Jalel Harchaoui 

A first agreement has helped to overcome the divisions that have affected Libya for years. New leaders have been appointed. Who are they? Will they have the means to set the country on the road to reconstruction?

On February 5th in Geneva, 74 delegates previously picked by the UN as part of its Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF), elected four figures to lead a new interim government. The prime ministership went to Abd al-Hamid Dbeibah, a candidate whom commentators deemed controversial but never thought would win.

The 62-year-old mogul from the western port city of Misrata now has until February 26th to form a cabinet, which, if confirmed, is expected to sweep into power next month and remain in place until general elections take place on December 24 or, more realistically, later.

The mechanism used to designate the prime minister and a triumvirate—called the presidential council, featuring a figure from each of Libya’s three provinces—was proposed by the UN as a means of easing Libya out of internationalised civil war. The goal is also to demonstrate that one unified government could hold despite the division that persists on the ground.

For months, until last spring, the eastern-Libyan-based commander Khalifa Haftar’s military offensive—with the combat assistance of Russian and other foreign mercenaries as well as Emirati air strikes—raged against armed groups aligned with the UN-recognized government in Tripoli. And in June, the Turkish state and its Syrian mercenaries helped the Tripoli government expel Haftar’s main brigades and allies from north-western Libya, a province called Tripolitania.

Now, Turkey’s military mission in the northwest and the Russian force in the centre, are not controlled by Libyans, but they help achieve a balance of power. The relative calm resulting from this approximate equilibrium, enabled the UN to promote ceasefire declarations and kickstart the LPDF last autumn.

The man widely expected to become prime minister was the current Tripoli government’s interior minister, Fathi Bashagha, aged 58, also from Misrata. Last year, when Turkey’s military intervention began looking like a game changer, a self-confident Bashagha embraced the Muslim Brotherhood’s idea of reaching out to a preeminent member of the opposite camp, whose main turf is Cyrenaica, the eastern half of Libya.

Bashagha partnered with Aguilah Saleh Issa, the chairman of the country’s eastern-based Parliament. Although the Egyptian-backed Saleh has never diverged in a fundamental manner from Haftar, he has often been a convenient civilian alternative to the stubborn Emirati-backed commander for actors outside Cyrenaica.

The pursuit of an entente with Saleh traces back to the spring of 2018, when the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated political party’s Khaled al-Meshri, upon acceding to the helm of the High Council of State in Tripoli, began conversing with his counterpart in the eastern parliament. The bet, revived amid Haftar’s defeat last year, was that a conciliatory stance by Bashagha, Meshri’s tactical ally, would give the interior minister an opportunity to rise to a higher office thanks to a UN peace process.

Things didn’t pan out, however. The list featuring Bashagha as prime minister and Saleh as president lost to the roster featuring Dbeibah and his running mates. In lieu of a list dominated by familiar faces, including Bashagha, known for his anti-corruption rhetoric, a combination of relatively obscure names prevailed. A brief look at their past itineraries helps avoid oversimplifications.

PROSPEROUS TIMES

Among the 74 delegates who voted earlier this month in Geneva on behalf of Libya’s public at large was Ali Ibrahim Dbeibah, aged 75, one of Libya’s richest citizens. Because he is a strategic backer of his first cousin and brother-in-law Abd al-Hamid, Ali matters.

Libyans who frequented Ali back then say that he acquired his immense wealth in the last decade of Muammar Gaddafi’s era thanks to his privileges as a pre-2011 regime official. A geography teacher by trade, he was mayor of Misrata in the 1970s. Over the years, his efficacy as a shrewd administrator earned him a special proximity to the then-Libyan autocrat.

The latter, in 1989, made him the head of the Organisation for Development of Administrative Centres (ODAC), a state-owned entity overseeing infrastructure development across the North African country. Normalisation of Libya’s relations with the United States and Britain in 2003 allowed for a gradual removal of international sanctions, which coincided with a boom in oil prices. The result was exceptional prosperity.

GADDAFI’S CONFIDANT

Gaddafi’s dictatorship spent tens of billions in construction projects, the overwhelming majority of which was awarded to Chinese and Turkish companies. The Libyan leader let Ali Dbeibah play a central role in the distribution and supervision of these contracts through ODAC. His responsibilities may have included overseeing the kickbacks and other under-the-radar schemes associated with them, although no hard proof exists.

By 2006, Ali’s status as Gaddafi’s confidant enabled his cousin and close associate Abd al-Hamid—a civil engineer who studied in Canada—to accede to the head of the Libyan Investment and Development Holding Company (LIDC), yet another real-estate conduit through which flowed billions of public dollars.

In those times of plenty that preceded the popular revolt against Gaddafi, the Dbeibahs also built a business connection with an architect by the name of Nadia Rifaat, married to another architect from Tripoli: Fayez al-Serraj, the current UN-recognized president and prime minister of Libya.

Nadia Rifaat, being a close relative of Gaddafi’s first wife, held senior responsibilities at the Tripoli governorate’s Projects Office in the 2000s. In that capacity, she commissioned much construction work from the Dbeibahs. The Serraj-Dbeibah connection illustrates the resilience of some of Libya’s pre-2011 elites through years of turmoil.

SWITCHING SIDES

During the same busy decade, Muammar Gaddafi, in a bid to present his son Saif al-Islam as a potential successor, let him project the image of a modern and tolerant reformer. In 2004, the regime enabled Saif to launch the sprawling endeavour called “Libya al-Ghad” (“Tomorrow’s Libya”). The program’s declared goal was to liberalise the country on three fronts: economic, social, and political.

The economic side of al-Ghad—particularly when it came to development and public investment—leaned on ODAC and LIDC. The political facet of “al-Ghad” involved a thaw with the Muslim Brotherhood, a process in which a Doha-based political Islamist from Benghazi by the name of Ali al-Sallabi played a central role. Qatar has harboured and propped up Sallabi since 1999; he now spends part of his time in Istanbul. Saif al-Islam’s Libya al-Ghad is how the Dbeibahs became acquainted with Sallabi and other Muslim brothers.

When the February 2011 uprisings erupted, Ali Dbeibah was abroad and hesitated for a few weeks as to which side to join. Owing to its substantial economic interests in Libya, Ankara’s first instinct was to oppose the intervention that Washington, Doha, Paris, and London were advocating. Abd al-Hamid Dbeibah, who was in Libya, offered to act as a mediator between Tripoli and Ankara.

The proclaimed thinking was to incentivise the Turks into sticking with Gaddafi by accelerating payments on existing contracts. But American insistence helped convince Ankara to join the NATO operation—and the Dbeibahs turned on their boss. They abruptly dropped the promises they made to Gaddafi as part of the negotiations with Turkey and, instead, injected large sums in Misrata’s armed insurgency.

During a long, harrowing siege at the hands of loyalist forces, the city received aid from Qatar in the form of weapons and humanitarian supplies shipped via the eastern city of Benghazi and coordinated by Sallabi. The Dbeibah family has preserved this friendship with both Sallabi and the Qatari state until today.

The connections above often elicit accusations that the Dbeibahs will go to great lengths to defend the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology. In reality, they are too rich and powerful to be at the service of some Islamist project whether transnational or domestic. The rapport with Turkey is key and undeniable but it doesn’t rule out arrangements with other centres of power. For instance, Abd al-Hamid, as a private businessman, has had close links with Russian counterparts, including through Ali’s dealings in Cyprus.

In February 2013, the Attorney General’s Office in Tripoli initiated an indictment process against Ali, but the effort petered out. In 2016, the Tripoli authorities accused Ali of using public money to purchase real estate in Scotland during the Gaddafi years. Separately, a Toronto-based newspaper alleged that some of Ali’s wealth sat in Canada.

Since 2014, the Dbeibah family, including Abd al-Hamid, has funded Misrati brigades in moments of crisis, such as the port city’s 2016 war against the extremist organisation Islamic State in Sirte.

Ali’s status as one of Misrata’s most influential men has often enabled him to shape aspects of Tripoli’s political and security landscape without occupying the front of the stage. But in 2017, when rival Libyan factions said they would hold UN-backed elections, the younger cousin Abd al-Hamid began traveling and marketing himself explicitly as a full-blown politician. But because of his image as a shadowy tycoon, his new aspiration was seldom taken seriously—until this month.

***

Jalel Harchaoui – Senior fellow researcher specialising in Libya within the Geneva-based Global network Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

_____________________

Laurent of Saint Perier

By getting closer to the regimes in place in the Sahel, like him close to Moscow, the Libyan marshal is playing on several tables. But he is above all seeking to consolidate his power in the face of the Western authorities and to position himself as an essential partner, including for Westerners.

The visit to Ouagadougou on July 9 by Saddam Haftar , the youngest of the six sons of the marshal who reigns over more than half of Libya , did not go unnoticed despite his air of discretion. The putative heir to his father’s domains has already been entrusted with diplomatic missions, just like his other brothers. But he has the upper hand in the military field, because he was promoted on May 15 to chief of staff of the land forces of his father’s self-proclaimed Libyan National Army.

The timing is not insignificant. The visit took place three days after the creation of the Confederation of Sahel States between the militarist regimes that seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. From Benghazi to Bamako, the officers in charge have no shortage of common ground, having seized power from civilian governments deemed to be under the influence and incapable of dealing with the wars that are setting the region ablaze, conflicts fueled by the fall of Gaddafi in late 2011.

Logical security cooperation

Politicians, journalists, activists… Anything that opposes their vision and methods is thrown into the catch-all of “terrorism” with the declared enemies of the military: the jihadists and radical Islamists. These, mobile, organized in networks, know how to play as much with the vast and hostile environment of the Sahel as with the border porosities increased by the political instability of the four States: the establishment of effective security cooperation seems logical, even essential. And Saddam Haftar, all-powerful in his father’s army, was indeed designated to go and conclude it with the AES.

“Haftar’s sons all serve his diplomacy, but Saddam is the top security official and he is in charge of the southern border area where multiple armed groups are trying to get involved. He was in charge of the Sudanese issue and had notably met with Chadian Idriss Déby before his death,” recalls Jalel Harchaoui, a political scientist specializing in Libya.

From Benghazi to Bamako, it is also a Russian diagonal that continues to assert itself faster, higher and stronger against its declared Western enemies: France, whose armies have been expelled from the zone, and the United States, which is in the process of packing its bags. The deep-water port of Tobruk, east of Benghazi, under Haftar’s control, thus becomes the Kremlin’s gateway to its African ambitions and to its Africa Corps, obeying the Ministry of Defense, which has supplanted the paramilitary group Wagner.

Russian Corridor

Easily accessible from the Black Sea, the port of Tobruk is a much more convenient hub than the landlocked Central African Republic, the first Russian target hit in 2018. Moscow has long been suspected of seeking to open a naval base in Tobruk as it did in Syria, in Tartus, and is now behaving as if the pact had been unofficially concluded, its warships following one another there at a steady pace. In April, several of them were filmed unloading thousands of tons of weapons without any concern for discretion.

“We wondered who this material was intended for,” says Professor Virginie Collombier, head of the Libya Platform at the LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. “A certain quantity probably remained in Libya, but a large part went down to be transported towards Burkina Faso, on the important Burkina-Niger-Mali road and on the other side towards Sudan. Russia has indeed an interest in using Libya as a platform and springboard towards the Sahel countries. And Saddam’s visit to Ouagadougou is probably also linked to this.” Is Haftar acting as Putin’s doorman?

In many ways, the diplomacy deployed by Khalifa Haftar is contradictory: in Sudan, he supports the forces of the dissident General Hemetti against those of General Burhan , the head of state supported by Egypt, a major supporter of Benghazi. He has welcomed French soldiers as well as Russian mercenaries from the ex-Wagner on his bases, and seeks to maintain good relations with Paris while giving himself to Moscow.

He has recently been getting closer to the Turks, who are sponsors of his rivals in Tripoli, but are attracted by the prospects of promising contracts for the reconstruction and development of the region. And this ardent defender – in words – of the Palestinian cause is even said to have sent the same Saddam son to Israel as a secret embassy in November 2021, according to serious Israeli media.

“In fact, he seeks as much to pose as an internationally accepted statesman as to serve his alliance with Russia and to position himself as the essential intermediary for the Sahel region with this message to Westerners: ‘You are forced to leave the Sahel and I, who fight like you against terrorism, I speak with these regimes. I have the ear of the Kremlin and I can assert your interests with these parties with whom you no longer communicate'”, analyzes Jalel Harchaoui. His position could thus be in line with the new African strategy that France intends to implement to remedy the loss of many of its positions, while anxiously watching the Chad of the new Déby, a box that has become essential to its African game, move dangerously closer to Moscow.

Initiatives that anger Cairo and Moscow

France “created an “Africa Command” entrusted, on June 26, to General Pascal Lanni. Its mission: to establish “security partnerships with countries that request it”, in order first to collect intelligence for the fight against terrorism, reported Le Canard enchaîné in its July 14 edition. Will France’s African reorientation make Haftar one of its trump cards in the northern half of the continent? Complex, the marshal’s balancing act, which extends his local geopolitics of opportunistic partnerships and which has so far succeeded for him, is not without risk, because by wanting to have everyone’s ear, one ends up becoming suspect in the eyes of all, as the case of little Qatar has shown.

And Haftar is upsetting Cairo, which sees this attitude as a lack of loyalty, as well as Moscow, which would like a more docile marshal : these capitals could be tempted to find a replacement for him. On the other side, his now strategic alliance with Putin has prompted his former supporters in the West, first and foremost France, to distance themselves from him since the reactivation of the Ukrainian conflict in 2022. But Haftar holds a trump card, convinced, probably rightly, that no one would be able to find a replacement for him on the current Libyan scene.

Saddam Haftar’s visit to Ouagadougou therefore aims as much to make the marshal the link between a security alliance from Moscow to Conakry, the essential intermediary in the region for international powers that have interests there, as to build the legitimacy of his power with putschist heads of state, in search of the same international legitimacy, and by projecting his influence regionally.

