army and the political system created by Kaddafi having maintained the status quo for decades.

But none of those contributed in any way in creating a national identity, which is why when the system malformed, the divisions that until than had been more or less dormant, resurfaced.

Of course not only geography played a role in shaping Libya, but also it is the main reason, including its wealth with limited population. Libya is a major exporting oil country in the region In fact; Libya holds approximately (46.4 billion) barrels of oil reserves, the largest in Africa and in close proximity to Europe.

In 2010, Libya produced an estimated (1.8 million barrels) per day bbl./d of the world’s 88m barrels a day of oil of which (1.5 million bbl. /d) was exported. The ousted regime had planned to up its production to 3 million barrels a day by 2020, and further develop its natural gas sector in an effort to stimulate economic recovery against the backdrop of US and international sanctions during the 1980s and 1990s.

France, Britain, Italy and Spain accounted for nearly (85%) of Libya’s oil exports. Of these nations, Italy received over (28%) of its total oil imports from Libya which amount to (370,000 barrels) of oil per day .

Italy’s role was also outstanding as Silvio Berlusconi’s government offered the use of seven air and navy bases for the Libyan operation at the early stages of the military operations .

Regarding France, it receives (17%) of its oil from Libya, along with Britain who receives (8%) of its oil from Libya as well. It is also interesting to point out that France, UK and Italy were the first NATO countries that undertook sorties and military logistical assistance across Libya as part of collective efforts to enforce a no-fly zone during the initial phases of the intervention

Furthermore, Libya is, also, awash in natural gas resources with an estimated capacity (of 55 trillion cubic feet) (TCF) of proven natural gas reserves. According to estimates by the International Energy Agency prior to the upsurge of popular revolution, Libyan production by 2012 could be increased by as much as 50 percent if planned pipelines and gas-fired power plants would have been built, but this is not happened due to the conflict over the oil ports of (Zwetina) and (Ras Alanowf), in the east part of Libya.

The natural resources of Libya attracted NATO members to organize and lead a major military campaign in the beginning of the second decade of this century.

Certain advanced questions remained without imperative answers; and how such NATO’s intervention, in supporting Libya’s revolt that created a large amount of debatable political and economic impacts on Libya’s affairs? The above arguments could explain why the wealth factor in Libya is important as the geographical one.

The Emerged Internal Divisions

One of the ways in which internal divisions resurfaced was the emergence of various well-armed militias in cities like (Musrata, Benghazi, Dirna, Sabah, or Zentan and Tripoli). While Kaddafi was still alive they had a common goal and therefore posed no threat, but when the former dictator was physically eliminated (possibly since before that) differences between these groups and differences between the militias and the new leadership in Tripoli started to take birth.

Ironically, the new government in Tripoli was originally forced to turn to the militias for maintaining internal order, which otherwise would not have been possible. Gradually though, they became the biggest obstacle in the way of achieving internal stability and in restoring the government’s authority. And given the large number of weapons the militia’s posses – weapons which originally belonged to the Libyan army.

It is unlikely that the regime in Tripoli will be able to disperse the militias too soon, not without massive external support.

In a fairly limited manner the General National Congress (the body which theoretically governs the country) managed to put the militias in a position of financial dependence, but this did not prevent the occupation of governmental buildings when pressure on the government was needed.

Moreover, it should be noted however, that since before the civil war Italy was hinting to a possible split in two of the country ( as it had had happened in the past) and the NATO commandment suspected that the militias will refuse to disarm themselves. So the countries that granted aid to the rebel cause were aware of the existing divisions in Libya, so what followed the civil war came as no disclosure.

However, most of the Libyan population is divided into four major ethnic groups: Arabs – the bulk of the population (Berbers, Tuaregs and Tebo (Tibbu). Of these, the Berbers and Tuaregs were the ones with the greatest freedom of action, even during the Kaddafi era.

That’s because it’s virtually impossible to control a group which when it feels threatened can simply pass the border into Mali or Niger or take the road to the Sahara Desert, and later return unhindered.

Again, geography prevented effective control, especially in the southern territories. Such an effort would require the continued presence of substantial military forces, which Libya never had. This did not prevent Gaddafi to recruit and equip Tuareg militants into his army in order to fight against the rebel forces.