“Since 2011, Libya has lost the external influence it had under Gaddafi. Many of my Libyan interlocutors are upset about this and its actors have lost the ability to understand and interact with their regional environment, in North Africa and beyond on the continent, which is a big gap. However, with this episode, it is the first time that we see a regional diplomatic projection of this order,” analyzes Virginie Collombier.

Saddam for security, Belkacem for the economy

Certainly, Libyan leaders, from both the East and the West, are increasing their international visits and receiving streams of diplomats. But the calculation is internal, with the aim of ensuring political legitimacy, economic partnerships and the continued support of their foreign sponsors, Egypt, Russia and the Emirates on the Benghazi side, Turkey and to a lesser extent Algeria and Qatar on the Tripoli side.

And the researcher concludes: “The capture of this empty box is a move in Haftar’s overall strategy , which aims to ensure control of a certain number of essential levers. Thus, having had his hand on the security lever for a long time, he has made his army the central pillar of the economy on the Egyptian model. The clandestine economy is also in his power and he is even involved in humanitarian work, his son Belkacem having been placed at the head of the fund for development and reconstruction after the catastrophic flooding of Derna in September 2023, with enormous economic stakes behind it. In a context where everyone expects to see the 80-year-old marshal, who suffered a stroke in 2018, disappear overnight, and where no one can know what will happen the next day, the father and his sons are trying to lock up as much as possible the various cogs essential to the control of the parts of the country in their power.”

***

Laurent de Saint-Périer is a journalist specializing in the Maghreb/Middle East, covering Syria, Egypt and Iran in particular. He is also a specialist in Gabon.

_______________

Senussi Bsaikri

Senior officers from the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) have arrived in Libya and met with political, military and security leaders in the West and East of the country. This is not the first visit by AFRICOM officers, but perhaps the sixth in the past three years, which reflects a special US interest in Libya. The Americans attributed it to terrorist threats, infiltrated borders and the need to form a joint military or security force between the divided West and East controlling factions. However, there is a new threat posed by Russia’s progress in strengthening its presence in Libya and the Sahel countries.

This was clear in AFRICOM’s statements and reports and was reflected in the escalation in the American rhetoric towards the Russian presence in the North African country, considering it to be undermining its security and stability, as well as the security and stability of the entire region.

Press reports quoted AFRICOM commander General Michael Langley as saying that they are searching for new allies in the region after the recent departure of US forces from Niger, and that Libya is included in the search. While the authenticity of the statement is not certain, it may not be unlikely if the Libyan crisis lasts for a long time and the Russian presence there is strengthened. What does seem clear in terms of US policy at the moment is the reliance on political and diplomatic options and local forces as the means to contain Russian infiltration in Libya.

It is known that AFRICOM reduced its focus on the 5+5 security committee, which did not succeed in achieving any tangible progress on the security level. Instead, it has focused its attention on the powerful leaders and forces on the ground. In the east, there has been communication between AFRICOM and the sons of General Khalifa Haftar, who hold senior military and security positions. Their influence is growing in the areas under Haftar’s control in the east and south of Libya. The AFRICOM delegation also visited the 444th Brigade in the West of the country, considering it to be a military force that is distinguished from other armed groups in the western area by its discipline. Several sources spoke about the possibility that these forces could be the nucleus of the joint force that the US seeks to form to secure the borders, remove mercenaries and confront terrorist threats.

It is true that AFRICOM’s tasks and objectives focus on besieging extremist groups, but its interest has grown over the past five years with the Russian presence in Libya and the Sahel countries. In fact, the Americans have become concerned about the nature of the Russian movement across Africa, which is what Langley mentioned in his latest briefing to the US Congress, noting that Russia is taking aggressive steps across the continent in an attempt to control areas extending from the southern borders of NATO in Libya to resource-rich Central Africa, and that its pace is picking up to achieve this.

The attempt to deal with influential and organised leaders and forces in West and East Libya may not achieve the Americans’ goal of containing the Russian presence and movement in the region, as Moscow is an ally of the eastern Libyan forces and provides much more support to Haftar than the US does. Removing the Russian forces from the eastern, southern and central parts of the country will weaken Haftar militarily. Washington does not plan on being a competent alternative to Moscow for Haftar, so how can the forces of the East be a party to restricting the Russian presence, let alone undermining it?

On the other hand, the US presidential election is approaching, and Donald Trump has a good chance of winning, according to many opinion polls. Trump’s position and choices are known to be contrary to Joe Biden’s policy of confronting the Russians, and it is expected that US foreign policy with regard to Ukraine and Libya will change if Trump wins. This means that the moves by AFRICOM in Libya will decline and its plans related to the military and security arrangements in the country will falter.

We should remember that it was Trump who gave the green light to Haftar to attack the Libyan capital in 2019.

While it is true that the effective US institutions, including the State Department, the Department of Defence and the National Security and Intelligence institutions, had reservations about the White House’s position and there was a change regarding the war in Libya at that time, this does not mean that these institutions are able to push Trump to continue the policy of confronting Russia’s plans in Africa, which has been the case over the past four years. AFRICOM’s moves in Libya are interesting, but the hopes for their success may depend on the result of the US presidential election on 5 November.

__________________

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

Conclusions

The meteoric rise and abrupt fall of militant Islamist movements in Libya cannot be explained solely by tactical logics and even less by the power of ideological mobilisation. The search for protection, for example, could cause actors to either ally with jihadists or to distance themselves from them.

Certainly, it was important whether militant Islamists had access to resources or were denied them, whether they celebrated military victories or suffered defeats. But the fact that they were able to spread at all becomes comprehensible by their social embeddedness.

The fact that they were no longer seen as tactical allies at a later point in time was not only due to tactical calculations, but also to the fact that ties of solidarity dating back to 2011 had been shattered by traumatic experiences. The speed of both the expansion and decline of militant Islamist movements becomes easier to understand when mechanisms of demarcation and conformity are considered.

Actors searching for recognition and belonging had impulses that were triggered by key events and became self-reinforcing through the weight of conformism. And thus Libya’s militant Islamists were suddenly gone again.

For analytical purposes, this study has separated mechanisms that are often difficult to distinguish in reality. How is it possible to determine in individual cases whether someone puts on the “Islamists’ abaya” based on deliberate calculation or out of a desire to conform?

In any case, accounts of those involved and close observers suggest that both happened. It should also have become clear that tactical considerations, social relationships and the dialectic of demarcation and conformity interacted with each other. None of this is to say that ideology plays no role in militant Islamist mobilisation.

It undoubtedly does for the hard core and long-term militants. Ideology can contribute significantly to the longevity and resilience of social movements or rebel groups – regardless of whether they espouse Islamist or other ideas.

Although this study cannot conclusively explain why it did not do so in this case, a hypothesis does emerge from the approach chosen here: followers who join a group for tactical reasons, social solidarity or conformism can internalise its ideology.

However, this requires, among other things, time – in other words, the lines of conflict and balance of power that condition militant Islamist mobilisation must retain a modicum of constancy over a certain period of time.

If a conflict reaches a dramatic turning point after a short period of time, thereby fundamentally changing the positions and calculations of its actors, this can interrupt and reverse processes of ideological internalisation.

Followers who adopted ideological positions due to conformism or opportunism can easily change them again under such circumstances. This, in any case, is what occurred in Libya.

Nor does it follow that the decline of militant Islamists in Libya will be permanent. On the contrary, the analysis here would suggest that it is certainly reversible. On the one hand, there is still a hard core of long-standing Islamist – but not jihadist – activists and ideologues who are closely networked with each other, such as the Mufti and the former LIFG leadership.

They are waiting for political conditions to shift in their favour.140 On the other hand, hundreds, perhaps thousands of former members of Ansar al-Sharia and IS are being held in Libyan prisons under the most appalling conditions – and the long-term consequences of this are unpredictable. Both the Libyan and other cases prove that prisons can offer the space and place for long-term radicalisation.

Above all, however, the fate of militant Islamists in Libya shows that critical junctures can have unpredictable consequences by suddenly revolutionising generally accepted assumptions about what political stance is socially acceptable.

The war in the Gaza Strip, which began in October 2023, is the most recent example of Even if it is not ultimately a key event in Libya, it has suddenly changed the way many Libyans view Hamas: “Today, every Libyan will tell you that they hope Hamas will win. But just three months ago, Hamas was still the evil Muslim Brotherhood.”

While this study problematizes common assumptions about the drivers of militant Islamist mobilisation, it does not attempt to replace them with a supposedly more plausible model. Fashion trends are notoriously difficult to predict.

To be more precise: Non-linear developments driven by the adaptation of many to the sudden repositioning of a few actors are largely unpredictable. This realisation does not make it any easier to develop recommendations on how to deal with militant Islamists. Three conclusions, which may also be relevant for other cases, nevertheless emerge from the present analysis.

Firstly, the Libyan case illustrates that extreme caution is required with regard to labels such as “Islamists” and “jihadists” – not to mention “terrorists”. This applies in particular to contexts in which dense social networks play just as big a role in militant mobilisation as ideological proximity.

Maintaining close relationships with militant Islamists in such circumstances does not mean being one yourself. This is all the truer in societies whose austere values are sometimes difficult for outsiders to distinguish from explicitly militant ideologies. In retrospect, it becomes clear that most international coverage of militant Islamists in Libya during the period analysed here painted too crude a picture.

As a result, individuals and groups often ended up being put into pigeonholes to which they did not belong on closer inspection.

Secondly, this study shows that even those who not only make pacts with jihadist groups, but also join them, are by no means all ideologically convinced Islamists. This is not a surprising finding in itself, but merely confirms what studies have already established in many other contexts. However, the Libyan case shows that the motives for militant Islamist mobilisation can be even more diverse than previously assumed.

In addition to tactical, even opportunistic actions and reactions to grievances such as arbitrary repression, these include close social ties and the pursuit of social recognition and belonging. Thirdly and finally, these conclusions do not only apply to militant Islamists. Rather, they indicate that militant Islamists follow the same logics of action as other armed actors.

Analyses of armed groups have so far paid surprisingly little attention to the search for social recognition as a motivating factor – compared to supposedly rational interests such as power, selfenrichment or survival. Social demarcation and conformism are mechanisms at work in all group formation processes. They also matter in overall societal shifts through which political ideals and cleavages gain or lose resonance. They should be given greater consideration in order to better understand the diverse motivations behind militant mobilisation – whether Islamist or not.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Laurent of Saint Perier

By announcing that he was resigning from his position as United Nations special envoy to Libya – like all his predecessors before him – former Senegalese minister Abdoulaye Bathily denounced the political leaders who, since 2011, have been obstructing any attempt to end the crisis. Who are these five leaders?

“We cannot allow the aspirations of the 2.8 million registered Libyan voters to be overshadowed by the narrow interests of a few,” lamented Abdoulaye Bathily , explaining to the United Nations Security Council on April 16, 2024, why he was resigning after a year and a half as special envoy to Libya . And he bluntly revealed the identities of the five people concerned: Mohamed Takala, President of the High Council of State; Abdelhamid Dbeibah , Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity; Aguila Saleh , Speaker of the House of Representatives; General Khalifa Haftar , Commander of the Libyan National Army; and Mohammed el-Menfi , President of the Presidential Council.

“Bathily was mainly trying to clear himself of having failed in his objective of compromising the status quo so that elections could be held,” said Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya specialist at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “Even in Sweden, you would have a hard time finding five people who could reach a consensus on such a subject. In Libya, it was utopian; no one is prepared to implement a change that would mean their own change of position.”

Abdoulaye Bathily’s predecessor, Ghassan Salamé , had drawn the pragmatic conclusion that with the ceasefire holding and the economy restarting, the status quo was the least bad solution. “If the elections lead Libyans to divide again, we don’t need them,” he told Jeune Afrique  in December 2023.

The partition of the country between the lords of the crisis, from the warlike split that it was in 2014 to the failure of Haftar’s attack on Tripoli in 2019-2020, has thus become a knowing division of the Libyan cheese. Well established, the figures who hold the country today could dictate its destiny according to their bargaining for a long time to come.

While the three names of Haftar, Saleh and Dbeibah regularly appear in the international press, those of el-Menfi and Takala rarely appear. Who are these “five main Libyan stakeholders” who have aroused the bitterness of the Senegalese historian? What is their real power, or power to cause harm?

Mohammed el-Menfi

“If I had to choose five decisive parties in the Libyan conflict, I would have cited Seif el-Islam Gaddafi rather than Menfi. But Bathily had set himself the goal of bringing together these five and, having never succeeded, it is them that he denounces, including the insipid Menfi,” immediately responds Virginie Collombier, professor at the Roman University Luis Guido Carli and founder of the think tank Libya Initiative in 2015. However, as president of the Presidential Council, which theoretically holds executive power, Menfi embodies the Libyan head of state in the eyes of the international community .

Born in 1976, he is the youngest of the quintet and, although originally from Tobruk in the east, he has always been loyal to the Tripoli authorities. His joint election with that of Dbeibah as prime minister, by 74 Libyan representatives meeting in 2021 in Geneva under the auspices of the UN, was a sign of détente between Tripoli, where the Presidential Council is based, and Benghazi, Haftar’s capital in the east.

An engineer by training, ambassador to Athens in 2018, this affable man has made national reconciliation his hobbyhorse. Without much result. “His inoffensive side allowed him to speak with Haftar following the Geneva process and his speech is compatible with Western diplomacy, but he has no military means, unlike Haftar and Dbeibah. He is a bit of a papier-mâché character, a smooth man who understood that if a merged East-West cabinet were to be set up, no one would pressure him to leave his place as representative of the East,” explains Jalel Harchaoui.

Mohamed Takala

Mohammed Takala, 58, was elected president of the High Council of State in August 2023. This 145-member legislative assembly was created in Tripoli in 2016 as an upper house to match the House of Representatives elected in Tripoli in 2014, but installed the same year in Tobruk, in the east, fleeing the resumption of fighting. “Like Menfi, he has an institutional position that places him above the fray, but he does not have control over much,” says Virginie Collombier. A doctor in computer science from the University of Budapest, Mohammed Takala has been involved in politics since the revolution, and was elected deputy in the first post-Gaddafi legislative elections in 2012.

Winner by a few votes against the outgoing president Khaled el-Mechri, he won the post with the help of Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah, of whom Mechri had become an enemy. “He is a worker,” describes Jalel Harchaoui, “surrounded by a good team and who has presence and intelligence. He does not seek controversy because he mainly wants to be re-elected, but his post is put back into play every twelve to fourteen months. He must therefore use wooden language and he makes statements for better representation of minorities, etc., however, when digging deeper, we quickly realize that for him, certainly the status quo is not viable, but it must not budge.”

Aguila Saleh

In the face of the precedent, Aguila Saleh grips the eastern perch of the House of Representatives much more firmly. Elected as a deputy in 2012, the octogenarian has been presiding over the assembly that has taken refuge in Tobruk since 2014. But the renewal of the latter, scheduled for 2018 then postponed to 2021, ultimately never took place due to the lack of agreement on the electoral law. A paralysis that allows the one on whom the said law largely depends – Saleh himself – to remain in his comfortable seat.

A long career in the Libyan judiciary has equipped him to legally secure his position and the international community has no other solution than to recognize this prolonged interim. Master of the laws and unbeatable kingmaker – except, ultimately, by himself – he does not need a militia to allow himself to, sometimes, stand up to the lord of the East, Khalifa Haftar, his accomplice whom he made marshal in 2016 through the voice of his Parliament.

Favorite in the elections held in Geneva in 2021, where he was a candidate for the presidency of the Council with the then Minister of the Interior, Fathi Bachagha , as a candidate for the prime minister’s office, he was snatched away by five votes (out of 75) by the Menfi-Dbeibah couple, then accused of having bought voters.

Harchaoui explains: “He sets as a condition for holding elections their supervision by a new technical government: a Trojan horse policy to drive out his enemy Dbeibah who is entirely in the interests of the Egyptians hostile to the latter. Because if Takala is the voice of the Turks, the supporters of the West to whom he is close without being a client, Saleh is that of the Egyptians, who support their neighbors to the East. And Cairo, after opening the door to Dbeibah, lost all confidence in him after receiving many promises of magnificent contracts, always without follow-up.”

Abdelhamid Dbeibah

His term ended on December 25, 2021, but he clings to his position as firmly as his rival Saleh, putting forward the argument that “the government will continue to exercise its functions until the elections,” which no one wants and which everyone is obstructing. Thus Saleh makes the organization of the elections conditional on Dbeibah’s departure, while the latter makes his departure dependent on the outcome of the elections. And the impossible resolution of this contradictory equation allows each to remain in their own backyard.

Born in 1959 into a wealthy merchant family in Misrata, Abdelhamid Dbeibah boasted a master’s degree in civil engineering obtained from the University of Toronto in 1992, but the institution declared, after investigation, that it had found no trace of his passage. However, it was in the construction industry that he made his fortune under Gaddafi, leader or partner of large state structures in the sector. Having entered politics stealthily in 2011 and reached the top in a decade, he does not bother with scruples and feeds on all the legal and illicit savings to maintain an army composed of motley mercenary militias.

For Jalel Harchaoui, “he manages to maintain a form of security by managing an unstable coalition of militias, despite sporadic bloody clashes. The Turks, the Italians, the Americans see no replacements and he knows that there is no alternative to himself.” The only major shadow over the magnate’s power and business: his powerful rivals in the East, who relentlessly announce his downfall.

But behind the official farce, the time has come for conviviality and sharing between Marshal Haftar and Prime Minister Dbeibah, as Virginie Collombier recalls: “With the good offices of the Emirates, they agreed in 2022 to change the head of the national oil company [NOC] and place someone close to Haftar there. The ability of these two actors to agree on such a point illustrates this priority given to the status quo.” The agreement made Aguila Saleh shudder, who then sought to get closer to the Turks, yesterday’s enemies but powerful sponsors of Dbeibah.

Khalifa Haftar

With his colorful and sparklingly decorated uniforms, his martial poses and speeches, but also his major military operations that turned into routs, he evokes a lot of the former fallen regime of Colonel Gaddafi, his senior by a year, with whom he had shared everything from the Benghazi Military Academy to the break-up, when Haftar was taken prisoner by the Chadians in 1987.

Exfiltrated to the United States in 1990, he struggled in vain to overthrow Gaddafi until the revolution gave him his chance. A first return, as a fighter in the revolution, was cut short in 2011, when he only stayed a few months on Libyan soil. He returned in 2013 and, having refined his strategy, he managed to unite former army members, combatant groups and tribes from the East and launched his “Libyan National Army” in 2014 to restore order in the face of militia chaos. He failed in Tripoli, but succeeded in Benghazi, where he established his power, purging the armed Islamist groups and his least opponents from the East.

Today master of two-thirds of the country, the army chief marshal controls all areas of activity, from the media to organized crime, including humanitarian work, reconstruction and economic development, having placed his pawns everywhere and the best of them, his sons, on the most strategic squares. Because he is old and had a severe stroke in 2018, but of his sons Saddam, Khaled, Belkacem and Essedik, no one has yet managed to guess who he has chosen to succeed him… or even if he has chosen.

For Virginie Collombier, “the big question now is whether the Haftar clan can remain united and maintain its centrality: can the brothers come to an agreement? There are serious doubts about this, as well as about the ability of national and external actors to accept such a dynastic succession. Thus, Saddam, despite being the army chief of staff, has no military training. Could Gaddafi’s former officers agree to obediently obey his command ?”

***

Laurent de Saint-Périer is a journalist specializing in the Maghreb/Middle East, covering Syria, Egypt and Iran in particular. He is also a specialist in Gabon.

______________________

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

Rise and fall: conformism and demarcation

Another key to understanding the dynamics since 2011 is provided by social mechanisms of demarcation and conformism, of distinction and adaptation. The driving force behind these mechanisms is an individual’s search for social recognition and group affiliation.

For Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, distinction and emulation express social status or its aspiration; the dialectical relationship between both is the driver behind fashion and taste. Similar processes can be observed in the rise and decline of militant Islamist movements in Libya.

The driving force behind these mechanisms is an individual’s search for social recognition and group affiliation. . For Georg Simmel and Pierre Bourdieu, distinction and emulation express social status or its aspiration; the dialectical relationship between both is the driver behind fashion and taste.120 Similar processes can be observed in the rise and decline of militant Islamist movements in Libya.

As discussed above (page 20ff), Libya’s militant Islamist movements in the first few years after 2011 formed part of a societal mainstream that followed a politically revolutionary but socially conservative zeitgeist.

Initially, militant Islamists and jihadists did not stand out from the mass of revolutionaries either by appearance or discourse. The aesthetics of the revolutionaries – bearded, often in camouflage clothing – could hardly be distinguished from those of militant Islamists. Many militiamen adopted this aesthetic.

A former LIFG leader recalled: “Back then, even hashish-smoking militia leaders grew a beard and had themselves called Sheikh. We misinterpreted this phenomenon, because we had been isolated from Libyan society for so long; suddenly everyone seemed to share our beliefs.”

As discussed above, Libya’s militant Islamist movements in the first few years after 2011 formed part of a societal mainstream that followed a politically revolutionary but socially conservative zeitgeist. Initially, militant Islamists and jihadists did not stand out from the mass of revolutionaries either by appearance or discourse.

The aesthetics of the revolutionaries – bearded, often in camouflage clothing – could hardly be distinguished from those of militant Islamists. Many militiamen adopted this aesthetic.

A former LIFG leader recalled: “Back then, even hashish-smoking militia leaders grew a beard and had themselves called Sheikh. We misinterpreted this phenomenon, because we had been isolated from Libyan society for so long; suddenly everyone seemed to share our beliefs.”

A revolutionary from the Islamist spectrum took a similar view: “Take Ismail Sallabi or Wissam ben Hamid, for example. In 2012, Ismail wore the abaya [long robe] of the Islamists because it was popular back then. Today he offers you cigarettes when you meet him” (an observation that the author can confirm).

Along with aesthetic emulation came formulaic commitments to the ideals of the revolution and a widespread tendency to conceal or reinterpret one’s own role in the Gaddafi era to better suit with zeitgeist.

The fact that the aesthetics and habitus of the revolutionaries and Islamists found so many imitators was not least due to their status as victors and heroes. As one leader of the Rafallah Sahati Brigade said: “In October 2011, we came back from the front as heroes, as revolutionaries. When the killing spree began, people suddenly started calling us terrorists and militias. We were shocked – only a year before we had been noble revolutionaries!”

Youthful boasting and aspirations for heroism were driving forces behind the gradual separation of jihadist splinter groups.

Aspirations for heroism were also a driving force behind the gradual separation of jihadist splinter groups after the fall of the regime. For example, many young men from Darna went to Syria because “those who had fought against the Americans in Iraq or against Gaddafi in 2011 had come back as heroes. If you wanted to be a hero, you could join the jihad.”

A commander from Benghazi recalled a sixteen-yearold who came from western Libya to fight against Haftar: “Someone like him also went to Benghazi so he could later brag at home that he had fought there. Fortunately, he joined us and not some extremist group.”

According to a Rafallah Sahati veteran, the popularity of IS in Benghazi was also due (among other things) to adolescent boasting: “There was a lot of Hollywood involved with IS, it was all about action – ‘I did this, I did that’.

They were by no means all ideologues.” 126 However, ideology was also a means of distinguishing oneself as superior. Groups such as Ansar al-Sharia and later IS saw themselves as representatives of the only true doctrine; for them, followers of more moderate movements were apostates or infidels.

Characteristic of the emerging jihadist splinter groups was the age of their members, who were mainly teenagers and young adults. Leaders of the revolutionary brigades often emphasised that a generational gap separated them from the members of Ansar al-Sharia and IS: “There were only very young people in IS. None of the older revolutionaries joined it.”

In addition to youthful boasting and the pursuit of fame, other general youth phenomena were also recognisable, namely rebellion against parents and society as well as the search for identity, belonging and a higher purpose. Such dynamics have also been observed in other contexts, for example among young Salafists in Tunisia or socially marginalised teenagers in Europe who were attracted to a jihadist subculture, a “jihadi cool”.

What has gone largely unnoticed so far is how fast-moving such a subculture can be – just like other youth cultures. With the reversal around 2016, the aesthetics and habitus of militant Islamists quickly disappeared. Some who had worn the “abaya of the Islamists” in 2012 now wore the “abaya of the Madkhali Salafists,” whose movement experienced a surge.

Among the leaders of armed groups, beards became shorter or were shaved off completely; militia leaders such as Haitham al-Tajuri from Tripoli now wore designer clothes and embodied an ostentatious materialism that replaced Islamist revolutionary rhetoric. The militiamen’s new youth culture glorified quick riches through violence and crime.

Later, the leaders of armed groups donned uniforms to emphasise the formal and disciplined nature of their units. In late 2023, the author met with a sheikh and university professor who, as well-informed fellow citizens alleged, had helped recruit fighters for the jihad in Iraq before 2011.

He had led an armed group in 2011, some of whose members later joined Ansar al-Sharia and then IS in Sirte. But now he met the author in a suit and was clean-shaven, and he emphasised that he was a pure academic and had had nothing to do with armed groups since the fall of Gaddafi.

Libya is not the only case where militant Islamists appeared and disappeared again as if it was a fashion movement. In the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, which became notorious for its jihadist subculture, older citizens can still remember the approximate date when the young people of a particular neighbourhood “suddenly became ‘Islamists’ – it was in the summer of 1980…[They] began to regularly perform their five prayers a day, grow beards … [and] ostensibly hold up the black banners of jihad.” And in Tunisia, from where thousands of young men had joined jihadist groups in Libya and Syria after 2011, jihadism was already “out of fashion” by 2020.

Mechanisms of demarcation and emulation can help to understand both the rapid spread and the equally rapid decline of militant Islamist movements in Libya. The impetus came from key events such as the 2011 revolution and the fight against IS, but also from the shaping of public opinion by the media.

Processes of social realignment and the weight of conformism help to explain how quickly such impulses can cause societal trends to emerge and to disappear again. Or, to use the vocabulary of social movement theories: how discursive frames resonate at a certain point in time – and no longer do so only a little later.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Kawthar Zantour

Useful networking

Over time, Al-Kabir has shown himself capable of rapid repositioning, adept crisis management, pragmatism, and opportunism. A bureaucrat who knows his own limits, he has learnt to identify where power lies and align himself to it.

These skills helped him survive a totalitarian regime. He allied himself with the second most powerful man in the country, Abdessalam Jalloud, a former Libyan prime minister who went to school with Gaddafi and helped him oust the monarchy.

Jalloud fell out with Gaddafi and was placed under house arrest for several years before finally managing to leave Libya for Italy in 2011. Abdel-Razzaq Al-Awadi was also al-Kabir’s childhood friend from the Belkheir neighbourhood of central Tripoli. They both got a scholarship to study in the United States during Gaddafi’s rule.

Al-Kabir’s appointment as central bank governor in 2011 is attributed to Al-Awadi who, like al-Kabir, was also a member of the National Transitional Council. Networking has continued to help al-Kabir. Last year, the Association of African Central Banks elected him Chairman of the North African Central Banks Group, which covers Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania, and Sudan.

It also elected him Vice-President of the Association for 2024 and Chairman of the Board of Governors of African Central Banks for 2025.

Facing criticism

Al-Kabir is no stranger to barbs. His friendship with al-Awadi led to al-Kabir being seen as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathiser. More serious criticism came in 2016 from the (then) British Ambassador to Libya, Peter Millett.

The envoy told a UK parliamentary committee that the Central Bank of Libya was funding the country’s civil war by paying the salaries of militants. The bank vehemently denied this, and even Millett soon seemed to backtrack.

Al-Kabir’s critics accuse him of becoming too powerful, and of turning the central bank into a state within a state, using it to serve his own interests. His predecessor called al-Kabir’s central bank “a one-man show”.

Critics say that, during his tenure, Libya has lost billions, the dinar has depreciated and devalued, and Libyans have faced runaway inflation. Others make unsubstantiated claims that millions have been spent buying off militias.

Another criticism levelled at al-Kabir is that he has been more generous with help from the central bank for the spending plans of subservient governments.