It was this way that the Tuaregs came into possession of large quantities of weapons, which after the fall down of the Kaddafi regime, they used to foment a rebellion in northern Mali and perform operations in Chad.

It took a direct military intervention by France to push the Tuareg militants out of Mali. The above mentioned problems are amplified by the existence of two centers of power, one in the west – Tripoli – and one in the east – Benghazi. In parallel, both military and intelligence services had been affected by the internal conflict and thus have a very limited operational capacity.

Also, even within the General National Congress there are competing factions. Or, in the lack of a single powerhouse with effective instruments for the exercise of authority, it’s very difficult to solve these internal problems.

In short, the authority of the General National Congress (elected 2012) in Tripoli is further worn by the fact that within its administration there are people who were once part of the Kaddafi regime.

On the one hand this is due to corruption, but also because Libya simply does not have many people with administrative skills. In other words, there aren’t many who can actually govern the country, or what’s left of it.

***

Milad Elharathi – Visiting Fellow, at Clare College, University of Cambridge UK

______________________

Emadeddin Badi

The role of armed groups

Meanwhile, armed groups have entrenched themselves deeper into the infrastructure of Libya’s energy economy. In both east and west, militias have embedded themselves in utilities such as the General Electric Company of Libya (GECOL), where operational choices are influenced more by kleptocratic leverage than by institutional standards.

Between 2022 and 2024, an estimated 1.125 million tons of diesel—allocated theoretically for power generation—were illicitly exported from Benghazi’s old harbor. These exports were facilitated through inflated supply requests issued via GECOL, the obstruction of audits, and threats of violence against oversight bodies. The NOC, too, has been drawn into this vortex.

Crony contracting has allowed politically connected firms to secure procurement deals and operational privileges, eroding the firewall between national resource management and elite patronage.

This dynamic accelerated following the 2022 appointment of Farhat Bengdara as NOC chairman in a power-sharing arrangement between the GNU and eastern authorities. Though intended to ease executive tensions, the move entrenched political influence over the corporation’s operations.

Bengdara’s abrupt resignation in early 2025 did not reverse this trajectory. Instead, his tenure left a lasting imprint: a politicized NOC, increasingly leveraged for factional gain rather than safeguarding Libya’s oil wealth. This erosion of institutional neutrality has a fiscal analog in Libya’s monetary policy, where political imperatives now override sound economic management.

At the core of the dysfunction lies the unchecked expansion of the money supply. Independent estimates suggest that the volume of money in circulation now exceeds 170 billion LYD—a level of liquidity that far outpaces productive output or revenue generation. But the deeper concern lies not in the quantity itself, but in how much of it has been manufactured ex nihilo.

Digital monetary creation—the injection of funds into the economy without any corresponding revenue or production—has become the fallback of a political order unwilling to curb spending or enforce discipline. The predictable result has been a cascading erosion of the LYD’s value, a surge in inflation, and a growing public mistrust in the state’s ability to steward its financial future.

As foreign reserves shrink and black-market rates spike, Libya’s monetary system is no longer a stabilizing force; it is a mirror of its dysfunction.

To call this mismanagement is too generous.

This is structural predation, a system designed both to fail and extract. Public wealth is scarcely channeled into services or national development. It is captured, funneled through kleptocratic networks, and increasingly siphoned through untraceable contracts and offshore accounts.

Avenues of reform

Addressing this collapse requires more than fiscal prudence. It demands political realignment. Libya’s economic institutions must be recentered as sites of national governance, not tools of factional financing.

The institutions that govern oil revenues, control disbursement, and oversee procurement must be protected, reformed, and in many cases rebuilt, not just with new laws, but with new incentives, protections, and public visibility.

A credible reform strategy must begin with mandatory public disclosure of all oil contracts, real-time publication of state spending, and a ban on off-budget arrangements. Procurement must be regulated through transparent, competitive systems.

Revenue distribution must be guided by transparency, equity, and public oversight—not by decentralization for its own sake, nor by external stewardship.

Reform must strengthen national institutions while ensuring that public funds reach intended sectors and communities through accountable, legally grounded mechanisms. These are not just technocratic ideals. They are prerequisites for legitimacy and recovery.