A Libyan figure close to the country’s UN special envoy (who recently resigned) told Al Majalla “what al-Kabir is doing isn’t the best… he is a controversial figure and doesn’t enjoy the trust of all, but replacing him might open the door to the unknown amid new developments in the country.”

Working in insecurity

Those “new developments” include fears about the presence of heavily armed Russian fighters. This led to calls in Washington to counter Moscow’s growing influence in Libya.

The respected French newspaper Le Monde reported that sums of around $127mn have been earmarked, a sign that al-Kabir may be having an influence in the US capital.

He earned his MBA at Hartford in Connecticut, then spent time working in Tunisia, and lived in Britain for a period, before returning to Libya. A former Tunisian official who knows him well paints a familiar picture of his manner.  

“He’s an introverted and cold personality, skilful in communication. He doesn’t chameleonise but can deal calmly with all situations and fluctuations, managing risks and crises. He is purely a banker.”

When directly confronted, al-Kabir responds calmly and with logic, talking through the legal and procedural situation. Libya’s central bank faces challenges that other central banks do not, the country’s many well-armed militias being one.

Amidst the very real threat of violence, he exhibits composure and courage. More than 50 bank officials have been kidnapped in recent years and al-Kabir has had a $25mn price tag put on his head.

Le Monde reported that the danger had grown sufficient enough for him to flee to Turkey in October 2023 fearing his safety, after a violent clash with the prime minister’s adviser and nephew, Ibrahim Dbeibeh.

Gone, the revolutionary

For all his quiet manner, al-Kabir is no stranger to violence. When the Gaddafi regime was on the wane, he was no backseat passenger.

Having resigned, he began reporting on events first-hand, as if he were a war correspondent, tracking the number of rebels among soldiers and officials, as well as the areas falling under their control. He was even referred to as a ‘military analyst’.

This helped show that he was part of the action, which in turn helped him work with the National Transitional Council. Still, his nomination to run the central bank was a surprise. Once in the job, he was quick to leave the revolutionary behind.

Instead, he rose above the day-to-day political clashes, embraced the neutrality required of bureaucracy and a central bank, and burnished its credentials as one of Libya’s most important sovereign institution.

But is he really objective? “Al-Kabir says he’s neutral and has no political ties, but he’s probably the only politician in Libya,” one diplomatic source told Al Majalla.

Politically adept to the point of being Machiavellian, for al-Kabir, the end always justifies the means. The trouble is, most dictators throughout history have thought the same.

_________________

Kawthar Zantour

No stranger to rivalries, the governor of the Central Bank of Libya is technocrat who has had to develop his political wiles, most recently clashing with the prime minister. Is this the next Gaddafi?

When he is in the country, Sadiq al-Kabir works in an office in an historic building on Tripoli’s seafront, but he is just as likely to be working from hotel suites in Tunisia, Malta, or Turkey.

Custodian of Libya’s finances, al-Kabir does not need familiar surroundings to do his job. He needs SWIFT codes (to make international transfers), a network of regional alliances (to provide support), and a knack for networking and striking deals.

Dressed elegantly in Italian suits, al-Kabir exudes a quiet calm with an easy smile, but he is cautious in the information he offers, and gives little away when questioned.

Al-Kabir has long shown that he has what it takes, having run Libya’s finances for 13 years, building support and interest in global financial circles. After all, this benighted North African country still has much to offer.

Doing well at his job for this length of time has permanently raised the governor’s profile. By contrast, most central bankers become known to the wider public only in times of financial crisis.

Ultimate survivor

During al-Kabir’s tenure, Libya has seen two civil wars and near constant political turmoil. The only institution to function throughout has been the central bank. Indeed, he appears immoveable.

Since he was appointed in 2011, six prime ministers have come and gone. Most have tried to remove him, but to no avail. This has slowly led to a shift in power, not least because high oil prices have kept billions of dollars flowing into the treasury, and he holds the keys.

Al-Kabir’s decisions cover a growing area of influence, from the traditional finance remit of a central bank to economic and investment issues, development areas, and, increasingly, diplomatic and security fields. He even has a say on military matters.

The governor’s most recent spat—with Libya’s internationally recognised prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh—is merely the latest round of the now well-known struggle to control Libya’s significant financial resources.

In March, al-Kabir effectively devalued the dinar currency and asked parliament’s speaker to approve a more unified government. This was interpreted as a direct challenge to Dbeibeh in Tripoli, with whom he is at odds.

Al-Kabir has taken a particular dislike to off-the-books spending by the Government of National Unity (GNU), which is recognised internationally but not by Khalifa Haftar’s House of Representatives parliament in Libya’s east.

Around 2.4 million Libyans (out of a total population of 7 million) are on the public payroll, so when Dbeibeh announced public sector pay rises recently, al-Kabir was quick to squash this. It is al-Kabir, ultimately who pay their wages.

Guarding the vault

Foreign exchange reserves were valued at around $82bn at the end of 2022. Libya also has one of Africa’s high gold reserves, estimated at around 140 tonnes. Al-Kabir has built up the national pot, not reduced it, but corruption remains a big problem.

Last month, the heads of the customs authority and of Misrata Airport were arrested along with others for trying to smuggle 26 tonnes of gold out of the country. The bullion, which was recovered, is valued at around $2bn.

Accessing the central bank’s reserves has been politicians’ goal since the 2011 fall of Muammar Qaddafi, who ruled Libya for 42 years, having led a military coup to depose the country’s monarchy and proclaim the state as a republic.

Al-Kabir was a member of Gaddafi’s regime but turned against it early in the revolution. This gave him legitimacy after it fell.

Today, his role is that of banker, statesman, guardian of the nation’s gold and currency reserves, and an ally of the United States, with internationally sound credentials. If he keeps seeing off rivals, analysts wonder whether he may be a new Gaddafi.

Public spending

The current dispute with Dbeibeh over public spending broke out last year, interrupting a period of relative calm in Libya’s rambunctious post-Gaddafi politics.

Al-Kabir said there was an agreement between him and the government that the central bank would help public spending reach $87bn during Dbeibeh’s three-year tenure. Later, he felt forced to criticise “parallel spending from unknown sources”.

Libya’s recent history suggests the governor is more likely to emerge the winner in any fight with the government, and al-Kabir has some significant global backing, including from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In May, the IMF signalled its support for him and his policies. It noted an expansion in public spending last year due to wage rises and bigger fuel subsidies, but said foreign reserves remained “comfortably significant”.

The central bank tried to limit the use of foreign currency by tightening controls on letters of credit, reducing available limits for personal foreign currency purchases, and imposing a temporary 27% tax on the official exchange rate of foreign currencies.

In Libya, al-Kabir divides opinion. Some see him as a statesman, others see him as a thief. He is described as the last of the revolutionaries and a political kingmaker.

A senior banker who worked with him for years told Al Majalla that al-Kabir was “a competent banker”, adding that “keeping him at the central bank for years might be the best for Libya”.

They continued that “despite the criticisms, mistakes, and deviations, in my opinion, looking objectively, considering the available resources and the country’s situation, al-Kabir has proven highly skilled in preserving Libya’s reserves and wealth.”

With help from friends

Al-Kabir, whose rise owes something to luck, grew up in the Belkheir neighbourhood of central Tripoli, just metres away from the central bank building.

He built important relationships with central figures who helped shape his destiny, including Muhammad Al-Bukhari, a finance minister under Gaddafi, and Abdel-Razzaq Al-Awadi, a businessman and former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1988, al-Bukhari entered al-Kabir into Libya’s elite, appointing him chairman of Umma Bank (the largest state-owned bank) when al-Kabir was in his early 30s.

Nepotism gave him a golden start, but he soon had a major setback, when it became clear that al-Kabir was among the senior figures to have signed off loans and real estate deals that went sour, leading to the bank’s collapse.

He was sentenced to three years in prison in the early 1990s, but served three months before going to Tunisia, where he took up a position at a bank in which Libya was a major shareholder.

Al-Kabir’s adversaries brought this up when he was appointed head of Libya’s central bank. His backers say that, during that period, there was simply no realistic alternative but to follow Gadaffi’s orders.

_______________

Despite no longer being the focus of media attention, Libya continues to be a source of instability in regional and international dynamics. In March, under UN direction,  Libya’s key institutional leaders reached a compromise on organising presidential and parliamentary elections. However, the ongoing stalemate appears insurmountable, as these leaders seem more concerned with preserving their power than with setting a date for these crucial elections.

This political impasse also affects the economy of the country, particularly the energy sector. The division of the country into two governments hampers the activities of the National Oil Corporation (NOC), which struggles to reach its production targets. Moreover, the presence of external interferences continues to fuel the political impasse, turning Libya into a theatre of international rivalry.

While Russia’s presence in Libya is well established, the US and its allies are striving to strengthen their role to counterbalance Moscow’s influence. In this context, last week’s visit by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to Libya reinforced Italy’s stance in the country, aiming to play a more significant role in the stabilization process.

For Italy – as for other European countries – the necessity to limit migration flows remains the key issue in the relationship with Libya. While migration has allowed Libya to be re-integrated into regional and international dynamics, it has also exacerbated the country’s fragmentation, adding another layer to the already numerous sources of Libya’s instability.

Experts from the ISPI network discuss the current situation in Libya.

***

The deadlock of Libya’s political process: the role of external interference

“Unfortunately, Libya has been subject to more or less constant external interference since 2011, when the first civil war broke out. Since then, numerous nations have violated the country’s sovereignty, also facilitated by a local political class totally unable to curb these intrusions and to fulfill the fundamental interests of its citizens. The result is that the natural process for the selection of the Libyan political class has not happened: on the contrary, many of Libya’s actors have anchored themselves to the privileges they gained precisely because of foreign intervention, barricading themselves behind the utopia of elections for which it is clear there are no preconditions.”

Federica Saini Fasanotti, Senior Associate Research Fellow, ISPI

***

Migration: another piece of Libyan instability’s puzzle

“Libya’s role as a major migratory thoroughfare to Europe has changed the way Europeans interact with it and provided more avenues for engagement with regional actors. Leading Europeans, like Italy, are sacrificing long-term comprehensive policies to manage progressive change in Libya to try and cement externalisation deals that are decreasingly effective. Meanwhile, antagonistic powers like Russia, help the Haftars traffic migrants across the Mediterranean due to its destabilising effects on European politics. At this point, all North African states have migration deals with Europe, and they cooperate to maximize their leverage. Now that Niger has once again begun facilitating migrant flows, this has also opened up a new avenue of relations between Niamey’s new government, its counterpart in Tripoli, and Libya’s people smuggling militias. As such, the migration phenomenon in its current guise is helping Libya’s destabilization and fragmentation.”

Tarek Megerisi, Senior Policy Fellow, ECFR

***

Meloni in Libya: more than just migration

“The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni went to Tripoli on this last occasion to reinforce Italian support for Tripoli’s government but also, rumours say, to emphasize a point that the US Administration holds high in its list of things to take care of soon that is, the large expansion of Russia’s presence in Libya. The same content Meloni went to refer to Haftar in Benghazi. Does this mean that Italy has become the messenger of the US? On the contrary, this trust given by the Americans to Meloni empowers the Italian PM to exercise a wider role not only in the issues of direct interest of Italy such as migration and criminality, but also to extend its efforts towards defining a plan and action for the stabilization of the whole of Libya. And this would be a story to follow closely.”

Karim Mezran, Director of North Africa Initiative, Senior Research Fellow, Atlantic Council

***

The hindered potential of Libya oil industry: the other side of political divisions

“Libya’s division impacts the oil industry’s present and future. The sector’s health is often influenced by politics with Khalifa Haftar using oil production as leverage to topple his rival, Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibeh. The most recent blockade ended in 2022, but only after the US pressured Haftar’s backers in the UAE who brokered a deal that now distributes Libya’s oil wealth between the Haftar and Dbeibeh families, dangerously politicising oil production and its future contingent on their divided political presence and unified greed. Whilst the National Oil Corporation underwent unification, having two governments makes it hard for the NOC to secure funds for necessary investment since both sides spend recklessly. As a result, the NOC will struggle to reach its target of producing 2 million barrels by 2025. The persistent division, and absence of a unified legislature and executive impedes Libya’s oil industry growth and critically its potential.”

Anas El-Gomati, Director General, Sadeq Institute

***

Russia’s presence is growing stronger in the East 

“Since Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s military defeat near Tripoli in mid-2020, Russia has maintained a clandestine armed presence in Eastern and Southern Libya. Because the Haftar family considers their presence indispensable to survival, it has given the Russians significant monetary and material benefits. In addition to Wagner’s replacement with other semi-private entities like Redut in 2023, the Russian State has become officially involved in Libya, drastically increasing its military presence, armament, and diplomatic activism. Unlike four years ago, when Libyan and Turkish forces were willing to hurt Russians, no such opposition exists now. Conversely, the Russian Armed Forces – busy solidifying their military footprint in Haftar-held territories – are not preparing a war of territorial conquest. There is no sign of any intention to attack Tripoli or Misrata in the foreseeable future. But the Russian Armed Forces’ apparatus in Eastern and Southern Libya has become vastly more powerful than a few months ago.”

Jalel Harchaoui, Associate Fellow, RUSI

***

General elections: yes, but when?

“The odds of Libya holding elections over the coming year are dim. Although months ago the House of Representatives formally approved laws that are supposed to govern presidential and parliamentary ballot, and the High National Electoral Commission stated it is ready to implement them, disagreements persist between Libya’s rival factions on the sequencing of elections and candidacy requirements.  Another thorny issue is whether a new interim government should be appointed before the election time clock starts ticking, as the laws envision, or not. It is difficult to envision Libya’s rival political factions resolving these disagreements any time soon, assuming they ever genuinely wanted to. Unfortunately, it looks like those currently in power favour keeping the country divided into two rival governments rather than hedging their bets on high-stake elections that could remove them from power.”
Claudia Gazzini, Senior Analyst, International Crisis Group

_____________________

Wolfram Lacher

It’s Not about Deniability

This self-isolation from Libyan society is not – or at least no longer – about deniability. Turkey has never made a secret about its troop deployment. Russia did (implausibly) deny that it had forces in Libya for a long time. But since the rebellion and death of the founder of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russia has slowly moved towards acknowledging its presence as the Russian defence ministry takes over Wagner’s previous role.