International actors—donors, multilateral institutions, and diplomatic envoys—must stop treating Libya’s economic collapse as a mere byproduct of its political fragmentation.

Stability manufactured atop corruption is not stability at all.

While much emphasis is placed on unifying the government, doing so without reforming its fiscal architecture would merely centralize corruption under a single executive. That may deliver temporary coherence, but it will not constitute progress. In fact, it risks consolidating the very networks that have driven economic ruin.

Libya does need a single budget and a unified executive—but one subject to strict and enforceable guardrails on how public money is spent, disclosed, and audited. External engagement must support this principle. Anything less only subsidizes the continuation of state capture under a new administrative label.

Libya is not doomed to economic failure. But its current trajectory is unsustainable—not solely because the price of the oil barrel dropped, but because the political will to govern with integrity has long since evaporated.

Recovery will require confrontation, not consensus.

And it must begin with reclaiming the institutions that were designed to serve the public, not those who profit from its decline. Tinkering with technical levers like the exchange rate may buy time. But when such adjustments are used to sustain elite corruption rather than correct structural imbalances, they do not stabilize, they provoke.

If this continues, the next phase of Libya’s crisis will not be quiet erosion. It will be public revolt.

***

Emadeddin Badi is a nonresident senior fellow with the Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council where he advises on US and European policies toward North Africa and the Sahel, focusing on Libya’s conflict.

_______________________

Libya’s sovereign wealth fund has been under UN sanctions since the revolt against Muammar al-Qadhafi in 2011. These measures restrict investment that would enlarge the fund. The UN has eased them, but further changes would better protect the Libyan people’s patrimony while posing minimal risks.

***

What’s new? 

The UN Security Council has granted the Libyan sovereign wealth fund permission to reinvest some of its assets that have been frozen since 2011. But Council members remain reluctant to reform the sanctions constraining Libya’s finances while the country is divided. They also lack confidence in the fund’s competence.

Why does it matter? 

The Security Council imposed an asset freeze on the fund during Libya’s 2011 civil war, with the aim of preventing the Qadhafi regime from plundering the fund, estimated then at over $60 billion. Over a decade after the regime’s ouster, the sanctions still act as a brake on the fund.

What should be done? 

Council members should make further reforms to the sanctions regime to enable the fund to grow, while maintaining safeguards. Since resolution of Libya’s political crisis is not imminent, they should also define a realistic plan for long-term sanctions relief. The fund should do more to enhance its credibility and transparency.

Executive Summary

Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), has been under UN sanctions since the country’s 2011 civil war. Established in 2006 to invest Libya’s surplus oil revenues abroad, the fund consists of a vast network of subsidiaries worth around $70 billion.

At least half of that amount remains under an asset freeze that has severely restricted the fund’s growth. In 2024, Libyan authorities submitted a first request to the Security Council to enact reforms allowing them to reinvest some of the frozen assets. The Council has long been reluctant to relax its sanctions, given Libya’s tumult and its lack of confidence in the LIA, but in early 2025 it acceded to some of the requests.

These reforms are a good start, but the Council should not wait for resolution of Libya’s political crisis to make additional changes to its sanctions regime. Instead, the Council should develop realistic conditions for broader sanctions relief over the long term, while the LIA should take steps to bolster its credibility. 

The Security Council originally sanctioned Libya’s sovereign wealth fund to prevent the regime of Muammar al-Qadhafi from plundering Libya’s coffers during the civil war that erupted in 2011 when rebels rose up to topple the regime. Although the Qadhafi regime was overthrown months later, the freeze remains in place almost fifteen years on.

After the regime fell, the Council delisted other Libyan institutions such as the Central Bank of Libya and the National Oil Corporation, which had also been sanctioned during the 2011 war, but left the sanctions on the LIA in place. The rationale for maintaining these restrictions was to give post-Qadhafi fund managers time to map out all the fund’s assets.

Yet Libya’s transition quickly descended into chaos, with rival governments intermittently at war from 2014 until today. Council members were accordingly wary of lifting the sanctions.

Over the years, Security Council members have cited various justifications for keeping the sanctions in place. At first, they pointed to the emergence of competing governments, each with its own group of loyalists claiming to be the legitimate managers of the country’s sovereign wealth fund.