The Russian ambassador in Tripoli has publicly stated in several interviews in 2024 that Russian “elements”, rather than forces, are cooperating with Haftar’s forces in eastern Libya. The much noted delivery of weapons by Russian vessels via the port of Tobruk in April 2024, and the visit to Tobruk by several Russian warships in June, both reinforced the message that the Russian presence was becoming more overt and official.

Instead, the modus operandi of Turkey and Russia in Libya offers clues to the purpose of their presence. In Mali and the Central African Republic, Wagner pursued objectives that required far greater interaction with the population: It conducted brutal counterinsurgency campaigns that resulted in many civilian victims, but also business ventures and public relations campaigns that heroized Russians as champions of national sovereignty against French neocolonialism.

In Libya, by contrast, the Turkish and Russian presence has involved very few armed interventions against local actors since the end of the Tripoli war. Nor have they used their deployments to take control of resource extraction – although the presence itself offers opportunities for profit, such as through the exploitation of Syrian fighters.

Rather, the point of having a presence in Libya seems to be to keep it. For Turkey, a Libyan commander with close ties to Turkish officers argued that the purpose of the Syrians’ presence is to secure Turkey’s foothold. One day, it may be possible to convert that military muscle into political influence and economic profit in ways that have broadly been elusive for both states thus far. For Russia, the presence also serves as a hub for deployments in sub-Saharan Africa, and potentially for maritime power projection in the Mediterranean. To serve those goals, keeping a low profile appears to be the right approach.

And It’s Working

In cases where interactions between foreign troops and local populations are expected to provoke conflicts, they are often curtailed to the extent possible. This logic also appears to inform the Russian and Turkish postures in Libya, where two factors make deployments particularly prone to controversies: First, Libyan public opinion is particularly averse to foreign troops; second, the legitimacy of Libyan government institutions is at best dubious, meaning Russia and Turkey both lack solid relationships on which to found their presence.

By and large, it appears this posture is working as intended. The foreign military presence is now rarely the subject of controversy, and the public appears to have gotten used to it. There have been two major exceptions to that rule: drone strikes that thwarted an attempt by a political-military alliance in August 2022 to install a new government in Tripoli, and another campaign of drone strikes in May 2023 that targeted opponents of the incumbent Prime Minister in Tripoli, under the guise of fighting smugglers.

In both cases, those at the receiving end of the strikes publicly accused Turkey of involvement. Public and private denials by Turkish diplomats and military officers did little to convince Libyans. A senior politician who had welcomed the Turkish intervention against Haftar told me after the August 2022 strikes that he could not accept a foreign state deciding who ruled in Tripoli.

But such controversies have rapidly blown over, while the general absence of incidents has kept the issue of this foreign presence out of everyday political debates. One resident of the Jufra region even went as far as to claim that people were “happy about the Russians, because they keep to themselves, they mind their own business” and did not do anything that would destabilize the local situation. Of course, that view may not be representative, and it brushes over the fact that the fear of repression by Haftar’s forces effectively rules out any expressions of opposition to the Russian presence.

Adopting a low profile doubtlessly also helps Russia and Turkey, as they are reaching out to their former Libyan opponents. Turkish companies now operate in Haftar-controlled eastern Libya, having scooped up contracts in the reconstruction bonanza controlled by Haftar’s sons.

The Russian embassy returned to Tripoli in mid-2023, led by a new ambassador who is fluent in Arabic and has gone on a charm offensive. More broadly, the polarization among the foreign backers of Libya’s rival forces has long given way to ambiguity: The Tripoli-based government has relentlessly courted two other key foreign powers in Libya – Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – that have traditionally supported Haftar. For Libyan actors, multipolarity implies juggling competing foreign interests rather than choosing between them.

In other contexts, the secrecy surrounding the foreign bases and the self-isolation of troops from their social environs have at times backfired by encouraging the spread of rumours about allegedly hidden motives and malign activities by foreign forces. This, for example, applied to the French and US presence in the Sahel states, before the leaders of military coups forced them to leave.

Interestingly, the Russian and Turkish presence in Libya tends to be much less of an object of speculation than the activities of Western states – in particular those of the US, the United Kingdom (UK), and France, despite the fact that all three have a far more limited military presence in Libya than Russia and Turkey. Over the past two years, the US, the UK, and Italy have each made separate efforts to build relationships with selected western Libyan commanders by training small numbers of their troops.

These modest undertakings have fuelled recurrent – but, to the best of my knowledge, wholly unfounded – rumours that Western states are training and equipping a Libyan force with the objective of attacking the Russians. Ironically, then, even Libya’s rumour mill sees aloof Western powers as a more likely source of instability than the Turkish and Russian military presence.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is a Project Director of Megatrends Afrika and a Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Division at SWP.

_____________________

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

Decline: social disassociation and isolation

Can the role that social relations played also contribute to understanding the decline of militant Islamists?

On the one hand, social solidarity often seems to have slowed down processes of disassociation from jihadists or those who had contact with them.

This was evident, for example, in the attempts at dialogue with Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi or in the leniency shown to some of their comrades-in-arms in the fight against IS in Darna.

Although they rejected democracy and offered refuge to the Egyptian jihadist Omar Rifai Surur, it was thought that “such differences of opinion should be resolved through discussion, not war”.

Or in relationships with old friends such as a former Ansar al-Sharia cadre, about whom American military officers had asked the leader of the Benghazi Defence Companies, Ismail Sallabi: “I told them: ‘Yes, it’s true, Younes and I were old friends, even before 2011.

When he joined Ansar al-Sharia, we became estranged. After that, I only helped him with one very specific matter, and he was never in the Companies.”

Sallabi and another leader of the Companies, Ziyad Balam, showed a certain leniency towards figures whose relationships with terrorists made them jihadists themselves in the eyes of foreign intelligence services, even if these relationships were purely transactional in nature.

For example, Balam said of Saadi Nofili, who had appeared in a video with the Algerian terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar: “I asked Saadi about it. He explained to me that he had helped some people to get from Benghazi to Zalla in return for money, and only then did he find out who they were.

I assured myself that Saadi was not an extremist and that it was purely a business relationship. Nevertheless, the accusations were a liability for us and I asked him to voluntarily submit to a police investigation.” And Sallabi commented on the involvement of another shady figure in the battalions’ military operations: “Ahmed al-Hasnawi is a simple man.

He is not ‘alQaeda’. But that’s the way it is in the south, where you do business with everyone – with IS, al-Qaeda or whoever.” On the other hand, once militant Islamists experienced social ostracism, it was difficult to reverse.

This makes it easier to understand why Haftar’s opponents did not enter into a new tactical alliance with militant Islamists in 2019, but instead kept their distance from all those who were – rightly or wrongly – categorised as such.

A former LIFG leader attributed this to the experiences made in the fight against IS in Darna, Sabratha and Sirte: “Since then, the thuwwar [revolutionaries] knew that they could not trust jihadists.”

The repudiating effect of the brutality committed by IS also played an important role in this development. IS not only became an immediate threat; its ostentatious cruelty broke all boundaries of social acceptability.

The aforementioned fighter from Misrata, who joined the offensive against IS, also explained his mobilisation by saying that IS “dragged the image of Islam into the mud”. It is a common pattern for rebel groups or terrorist organisations to alienate supporters and sympathisers by using violence against civilians.

The stigma associated with the Islamist label since 2014 also contributed to the isolation of not only militant but also more moderate Islamists. Another former LIFG leader recalled: “Suddenly, people no longer wanted anything to do with us, they never wanted to have known us.

They lumped us all together – ‘the Islamists’. The demonisation by channels like al-Asema TV was very effective. They talked about the LIFG as if we were responsible for everything, as if we were behind everything.”

A cadre in the Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood explained why the organisation changed its name in 2021 in an attempt to distance itself from the Muslim Brotherhood: “The Muslim Brotherhood no longer finds any acceptance. No one will come to your office.

If I speak in the name of the Muslim Brotherhood, I am evil incarnate.” His name had appeared on a list of “terrorists” published by the parliament in eastern Libya, which was aligned with Haftar – with noticeable consequences in his social and professional environment, where some now treated him with suspicion.

And an activist from Darna, who tried to raise public awareness for prisoners from his hometown who were arbitrarily detained and tortured in Haftar’s prisons, said: “Nobody wants to talk about the prisoners because they are considered ‘Daesh’ (IS). If you talk about them, you are ‘Daesh’ yourself”.

Many of the activists, politicians and leaders of armed groups who saw themselves stigmatised in this way withdrew and became increasingly socially isolated – regardless of whether they remained in Libya or went into exile. This was the case, for example, with the former LIFG leaders in Istanbul.

The former leader of the Benghazi Defence Companies, Ismail Sallabi, reported that he only met with a few old friends in his Istanbul exile and no longer agreed to meet with journalists.

When Haftar attacked Tripoli, he wanted to fight – but he was told to stay away; his involvement would only do harm, since he was defamed as an extremist.

Another reason why tactical considerations did not lead to the expected comeback of militant Islamists in 2019, therefore, was because the latter had lost much of their social acceptance in the meantime and were now socially isolated.

Many of the trust relationships that militant Islamists had forged with their brothersin-arms through the joint fight in 2011 had long since been shattered by 2019.

The crucial experience of the confrontation with IS and the media’s demonisation of all Islamists played a significant role in this. However, the social networks that militant Islamists had been embedded in are likely to have impeded this evolution rather than facilitated it.

The fact that the tide turned so quickly and completely therefore requires further explanation.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Luis Aleman, Bryan Dawson and Nii Simmonds

By intensifying its involvement in Libya, China not only aims to secure its access to vital oil resources but also to establish a strategic foothold that could facilitate its expansion into Central Africa.

The collaboration between Libya’s GNA and China underscores the GNA’s efforts to engage with global powers to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and stabilize its economy amidst ongoing internal and external challenges. However, the GNA’s endeavors to assert its authority and manage the country effectively were persistently undermined by the fragmented political landscape and security issues.

This backdrop of political strife and the GNA’s quest for international partnerships highlight the complex dynamics of governance and international relations in Libya’s quest for stability and prosperity.

Beyond energy security, China sees an opportunity to expand its geopolitical influence in Africa and counterbalance Western powers in the region, such as the United States and France. Libya’s strategic location in North Africa offers access to growing markets, and, as Libya rebuilds, opportunities to secure lucrative infrastructure, construction, and other contracts.

Despite these opportunities, China faces challenges. In addition to the United States and France, other international players, such as Russia and Turkey, are vying for influence and contracts in Libya.

Anti-Chinese sentiment remain common in Libya, reflecting Libyans’ memory of China’s pro-Gaddafi stance and alleged supplying of arms to pro-Gaddafi forces in 2011. These sentiments and the perception that Chinese companies are exploiting Libya’s resources and labor add to the challenge. However, economic interests, geopolitical ambitions, and the BRI will continue to drive China’s engagement in the country.

Addressing migration: A challenge for Europe

Libya’s influx of migrants has emerged as a formidable challenge for Europe. Situated at the crossroads of Africa and Europe, Libya stands as a primary transit point for migrants seeking refuge across European shores.

Fleeing from war or famine, migrants find themselves ensnared within Libya’s borders, stripped of basic rights. The plight faced by migrants highlights the pressing need to address this complex issue with compassion and urgency to prevent further suffering and loss of life.

Additionally, the European Union’s focus on border control and the interception of refugees at sea has led to severe humanitarian consequences. Over 82,000 people have been forcibly returned to Libya in the past five years, where they face dire conditions that include torture and sexual violence.

This situation poses a moral and political dilemma for Europe. Balancing the management of migration flows with human rights obligations is a complex task. Europe must recalibrate its strategy, prioritizing safe and legal migration pathways and reassessing support for operations that contribute to human rights abuses. The EU’s responsibility extends beyond its borders, demanding a policy shift that places human dignity at its core.

A catalyst for change: Empowering Libya’s diaspora

Libya’s people are scattered worldwide. It is crucial for Libyan policymakers to engage with the diaspora to tap into their skills and utilize them for the progress of the country. Yet, the level of their impact depends on international support.

Unfortunately, economic struggles, especially the liquidity crisis, have hindered the ability of Libyans living abroad to send financial aid to their families, which also affects regional economic stability. Acknowledging the diaspora as a valuable source of talent and assets is essential for rebuilding and growing Libya.

The Libyan diaspora makes up a significant part of the population, possessing valuable skills, expertise, and cross-cultural competencies acquired through time spent overseas. By utilizing this resource, Libya can gain diverse viewpoints and innovative ideas that have been honed around the world.

To effectively involve the diaspora in rebuilding their country, it is necessary to tackle underlying economic problems that are plaguing Libya. Investing in infrastructure development will not only improve connectivity within cities but also establish transportation links connecting urban centers with remote regions.

This connected network will unite communities and promote inclusivity among all Libyans, regardless of their location.

Additionally, in the pursuit of a stable Libya emerging from its delicate state, it is crucial to harness the potential of the diaspora with expertise in governance, accountability, and transparency.

Libyans could greatly benefit from leveraging this resource by engaging individuals with extensive knowledge of effective governance practices acquired through experiences in various international settings.

By tapping into their diverse skillsets, which encompasses areas such as policy development, institutional design, and organizational leadership, the diaspora can contribute towards building robust institutions that prioritize accountability and transparency within Libya’s governmental framework.

Through collaboration between overseas professionals and local counterparts, this partnership could foster innovative solutions to address pressing issues while nurturing an environment conducive to sustainable growth and stability for Libya.

The way forward

As we envisage Libya’s path forward, the 6+6 agreement emerges as a cornerstone of hope and unity, bridging the divide between the East and the West. Integral to this transformation, and deserving of special recognition, is the Libyan diaspora.

The diaspora’s role extends beyond mere consultation. They are instrumental in driving economic development, promoting cultural exchange, and aiding in the establishment of a global network that supports Libya’s aspirations.

Their engagement is vital in ensuring that the implementation of the 6+6 agreement is not only successful but also inclusive, reflecting the rich tapestry of the Libyan identity. The 6+6 agreement offers a collective call to action for all Libyans, both within the country and across the globe, to embrace this historic opportunity for change.

___________________

Wolfram Lacher

Western governments have castigated Russia and Turkey for destabilizing Libya with their military deployments. But in daily life, their military presence is hardly noticeable – even in the immediate vicinity of their bases.

In this Megatrends Afrika Spotlight, Wolfram Lacher (SWP) argues that both states have adopted a low profile in order to stay in Libya for the long term – and so far, their approach appears to be working.

***

On successive visits to Tripoli over the past two years, I repeatedly drove to a military base on the capital’s western outskirts for meetings. The base is located in a dead end that is set back a few hundred metres from the coastal road. To reach it, I would first pass by another compound just next to it, called Sidi Bilal – one of several bases hosting Syrian fighters whom Turkey has been deploying to western Libya since 2020.

On my first visits, the Turkish flag fluttering at the top of a mast inside the base was clearly visible from outside the base’s walls. Syrian fighters would keep a wary eye on me as I drove past. But on my last two visits, in late 2023 and mid-2024, the flag had been lowered so that it was no longer visible from beyond the walls. I could only catch a glimpse of a Syrian guard’s face peering out from a narrow gap in the gate. It was obvious that measures had been taken to make the Syrians’ presence as discreet as possible.

These changes reflect a broader pattern of how both Turkey and Russia have adapted their military deployments in Libya to the local political context while settling in for the long term. After initial episodes illustrated the explosive potential of troops having contact with local society, both states and their proxies have made their presence increasingly invisible and progressively reduced their interactions in the environments surrounding their bases. For now, this strategy appears to have been by and large successful in gaining a modicum of acceptance for the foreign military presence and thwarting attempts to politicize it.

Settling In

Led by the United States (US), Western states frequently point to the Russians’ presence as destabilizing Libya. Except for France, they rarely portray the Turkish deployment in similarly negative terms. Calls for all foreign forces to withdraw have become a routine talking point of Western states concerning Libya.

In fact, the balance of power created by Russia’s and Turkey’s military presence has been instrumental in freezing the Libyan conflict since the defeat of Khalifa Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli in June 2020. Both states gained their military foothold during that conflict after Western governments adopted a hands-off approach to Haftar’s offensive, with the US and France deciding to give war a chance. Since the end of that conflict, Haftar has relied on Russia – initially under the guise of the Wagner Group – to deter social unrest and protect him from potential attacks by his opponents based in western Libya.

The latter, in turn, have relied on Turkey to prevent another offensive by Haftar. Both sides have paid their foreign backers for their assistance, allowing them to build a permanent presence in Libya at little cost. Western states, having already proven to Libya’s rival factions that they could not be relied upon, have been short of practical ideas for how to make their recurrent calls for foreign forces to leave a reality.

When both states first began intervening in 2019, their irruption into Libya was a striking illustration of how rapidly the international order was changing – and it heralded new patterns of foreign intervention in African conflicts. It also startled Libyans and observers of the Libyan conflict. Both Russia and Haftar’s forces denied that they had deployed the Wagner Group – which, at the time, did not officially exist. Visual evidence of Wagner’s presence first came in the form of documents and photos captured by Haftar’s enemies on the battlefield.

Turkey, by contrast, officially announced its intervention, but its deployment of Syrian fighters in December 2019 embarrassed the anti-Haftar forces. Whereas the latter kept quiet about the mercenaries and restricted journalists’ access to them, the Syrians shared videos of their first battles. When the Turkish intervention finally forced Wagner into a hurried retreat, the Russian’s stealth intervention was briefly caught in the spotlight. Images of Russian fighters being evacuated through the streets of a western Libyan town on uncovered trucks in broad daylight stunned Libyan social media.

Becoming Invisible

When the war ended but the foreign forces remained, early events appeared to underline the explosive potential of the foreign military presence. In Sirte, near the new frontline, Wagner terrorized the population by shelling a residential area to forcibly displace its inhabitants before occupying their houses and mining the surroundings, thereby potentially killing anyone who might approach the area. In Misrata, Syrian fighters occupied the houses of displaced residents in a southern suburb, fuelling latent tensions with neighbours. When protests erupted in Tripoli in August 2020 amid an economic crisis and defunct public services, those protesting expressed anger that Syrian fighters were being paid in precious US dollars, whereas Libyans barely received their public-sector dinar salaries.

As rivalries among Haftar’s western Libyan adversaries resurfaced, some sought to damage their opponents by falsely accusing them of using Syrian fighters in local conflicts. Pro-Haftar propagandists, meanwhile, tried to stoke fear and anger by spreading fabricated stories of Syrian fighters abducting Libyan women.

The foreign presence seemed all the more likely to provoke a backlash, as contact between foreign forces and the local population was not uncommon, and largely unregulated. In Sirte and Jufra, Russians frequently turned up in shops and restaurants, at times openly carrying weapons. Sudanese fighters, whom Haftar was no longer able to pay, became an even more vexing presence, as they began demanding tolls at checkpoints along overland roads, and as their ventures into fuel smuggling caused shortages for Libyan consumers. In Tripoli, Syrians also regularly ventured out of their bases on foot to shop for groceries, and in August 2021 they openly protested in front of a base about delayed salaries.

Since then, however, the Turkish, Syrian, and Russian presence has gradually become largely invisible. In Sirte, Wagner fighters withdrew from the areas they had occupied to a dedicated area in the Qardhabiya airbase in 2021. Their visits to local shops in Sirte and Jufra, often together with their Syrian translators, have become much less frequent. On the rare occasions that they do appear in public, they now invariably wear civilian clothing, signalling that they are on their day off.

In the southern bases of Brak and Tamanhant, where the Russians also have a presence, it is even less common to encounter them outside the bases, local residents say. Interlocutors from the far south occasionally report hearing about Russian visits to remote sites such as gold mining areas or military bases, but they rarely describe seeing them with their own eyes.

Much of the same goes for the Syrian fighters deployed by Turkey. In Suq al-Khamis, south of Tripoli, residents had complained that Syrian fighters would often come out of a local base on foot. But for the past year at least, their sorties were restricted to a single weekly trip by car to local shops, suggesting that a regime regulating interactions with locals had been introduced – thus turning boredom into a major challenge for the Syrians.

The formal Turkish military presence itself has been even less visible, confined to a few military bases between Misrata and the Tunisian border. It is extremely rare to encounter Turkish military personnel outside of these bases.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is a Project Director of Megatrends Afrika and a Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Division at SWP.

_______________________

Frederic Wehrey

The Jabal Akhdar

With its thickly forested slopes and bucolic meadows, the aptly named Jabal Akhdar seem a world away from Fezzan. Rising 800 meters above sea level (about 2,600 feet) and stretching350 kilometers (about 215 miles) from Benghazi in the south to Derna in the north, the mountains are Libya’s wettest region and home to its densest concentration of trees and its most arable land. It is also rich in biodiversity: though it constitutes just 1 percent of Libya’s surface area, Jabal Akhdar accounts for anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of its plant species, leading one climate activist from the area to dub the mountains and their forests “the lung of Libya.”

Though its populace lacks significant communal divides, the mountains have been the site of political instability and grievances against the government, especially given eastern Libya’s perception of relative decline after Qaddafi’s 1969 coup toppled the eastern-based Senussi dynasty. During the 1990s, these grievances informed a fierce Islamist insurgency against the regime that used the fortress-like gorges and caves of the Jabal Akhdar as a haven. Since the fall of Qaddafi, successive rounds of violence in eastern Libya, particularly during the 2014–2018 war that wracked Benghazi and Derna, only worsened the region’s environmental deterioration and vulnerability to climate change.

Today, the region is firmly under the control of Haftar and his Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), who are nominally part of the GNU in Tripoli but who in practice govern eastern Libya as a separate administrative territory. Although Tripoli and the east have working-level coordination and collaboration on some issues, such as meteorological data collection and the exchange of research on seed varieties, steps toward more national-level climate cooperation invariably fall victim to the same elite rivalries and factionalism that plague other aspects of Libya’s governance.  Simultaneously, Haftar’s kleptocratic rule is exacting a severe toll on environmental protection in the Jabal region.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the activities of the LAAF Military Investment Authority. This organization is a profit-making enterprise for the Haftar family and has been involved in predatory illicit enterprises such as fuel smuggling and scrap metal harvesting. Reportedly, some of the illegally acquired scrap metal (which often is sold abroad) comes from equipment and components of the MMR.

The inhabitants of the Jabal Akhdar acutely feel the nexus of governance, climate change, and environmental devastation. As elsewhere, farmers in the area suffered from problems like electrical outages, supply chain disruptions (particularly seeds), rising costs of drilling for groundwater, and soil erosion caused by overgrazing and poor land management. All of these issues have been compounded by climate-induced temperature spikes and declining rainfall.

Furthermore, the region’s beekeepers—a niche but important industry, especially in the east, where honey is particularly prized for delicacies and traditional remedies—have seen their honey output decline drastically as climate change has pushed temperatures to ranges that are inhospitable for bees.

But the most catastrophic environmental affliction in the mountains is the rampant loss of tree and vegetation cover. Between 2005 and 2019, the Jabal Akhdar lost over 14,000 hectares of forest, with the rate of deforestation accelerating after 2011 as insecurity and lawlessness encouraged people to sell wood for charcoal and to embark on unchecked construction.

Government efforts to crack down on such illegal practices have been uneven, with better-armed militias and criminal groups sometimes responding to enforcement efforts with heavy gunfire. Conflicts in the east and elsewhere have also exacerbated deforestation as urban areas have expanded and new settlements have emerged to accommodate displaced persons.

Regardless of reason, the effects of deforestation have been uniformly harmful for citizens’ livelihoods, health, and properties. Deprived of tree cover, the average mean temperature in the area has risen, which in turn has made outbreaks of wildfires more likely. Already, soaring heat waves have sparked outbreaks of such destructive blazes, like the ones in 2013 and 2021 that swept through forests near Shahat and Al-Bayda, respectively. The absence of tree cover has also contributed to soil erosion and decreased agricultural outputs, while also increasing the prevalence of dust storms originating from the region.

More broadly, the human-caused transformation of the region’s natural environment, along with widespread corruption and decaying infrastructure, has worsened the damage from climate-induced floods like those that hit the eastern city of Al-Bayda in late 2020, displacing thousands. Most tragically, the city of Derna at the foothills of the Jabal Akhdar suffered a catastrophic loss of life—an estimated at 11,200 people—after two aging dams collapsed during Storm Daniel in early September 2023.

The same storm also displaced more than 40,000 people from Derna and other locales. The impact of Storm Daniel underscores how the malignant effects of politics and militia rule magnify climate shocks in Libya: in the case of Derna, Haftar’s military regime had long targeted and isolated the town because it had a history of opposition to his authority. This animosity contributed to the municipality’s unpreparedness and to the storm’s staggering death toll. 

The aftermath of the Derna tragedy has made it clear that local actors need to have both the capacity and the freedom to tackle climate adaptation and environmental stewardship. Municipalities in and around the Jabal Akhdar, as elsewhere, have taken some commendable steps on these fronts, with campaigns on water rationalization, well-digging, recycling drives, electricity conservation, and other actions toward sustainability.

On the crucial problem of deforestation, local civil society, journalists, and bloggers have been especially active. Reforestation initiatives in particular have proven enormously popular, with groups like the Libyan Wildlife Trust and the Boy Scouts planting millions of seedlings and sponsoring awareness campaigns in schools. Yet according to several observers, these efforts, while laudable, are not enough: Libyan civil society has not yet been able to realize its full potential as a bridge between the public and private sectors and as a voice for vulnerable communities.

 The activists themselves admit that their efforts cannot keep pace with environmental devastation, and they point to the need for a better-equipped and more robust response from official law enforcement entities. Moreover, in the east in particular, activists face restrictions from the area’s security forces. Though these forces do not directly target environmental and climate groups as long as their activities do not cross certain political red lines (like corruption or the role of the Haftar family), their presence still has a chilling effect.

 “Young people are willing, but they are afraid,” noted one official from the region. “There is no state support.” In a September 2023 interview, a member of a volunteer climate action group in eastern Libya gave an example of such interference, stating that their organization’s efforts to import weather monitoring equipment—to compensate for what this person believed was the inadequacy of the official meteorological service—were blocked by Haftar’s government because of supposed security concerns.

Relatedly, policing bodies in both the east and the west often have a distinctly ideological bent deriving from the Salafi current of Islam, evident in arrests that are not rooted in codified law but rather are against transgressions deemed to be un-Islamic. These arrests have included crackdowns on environmental activism like an “Earth Hour” event in Benghazi in 2017 and, more recently, in the arrests of animal rights defenders in the same city. In such an environment, it is not surprising that many climate activists operate from abroad or solely in the virtual space, while others confine their engagement to politically “safe” activities.

Separately, Haftar’s governing apparatus could try to coopt climate action as a form of legitimation, or greenwashing—especially as the issue attracts great funding and support from outside donors. Arab autocrats elsewhere have pursued similar tactics by focusing mostly on technical solutions, renewable energy plans, and ambitious net-zero pledges while sidelining the society-focused governance reforms and grassroots partnerships that effective climate adaptation requires. The urgency of such local-focused reforms is nowhere as apparent as in Libya’s vulnerable peripheral regions.

Conclusion: Building Grassroots Climate Resilience in Vulnerable Regions

The sheer scale of Libya’s climate fragility demands a radical departure from the status quo. In many respects, climate change accelerates and amplifies preexisting deficiencies in governance and inequalities that predate the chaos of the 2011 uprising and its aftermath. It also introduces new shocks, like heat waves, fires, and extended droughts. These impacts are worsening the health and livelihood of already at-risk populations—those in the agricultural sector, for instance—while creating new stresses on comparatively better-off citizens.

Endemic insecurity and successive rounds of national-level internal conflict starting in 2014 have understandably impeded concerted climate and environmental action by governments and citizens alike. “It’s hard to garner public support for trees when people’s lives are in danger,” admitted an environmental activist in 2013. But the peace that has emerged since a United Nations–brokered ceasefire in 2020 is one in which armed groups dominate the political and economic life of the country as dynasties of venal elites in both east and west carve up the spoils while stifling free expression and civil society. Such circumstances are hardly cause for optimism on climate adaptation.