While the dispute over the LIA leadership was eventually resolved, allegations of corruption plagued Libya’s other institutions and fighting broke out periodically. Council members worried that if they unfroze the LIA funds, armed groups and other powerbrokers would embezzle the money.

Council members also cited a lack of confidence in the LIA’s ability to manage the fund competently, transparently and independently. In recent years, the fact that neither claimant to government power had an electoral mandate became another reason to maintain the freeze. The Council, like many Libyans, sees the sanctions as a means of protecting the population’s sovereign wealth nest egg from these various ills.

Libyan political elites benefit from the country’s enormous oil wealth, but the Libyan people see little of it.

Today, Libya has again lurched into political and economic turmoil. Two rival governments are still vying for power, and there are no elections in sight. Libyan political elites benefit from the country’s enormous oil wealth, but the Libyan people see little of it.

Foreign officials have sounded alarms about mismanagement in the National Oil Corporation and the Central Bank of Libya, which are foundational to Libya’s economy. These officials also point to institutionalised embezzlement throughout the state. Meanwhile, Libya’s leaders have channelled hardly any oil money into development projects, and the Libyan people face poverty, high unemployment and economic stagnation. 

Yet the sanctions may be making things worse. Libyan officials, while refraining from calling for lifting them wholesale, say these measures have caused financial losses and curbed the sovereign wealth fund’s growth. For years, sanctions meant that billions of dollars of Libyan assets sat in cash, which lost value over time due to inflation.

Outside firms charged hefty fees to administer frozen accounts, on terms that had been negotiated before 2011, while doing little to manage the LIA’s holdings due to restrictions. Citing these and other reasons, the fund asked the Council to consider reforms to allow for reinvestment of some LIA assets while maintaining the freeze. 

In January 2025, the Council made a novel decision to reform the LIA sanctions regime by allowing the investment authority to invest its cash reserves on certain conditions, including the requirement that the reinvested funds and the interest they accrue remain frozen.

The reforms remove important curbs on the fund, but sanctions still block it from growing to its full potential. Council members are nonetheless hesitant to offer broader sanctions relief, given Libya’s dysfunctional politics and the LIA’s flawed management. Yet, counterintuitively, Libya’s long-running crisis only underscores the importance of bolder reforms. Neither political unification nor an election is likely to happen soon, and without action now, the sanctions on the LIA could persist for many more years.

In the meantime, the fund’s growth will be slower than it could be, and the Council will have overseen a decades-long sanctions regime disconnected from its original purpose. To address these challenges, the following reforms should be pursued:

The Security Council should consider reforming additional elements of the LIA sanctions that curb its growth, such as by allowing low-risk reinvestments for non-cash assets, while keeping the assets and accrued interest frozen.

The Security Council and the LIA should consider creating a pilot project where LIA partners and a credible third party such as the UN or the World Bank co-manage a portion of the frozen assets. 

The LIA should take vigorous steps to enhance transparency, accountability and independence, such as by complying more fully with the Santiago Principles on sovereign wealth fund best practices and producing comprehensive reports on its holdings. 

The Security Council should set realistic goalposts for sanctions relief for the LIA, considering that resolution of Libya’s crisis and elections are far off.

The opportunity to improve the long-term prospects of all Libyans should not be missed. Modest reforms pose minimal risks and could better protect Libyan wealth. They would enhance the credibility of Council sanctions on Libya, which if left unaltered would face fair criticism for being discriminatory and anachronistic. The Security Council and the LIA should take corrective action. 

_________________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Domestication: How Russia taps into

weak-state opportunities

…

Narcos Libya

The Dbeibeh debacle was undoubtedly a setback for Russia. Just as well Prigozhin had been cultivating a backup: the field marshal’s son, Saddam Haftar. And it was with him that Wagner worked to rebuild Khalifa Haftar’s shattered force and ensure it served Russian interests. Charting how this new beast grew shows how little Russia’s fundamental goals in Libya had changed over the years. They remained: establishing influence and a military foothold in the eastern Mediterranean; making money to fund Moscow’s adventurism; and developing a migration “trump card” against Europe.