At the most basic level, that adaptation should prioritize solving Libya’s water crisis by extending the GMMR to communities in need, halting the decay of its infrastructure, and rationalizing the use of the water it delivers. Among consumers, this rationalization can be accomplished principally through tariffs. Farmers can support the process through more efficient practices like the introduction of new seed varieties, a shift toward less water-intensive crops, and more sustainable techniques like hydroponic farming. In tandem, Libya should explore alternate sources of freshwater, like desalinization.

Today, most of Libya’s sixty desalination facilities are not operational, and the industry itself faces a lack of support owing to these maintenance issues and perception of its prohibitive cost. Yet with the rapid depletion of the country’s aquifers, that perception needs to change. Various innovative domestic proposals have been advanced for making desalinization in Libya more economically feasible; one proposal advanced by a Tuareg activist and former official would use dune-generated heat in Fezzan to power coastal desalinization plants.  Underpinning all these potential options is the pressing need for a national water strategy and an integrated water policy that will rationalize and safeguard its distribution across the sprawling country.

That need, in turn, speaks to another urgent imperative for Libya’s climate adaptation: vision and will at the top. As noted, the challenge of fiscal and political decentralization in Libya is deeply entrenched. On climate change, municipalities are hindered by legal and funding restrictions, such as the lack of legislative empowerment to tackle climate adaptation and the need to seek preapproval for revenue expenditure instead of having climate change measures built into their budgets.

Beyond this consideration, municipalities need greater authority and leeway and fewer bureaucratic obstacles to expeditiously access foreign funding, equipment, and expertise, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Taqarib project and the European Union’s Tamsall effort. For their part, both the Libyan government and foreign donors should work to coordinate and “bundle” municipal-level projects, more efficiently identify best practices, more easily access outside funding, and scale-up successes.

Beyond town-level empowerment, interlocutors across all three regions surveyed in this article spoke about the need for greater space, protections, and support for civil society actors working on environmental protection and climate adaptation. Many acknowledged that, despite the groundswell of enthusiasm, such activism is still in its infancy. They suggested the need for greater education and acculturation of Libya’s youth on climate change, starting in schools.

These efforts are encouragingly underway by UNICEF in eastern Libya, but they need more buy-in from Libya’s authorities. More pressingly, though, Libyan authorities in the west and the east need to grant greater freedoms for independent civil society groups to operate freely and with foreign support, ending the restrictive laws that prevent them from doing so.

Relatedly, the dominance of Libya’s predatory armed groups over nearly every aspect of its political and economic life needs to transition to a law-based, accountable security sector—a Herculean problem that will not be solved anytime soon. Still, the urgency of tackling Libya’s climate adaptation and environmental devastation adds one more compelling reason for doing so.

In all three of the regions surveyed, interlocutors were unanimous in pointing to the militias as the primary culprits for the weakening of climate resilience, through predation on the environment and, indirectly, through the perpetuation of violent conflict and the resulting population displacements, disruptions to services, and damage to infrastructure and the economy.

Lastly, while the Jabal Nafusa, Fezzan, and the Jabal Akhdar share certain commonalities in their climate vulnerabilities, they are also distinctive subregions with their own communal and ethnolinguistic identities, histories, economic resources, and other factors that militate against the one-size-fits all approach encouraged by foreign states and organizations.

Addressing climate fragility in each of these areas therefore necessitates a multifaceted approach that recognizes and harnesses these local specificities, integrating on-the-ground knowledge, community-driven initiatives, and partnerships with civil society organizations. Ultimately, though, these bottom-up actions need to be accompanied by top-level will and resolve by Libyan elites, who must set aside self-aggrandizement and the pursuit of spoils to address the looming climate crisis.

***

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on governance, conflict, and security in Libya, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf.

______________

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

Rise: Social embeddedness and social acceptance

Such tactical choices become more understandable through their social context – that is, when considering what was socially acceptable or facilitated by social ties. Before militant Islamists became attractive allies with the escalation of conflicts in 2014, they were able to develop in an environment in which they and their perspectives enjoyed widespread social recognition. This was partly due to the prevailing moral codes under Gaddafi, but above all to the role of Islamists in the 2011 revolution.

It is true that Gaddafi had persecuted and demonised Islamist opponents; at times his regime had arrested young men simply for attending early morning prayers. At the same time, however, Gaddafi had enforced a strict moral code – in the words of a then young Islamist who had spent several years in the notorious Abu Salim prison: “Libya was a conservative, isolated society.

Gaddafi had banned alcohol, prostitution and nightclubs. During Ramadan, everyone fasted. Being religious was entirely normal, and many people who were later labelled as Islamists were simply devout.”

With certain limits, the regime even tolerated a jihadist underground culture in the 2000s. At least for a while, the secret services covertly encouraged the recruitment of young men to fight in Iraq and did not prevent the families of fighters from publicly celebrating them as martyrs when they received news of their deaths.

In cities such as Darna, Ajdabiya and Sabratha, networks developed that deeply embedded jihadist ideas in parts of local society. For young men with this social background, jihadism was simply an aspect of piety.

During the 2011 revolution, Islamists actively participated in the struggle, and thereby emerged as prominent leaders. In this way, they accumulated considerable “revolutionary social capital”, which increased their social standing all the more dramatically since they had been in exile, in prison or under surveillance only a short time before.

Hardly any of them formed purely Islamist – let alone jihadist – units. Instead, just like others, they mobilised under the banner of the revolution. The revolutionary armed groups were mostly centred on individual cities. Fighters primarily joined groups with whom they had family, friend or neighbourly ties.

The fact that there were more Islamists in some groups – such as those from Darna – than in others was mainly due to local subcultures. But even in these groups, die-hard jihadists fought side by side with young men who were simply committed to the revolution.

Deep bonds often developed between Islamist and non-Islamist commanders from different groups during the joint struggle, and these bonds lasted for years. Of course, there was also mistrust – especially between figures who had not fought closely together and only encountered each other when the first rivalries emerged after the fall of the regime.

Three aspects were decisive for the ascent of militant Islamist movements after 2011. Firstly, the revolution gave rise to many charismatic leaders of armed groups who used an Islamic idiom. It was often difficult to determine which of them were Islamists, jihadists or simply devout – the boundaries were blurred.

Secondly, in the years after 2011, politicians and commanders who were part of the militant Islamist spectrum were able to build on the solidarity of those with whom they had fought during the revolution.

At least in the initial phase, they enjoyed high social standing, which showed in the election results in 2012 and subsequently dwindled as conflict and insecurity spread. Thirdly, groups led by figures who ranged from pious to jihadist after the fall of Gaddafi often included both Islamists and non-Islamists.

Most, though not all, of the leaders of the Abu Salim Brigade in Darna were jihadists, but among their fighters were “many ordinary young people from Darna who smoked and put gel in their hair”.

The founders of the Rafallah Sahati Brigade in Benghazi “espoused Islamist ideas. Most of us were former prisoners. But many of our members were Shabab who smoked, took drugs and listened to music. We were open to everyone.

It was similar with other groups, such as the 17 February Brigade or the Martyrs of Zintan Brigade.” Leading figures in Zawiya and Sabratha such as Mohamed al-Kilani, Omar al-Mukhtar and Shaaban Hadiya were widely perceived as Islamists – but in fact “Hadiya was a charismatic legal scholar who had been a unifying figure in 2011, not an extremist”.

Kilani and Mukhtar were “not members of any ideological organisations. Omar al-Mukhtar had been Abu Salim in prison, but he was simply deeply religious. And many fighters were not – they smoked and so on.” The leaders of the Faruq Brigade in Zawiya, who were later vilified as terrorists by political opponents, were religious – “but among the members there were more people who drank alcohol than strict believers”.

These aspects explain why many revolutionaries did not see those militant Islamists with whom they had personal connections as a threat. And for the same reasons, Islamist ideology was not so alien to many of them.

For young men in the Abu Salim brigade from Darna, for example, chants (nasha’id) from the al-Qaeda movement were commonplace. The same applied to the black flag with the Islamic Shahada, which was used by IS and al-Qaeda groups, among others. In Benghazi, “we had to explain to the Shabab how this was perceived internationally”.

Looking back, an Islamist revolutionary from the city said: “I can understand why many people liked the black flag. But it didn’t make a good impression, it looked like IS.”

Militant Islamist groups in Libya were able to operate openly in society.

This background also helps to contextualise why jihadists were able to continue operating openly in society when they separated themselves from the revolutionaries and formed their own groups – in other words, why they emerged as a social movement and were not forced underground as isolated cells.

In Benghazi, many initially regarded Ansar al-Sharia as a group of devout young men interested in the common good.100 As recently as 2013, a member of the local council was of the opinion that “all they want is Sharia law” – and after all, the fundamental role of Sharia enjoyed support across political divides in the first few years post 2011.

Even when the leaders of Ansar al-Sharia openly rejected the state and democratic processes, their former brothers-in-arms advocated resolving such differences of opinion through dialogue.

Last but not least, this explains the permeability between revolutionaries and jihadists and the fact that social ties facilitated alliances between them. It was all the easier for members of the Rafallah Sahati Brigade to join Ansar al-Sharia because they were reuniting with their former comrades-in-arms.

IS also initially appeared in the guise of fighters with whom the revolutionaries previously had personal relationships – such as a person who was sent to Benghazi by IS in Iraq in 2013 to demand that three revolutionary commanders submit to the organisation, albeit in vain.

In Sabratha, a leading revolutionary acted as an intermediary with IS when negotiating the release of hostages, using relationships dating back to the joint fight in 2011: “Abdallah Haftar [the local IS leader] had been with us in the mountains in 2011. He was a brave fighter – a simple person, not ideological, interested in money. He also fought in our ranks in 2014.

Social ties and embeddedness in local society therefore played an important role in the spread of militant Islamists in former revolutionary strongholds such as Benghazi and Darna.

The later IS capital of Sirte, on the other hand, was anything but a revolutionary stronghold; there, another logic applied. Ansar al-Sharia and later IS established themselves in the city as small, isolated minorities that benefited from the absence of a military counterweight. Sirte had experienced the revolution as a defeat, the revolutionaries did not have a broad social base there, and the city’s elite was in prison, in exile or dead.

Among the founders of Ansar al-Sharia in Sirte were members of the Faruq Brigade from Misrata – a revolutionary group that included both Islamists and nonIslamists in its ranks. The Faruq Brigade split in two when part of it settled in Sirte and merged into Ansar al-Sharia.

This split involved the Sirte group’s geographical and social distancing from its former brothers-in-arms, even if relations between some members of both groups continued. Ansar al-Sharia in turn later formed the nucleus of IS in the city. Therefore, the rise of IS in Sirte differs from the pattern in other Libyan cities with regards to the social embeddedness of its jihadists.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Luis Aleman, Bryan Dawson and Nii Simmonds

Standing at a crucial crossroads, Libya is a nation brimming with promise yet besieged by peril. Recent strides by the “6+6 Committee” in establishing election laws have sparked hope in a country long plagued by turmoil.

This development, a product of concerted effort following a decade of instability and foreign intervention failures, signals a potential shift towards a representative democracy. However, despite these advances, Libya’s journey toward stable governance remains overshadowed by significant political and technical challenges.

The updated draft election laws signify important progress; yet, they fall short of incorporating vital elements required for conducting successful elections, notably adequate security protocols and a comprehensive regulatory structure. This gap is accentuated by adjustments in UN policies.

The enduring conflict has embedded a profound mistrust among Libya’s diverse factions and regions, making the prospect of fair elections seem remote without additional efforts towards reconciliation. Furthermore, the international community’s urgency for quick elections risks overshadowing the need for unity, bypassing these indispensable issues.

This context is clarified by specific critiques from the UN regarding the preparedness of the election laws, drafted by the 6+6 committee, to effectively support the electoral process in Libya, highlighting concerns over their current state and implications for future elections.

A major impediment to progress is the leadership crisis. The interim Government of National Unity (GNU), initially set up to transition the nation to democratic elections, has overstayed its mandate, exacerbating governance polarization. The eastern-based Libyan parliament’s declaration of the GNU’s illegitimacy further complicates the situation, raising the question of whether another transitional body is necessary to supervise the electoral process.

After more than a decade of chaos, Libya finds itself deeply divided, lacking robust national institutions and democratic experience, and skeptical about fair representation. While previous transitional plans, premised on swift elections, have failed, the 6+6 Committee’s work offers hope. The international community’s role should pivot from imposing solutions to supporting Libyan-led initiatives with aid and security support, particularly for displaced persons and migrants often sidelined in political discussions.

Libya’s future hinges on rising as a sovereign nation with institutions that represent all its citizens. The path ahead, though arduous, calls for patient, Libyan-directed progress and international support that emphasizes assistance over imposition.

The nexus of oil wealth and future challenges

Libya’s economic narrative is a complex interplay of immense potential and daunting challenges. Home to Africa’s largest oil reserves, Libya’s economy is heavily reliant on hydrocarbons, which account for 95 percent of its revenue. This dependence places the nation at a critical juncture as it grapples with political instability and the urgent need for economic diversification, especially in the face of the global green transition.

The country’s hydrocarbon wealth, while a significant asset, also narrates a tale of untapped potential amidst a shifting global energy landscape. Billions in frozen assets, mired in international disputes, further symbolize the tumultuous post-2011 revolution period. However, this scenario also presents an opportunity for Libya to redefine its economic trajectory by investing in diversification and stabilizing its political landscape. Importantly, Libya’s oil reserves hold significant strategic value for European energy security, offering a potential stabilizing force in the region’s energy supply.

China’s economic and geopolitical interests in Libya

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), sometimes referred to as “the New Silk Road,” was launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. BRI is a massive global overland and sea infrastructure development strategy that seeks to expand China’s economic and political influence.

Originally intended to create infrastructure linking East Asia and Europe, BRI has expanded to include Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. The scale of China’s ambitions is unprecedented, but so is global receptiveness. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “147 countries—accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population and 40 percent of global GDP—have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so.”