Several driving forces led to the expansion and professionalisation of Libya as a smuggling hub, and Wagner as a likely partner for the Haftars in this development.

Scratching backs

First, it seems that Wagner and the Haftars managed to find a common cause. Having withdrawn from western Libya, Wagner still needed to consolidate control over the central oil-gateway city of Sirte. And Khalifa Haftar needed foreign military support to maintain his position as eastern Libya’s leader, having lost political and tribal support in the east. The LAAF would have to end up in his family’s and Wagner’s hands.

But Libyans are fiercely independent—and the idea of the removal of all foreign forces contained in the ceasefire agreement was genuinely popular. Turkey had some cachet in western Libya, having saved the day, but the sight of Turkish flags on Libyan soil would likely have sat uneasy with many. In the east, long-running propaganda about Turkey’s intervention as a neo-Ottoman violation of Arab sovereignty provoked a sharp rejection of its presence.

Wagner, meanwhile, had sparked public outrage due to its forces’ Islamophobic attitudes and their abuses of civilians—not to mention the heinous crimes they had committed as they retreated from Tripoli, such as booby trapping homes and children’s toys. Even the LAAF officer class wanted Wagner forces to leave following their fallings-out during the war.

The atmosphere on the ground was tense: Haftar had promised the tribes of central Libya a new age of power and riches if they backed his assault on Tripoli. But their homes had instead become the front lines of a new conflict. Protests regularly broke out in Sirte and across central Libya calling for Wagner and its Sudanese mercenaries to leave.

New social movements also sprung up; the Sirte Reconciliation Committee, for instance, whose aim was to repair ties with western Libya in order to defuse tension and expedite demilitarisation. Wagner would need a local infrastructure to clamp down on such upstart attempts at Libyan self-determination.

Wagner mapping of mine and booby trap locations, UN panel of experts report on Libya, 2022

In Sirte the Tariq bin-Ziad (TBZ) brigade commanded by Saddam Haftar rallied the large Salafist and tribal components of its local deployment to control the city, even arresting the prominent head of the reconciliation committee. Another of Haftar’s praetorian brigades broke up protests across central Libya through a mass arrest campaign.

Drawing the trump card

Second, Wagner’s and the Haftars’ mutual need to consolidate power seems to have dovetailed with another perpetual need: money. Following the post-war consolidation it was Saddam Haftar who gained oversight over key airports like Benghazi’s Benina, and seaports in Benghazi and later Tobruk. In 2020 Cham Wings started a twice-weekly commercial route from Damascus to Benghazi’s Benina airport, intermittently advertising these as “migrant flights” on its Facebook page.

The conditions of obtaining security clearances and entry visas from Cham Wings offices connected the company to the dark new network of human trafficking that was growing under Saddam Haftar’s management.Haftar exploited the cross-country nature of his TBZ brigade to create a human smuggling infrastructure that transnational trafficking and smuggling networks could rent. For the price of a “racket fee” these networks were granted the use of one of Haftar’s nine entry hubs into Libya.

And the smuggling continues to this day. On arrival, migrants hand over their informal visas to the LAAF, who detain them until they receive payment by the network. They are then held for between several days to several weeks, typically in inhuman conditions, before being taken to “launch points” where they board boats towards Europe. At this point, Saddam is paid again for his coastguard units to allow boats through: $100 dollars per migrant for “smaller boats” (of around 300-550 people) or an $80,000 flat fee for larger boats. Others are taken to western Libya. This demonstrates how Libyan armed groups cross political divides in pursuit of profit.

Africans usually arrive in Libya via land borders. But a range of other nationalities from as far afield as Bangladesh arrive through the Cham Wings network. South Asians, paying up to $9,000 for their “visa”, fly to a transit point (often Dubai) where they receive these tickets in exchange for their liberty. They are then flown to Syria, where they are joined by Syrian migrants (paying lower fees of around $2,000) and onto Benina airport where they enter Haftar’s network.

From January 2021 to March 2022, there was a 79% increase in Cham Wings flights. This was a period of relative military stasis in Libya, meaning this growth is likely attributable to smuggling. During this time Cham Wings ran at least 187 flights, carrying a maximum of 32,538 people, while migrant arrivals from Libya to Italy rose by roughly 21,000.

Wagner had been busy developing a close relationship with Saddam Haftar and his TBZ brigade since at least end of the war on Tripoli. And its operatives have been spotted alongside TBZ deployments across Libya, most notably around smuggling hotspots along Libya’s south-eastern and south-western borders. The involvement of Cham Wings, heavily used by Wagner for military purposes, sometimes running through Russian military airbases in Syria, also used to take migrants from Damascus to Minsk, is another indicator of how deeply Russia is likely involved in the Libyan operation.

The Kremlin has weaponised migration elsewhere too since the all-out invasion of Ukraine, notably via Belarus towards Finland and Poland. Russia even seems to have turned Libya’s migration weapon towards the US in its fractious 2024 election year. Reports indicate that an additional stop was added to the migration airbridge with flights heading from Benina to Nicaragua.

But the Saddam-Wagner smuggling nexus was not limited to people. From 2017 onwards Libya had developed into a centre for drug smuggling; largely of hashish and captagon from Syria. The relationship with Assad was initially managed on the LAAF side by another tribal relative of Haftar’s, Fawzia al-Ferjani. Logistics and transportation was overseen by Mahmoud Abdullah Dajj with a shipping company headquartered in Latakia in Syria (conveniently where Russia’s headquarters in the country was also located).

Daij is a Syrian-Libyan dual national who was sentenced to death in-absentia by a Libyan court for drug smuggling in 2019. That same shipping company, Al Tayr, is also the “exclusive” agent that started organising commercial Cham Wings flights from Damascus to Benghazi from October 2020.

***

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

_______________________

Kersten Knipp

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

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

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

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

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

Moscow looks to Libya to bolster interests

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

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

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

Haftar’s son expands Libya’s role

as ‘hot spot for smuggling’

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

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

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

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

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

Business based on suffering

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

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

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

‘Migration as a weapon’

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

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

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

***

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

______________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Shaping the peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wagnerfication in the roscolonial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

___________________

Andrew McGregor

Executive Summary:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Making deals at the crossroads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A slippery symbiosis

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

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

Losing the war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia had unilaterally drawn

Libya’s new dividing line.

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

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

***

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

_______________________

Gregory Aftandilian

Foreign Interference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turkey also backs the GNU.

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

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

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

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

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

Sadly, More of the Same

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

_____________

Fuat Emir Şefkatli

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

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

***

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

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

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

Normalization with the East is gaining

momentum

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

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

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

Unifying and solution-oriented rhetoric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

_____________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Wagnerfication: How Russia harnesses

struggling strongmen

…

The Devil’s bargain

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

Planting the idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summoning a demon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

_______________________

Gregory Aftandilian

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

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

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

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

No Change in Government Structures

and Power Dynamics

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

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

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

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

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

Oil Divisions and Schemes

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

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

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

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

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

The country’s dueling governments

use oil revenues to sustain themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

Exploitation of Migrants

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

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

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

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

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

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

Information continues to surface about this human tragedy.

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

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

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

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

***

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

________________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Sparkling conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultivation in the roscolonial

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

______________________

Prof. Miral Sabry AlAshry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

_______________________

Federica Saini Fasanotti

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

Libya remains fragmented between

rival factions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sanctions and Libya’s ongoing political crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

International response to Libya’s militia-controlled instability

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

Facts & figures

Libya’s tumultuous journey since 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Scenarios

….

Highly unlikely in the short to

medium term: Elections are held

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

Very likely: Libya slides further

into social disorder

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

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

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

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

***

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

______________________

Abdullah Alkabir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi 

Cultivation: How Russia enters

geopolitical vacuums

…

A bear knocks at the door

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

Setting the table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boiling the kettle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

______________________

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

Tarek Megerisi

A fragile “entente roscolonial”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

_________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________________

Tarek Megerisi

Russia, Libya and the Kremlin’s playbook

for fragile states

***

Summary

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

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

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

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

How Russia returned to Libya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

_______________________

Yaseen Rashed

There is a case for Trump and Meloni

to challenge the status quo.

Renewing US-Italian engagement in Libya  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

_________________________

Stephanie T. Williams

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

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

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

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

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

An indifferent “international community”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Decentralization as a path forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________________