The Government of National Accord (GNA), under the leadership of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, was established on December 17, 2015, as a provisional authority aimed at unifying Libya’s divided political factions. This effort was part of the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA), endorsed by the United Nations, positioning the GNA as the legitimate interim government with its headquarters in Tripoli.

Despite gaining international recognition, the GNA struggled with consolidating control over Libya, contending with opposition from various militias and the rival Libyan House of Representatives (HoR) based in the east, alongside the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Khalifa Haftar, during a period marked by the Second Libyan Civil War. In a significant move towards international cooperation, Fayez al-Sarraj, representing Libya’s GNA, embraced the Belt and Road Initiative in July 2018, advocating for a broader Chinese investment in the country.

China, as the world’s second-largest oil consumer, eagerly accepted this overture. Chinese enterprises have played a substantial role in the development of Libya’s oil infrastructure, including the construction of pipelines and refineries. Before the outbreak of the Libyan Civil War, Libya was a source of roughly 3 percent of China’s crude oil imports.

_______________________

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

After the fall of Gaddafi, Islamist revolutionary leaders in Benghazi and Darna had campaigned among their followers to join state institutions and support political processes such as the 2012 elections.

Groups such as Ansar al-Sharia split from the revolutionaries precisely because they rejected that state. With his attack on the revolutionaries, Haftar seemed to vindicate Ansar al-Sharia’s uncompromising position: “Ansar told the Shabab [young men, fighters]: ‘You see? We told you that we have to fight against the state, that we have to conquer it! Now the state is waging war against you!’”

Later, after Haftar’s allies attacked the revolutionaries’ homes, IS tried to attract followers by emphasising that it rejected any compromise with the enemy.Wolfram Lacher

At times, this uncompromising attitude seemed to increase IS’s chances of success.

In January 2015, for example, a member of the Shura Council expected IS to win the battle for Benghazi, “because they are brutal fighters who will kill anyone who gets in their way. The tribes will submit to them to save the lives of their sons.”

A politician whose three sons were killed in the fight against Haftar said at the time that many who were now fighting for IS were not Islamists, but had joined it because of the other side’s violence.

Another person close to the leadership of the Shura Council said at the same time: “If we need IS to defeat Haftar, then let IS come. My family has lost everything, our house was burnt down, thousands of families have fled Benghazi. I have nothing left to lose.”

According to a former leading member of the Rafallah Sahati Brigade, such radicalisation processes explain why many members of the group first turned to Ansar al-Sharia and later to IS.

Last but not least, there were people whose support or mobilisation for militant Islamists came from opportunism, such as the tendency to join a force that seemed to be on the way to military victory: “When IS suddenly took over almost the entire province of al-Anbar [in Iraq] in 2014, many in Benghazi were impressed.”

Similarly, in Sirte, the triumph of IS in Iraq was a strong argument for members of Ansar al-Sharia to submit to the caliphate. A resident of Darna told of a pharmacist who had sought a licence from IS for his business on his own initiative: “I was surprised and asked him why. He replied: ‘Libya always wanted to be a powerful Arab state.

And now look at IS, its territory is bigger than that of Great Britain!’ In Darna, there were fighters who “joined every new wave – first IS, later Haftar”.

In Benghazi, IS fighters included “people who drank alcohol, consumed drugs or robbed banks and used IS as a cover for their self-enrichment”. In Sirte, where supporters of the Gaddafi regime had been militarily defeated and subjected to persecution by revolutionaries from Misrata, IS offered them an opportunity to obtain weapons, find protection and perhaps even take revenge on Misrata.

Decline: Tactical logics of action

Similar tactical considerations can be seen in the decline of militant Islamist groups. And here too, such objectives are located on a spectrum that ranges from reactions to an immediate threat to sober costbenefit calculations.

The fact that former revolutionaries in Sabratha, Darna and Misrata went from initial tolerance towards IS to a costly confrontation with the organisation was directly linked to the threat posed by IS.

In Sabratha, the armed groups tolerated IS supporters “until they started kidnapping and killing people”. Confrontation only occurred when the IS offshoot suddenly tried to gain control of the city after a devastating American airstrike in February 2016 – and was subsequently driven out.

In Darna, IS repeatedly clashed with the Abu Salim Brigade as of mid-2014. Together with other organisations, the latter formed the Mujahidin Shura Council of Darna (Majlis Shura Mujhahidi Darna), which was briefly joined by part of the local Ansar al-Sharia group before it broke away from the alliance. But open warfare between IS and its opponents only erupted when IS assassinated a prominent Shura Council commander – former LIFG member Nasr al-Okr – and when the Shura Council leader, Salim Derbi, was killed in the ensuing clashes.

Fighting in Darna continued for eight months. External observers usually described this confrontation as an internal conflict between jihadists, namely between IS and groups ideologically affiliated with al-Qaeda. In reality, however, the latter description only applied to part of the hard core of the Abu Salim Brigade.

And as for the fight against IS, the Shura Council not only succeeded in mobilising broad support in Darna; it also increasingly tried to shed its jihadist image in public statements.

. It is difficult to judge whether this also involved genuine ideological change among at least some of the leaders of the Shura Council, as well-informed observers insist. Nevertheless, the fight against IS in Darna must be seen as the beginning of a process whereby the local revolutionaries distanced themselves from jihadism – even if not all of them did so.

The later renaming of the Shura Council as the “Darna Protection Force” (Quwat Himayat Darna) followed the same logic. The Protection Force avoided any jihadist references and presented its resistance against Haftar as the city’s collective struggle against dictatorship and support for a “civilian state”.

A commander of the Protection Force, who escaped to western Libya after the group’s defeat, emphasised that the group no longer had any links to jihadists.73 Even more drastic and consequential was the change that occurred in Misrata when IS threatened to expand from Sirte towards Misrata.

From early 2015 onwards, IS brought Sirte under its control and repeatedly attacked an armed group from Misrata that maintained a presence on Sirte’s outskirts. Although this raised awareness of the threat in Misrata, it did not yet trigger mobilisation.

Leading players in Misrata also continued to allow their city to be used as a logistical hub by Haftar’s opponents in Benghazi – from which IS elements in Benghazi also benefited.

This only changed when IS attacked checkpoints between Sirte and Misrata in May 2016, threatening the city itself The spontaneous mobilisation of Misratan armed groups prompted a large-scale offensive that would last for months.

Hundreds of fighters in the city were killed before IS was defeated in December 2016. As one fighter said at the time: “The day after the attack on the checkpoint in al-Sdada, I joined the offensive.

Because IS was closing in, it even appeared in Misrata itself.” This was accompanied by a profound shift in attitudes towards militant Islamists in general. Interrogations and documents found in Sirte revealed that IS in Sirte and Benghazi had been able to benefit from the support for Haftar’s opponents in Benghazi, which was channelled through Misrata. Social pressure in Misrata then put an end to this support.

Political calculations are also likely to have played a role in this development. Misratan politicians had been trying to find new allies in eastern Libya since the formation of a unity government in early 2016.

This required them to end their support for the groups in Benghazi. The shift in Misrata was an important reason why opponents of Haftar who had been driven out of Benghazi increasingly tried to distance themselves from the jihadists. One example of this was the founding of the Benghazi Defence Companies.

The leaders read out the founding declaration in June 2016 in front of the Libyan flag, with an army officer in their midst, and announced that they were following the rulings of the Dar al-Ifta’, i.e. the mufti in Tripoli.

By doing so, they sought to differentiate themselves from the Shura Council, which Ansar al-Sharia had prevented from using the national flag, as well as from all groups that referred to jihadist legal scholars.

They also tried to screen out fighters with links to extremists during the recruitment process – with mixed success, as described above. After they were accused of such links, they cut ties with dubious figures, which they never tired of emphasising when meeting with the military chain of command in Tripoli and Misrata, with British and American representatives – and with the author.

Individual fighters also sought protection by distancing themselves from militant Islamists. A young man from a western Libyan city who had fought against Haftar in Benghazi told the author: “One of my brothers had joined IS in Syria and was killed there.

When I came back from Benghazi, people started asking questions about my ideological tendencies. Later, some distant relatives of mine fought in the ranks of IS in Sabratha. For all these reasons, I sought protection at home and found it in the [anonymised] brigade.

When Haftar attacked Tripoli in 2019, his opponents had learned from this experience. They were now acutely aware of the toxic nature of links with extremists – which the Haftar camp and its foreign allies sought to fabricate from the first day of the war.

Prominent commanders from Benghazi, accused of such links rightly or wrongly, wanted to join the fight against Haftar in Tripoli. However, both figures from their own circles and western Libyan leaders advised them to stay away so as not to harm the cause.

Former foot soldiers of the Shura Council were able to join the forces fighting Haftar, provided they had never been members of Ansar al-Sharia or IS. In addition, many other young men who had been forcibly displaced from the east of the country by Haftar’s forces took up arms. But instead of forming their own unit, which would have attracted negative media attention, they joined various western Libyan groups.

Previously, they had found themselves in a precarious situation in western Libya, as displaced young men from the east faced generalised suspicion of being terrorists. They were often held without reason and without trial in the notorious prison of the “Deterrence Apparatus,” one of the most powerful militias in Tripoli.

By joining western Libyan groups as individual fighters, including the Deterrence Apparatus, they countered such suspicions and found protection.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Frederic Wehrey

The Jabal Nafusa

Rising to 900 meters above sea level (nearly 3,000 feet), the Jabal Nafusa are a rugged mountainous plateau that arcs around the Jafara plain west of Tripoli and stretches over 400 kilometers (about 250 miles) to the Tunisian border. Historically, the region has been of marginal political and strategic significance, though this changed with the 2011 revolution, given the range’s role as a base for anti-Qaddafi rebels and its location alongside routes into the capital.

The divisions within the Nafusa region that emerged during that period—as some towns supported the uprising and others opposed it—reflected in many instances the Qaddafi regime’s exploitation of intercommunal tensions by granting favored communities grazing land, employment in the security services, and even access to water.

Roughly speaking, the most prominent division today in the region is an ethnolinguistic one between Arab communities, who historically were pastoralists, and the Amazigh people, who were predominately settled farmers (hadhar).

That said, neither the Amazigh nor the Arab communities in the Nafusa region behave today as a monolithic bloc: allegiances and alliances among their respective towns often straddle the ethnolinguistic line and are constantly shifting.

Against this backdrop of fragmentation, climate change and its attendant worsening of water shortages has sharpened intercommunal tensions in the Nafusa region and tensions between Nafusa communities and the Tripoli government.

Historically farmed since antiquity, the eastern portions of the Nafusa range are the most fertile and productive, particularly for the cultivation of olive, fig, and almond trees. And even though the region has always grappled with droughts, sandstorms, and erratic rainfall, anthropogenic climate change and global warming are causing a different sort of threat.

Local farmers have noticed that winters are getting warmer while summers have become drier and hotter, without the usual cooling-off in the evening, leading to outbreaks of wildfires that required the dispatch of firefighting equipment from outside the country.

Rainfall appears less frequently, and sandstorms are changing in seasonality and increasing in intensity, the result of both global warming and local factors such as declining plant cover and soil erosion. Desertification—a direct result of climate change—is increasing as well, with expanding sand reducing the area of cultivable land.

The impact of these stressors has been magnified by the aforementioned inefficiencies in water supply and political marginalization. Qaddafi’s historical mistrust and suppression of the Amazigh people led him to deny predominantly Amazigh towns in the Nafusa region access to the MMR network, forcing a reliance on wells and water tanks that continues to this day.

The MMR’s discontinuity continues to plague the predominately Amazigh towns of Yifren, Nalut, Jadu, and Qala’a, as well as some Arab towns like Zintan, which was scheduled to be connected to the pipeline system before the 2011 revolution interrupted that work. Consequently, a significant number of Nafusa communities have been forced to rely on water shipments delivered by tanker trucks.

But these trucks, which haul water up steep mountain roads from a reservoir at the base of the Jabal Nafusa, are too few in number to service the entire region and often are prohibitively expensive for many families. Accessing deep groundwater aquifers through excavation and well-digging is another option, but this too is a costly and often unsuccessful endeavor.

Moreover, wells in some locales often are too few to cover the population’s needs or have fallen into disrepair. Even in communities that the MMR reaches, the water supply is often limited and inconsistent.

In the face of such infrastructural and climate challenges, some Amazigh communities in Nafusa have taken to reviving ancestral adaptation and stewardship mechanisms including agroforestry, terracing techniques, and water management practices.

One such method, agdal, is a communal approach to land utilization characterized by the cyclic utilization of grazing areas, a mindful approach to water consumption that prioritizes sustainable sustenance, and, most importantly, a profound set of social and ethical principles centered around the responsible management of fertile and water-abundant lands.

Traditional customs like agdal enable Amazigh communities to gather and preserve water during the rainy seasons and thrive amid challenging environmental circumstances.

Elsewhere, municipal leaders in Nafusa are leading grassroots efforts on climate adaptation, focusing on rationalizing water and electricity consumption and combating desertification.

They are pushing for greater local empowerment while soliciting services from the GNU in Tripoli and support from foreign states and donors. But such efforts remain hampered by meager budgets from authorities in the capital.

In one notable case, the mayors of three Nafusa towns—Jadu, Yifren, and Kabaw—reportedly diverted the 150,000 dinar allotment from the Tripoli government for the purchase of an official car to fund environmental services and to address their towns’ water scarcity problems.

More broadly, though, municipalities suffer from Libya’s aforementioned lack of political and fiscal decentralization, a shortcoming acutely felt by people in other parts of the country grappling with climate change, especially those in Libya’s underdeveloped desert south.

Fezzan

The southwest region of Fezzan, stretching over 200,000 square kilometers (nearly 125,000 square miles), is Libya’s driest, hottest, and most inhospitable area, marked by a Saharan topography of sand dune seas, gravel-strewn plateaus, volcanic mountains, dry riverbeds, and oasis depressions.

Climate change is thus a particular concern for its inhabitants. As it has been for millennia, water continues to be a prized and contested commodity in this region, evident in Fezzan’s role in supplying the aquifer-fed water to the MMR pipeline, a quality that has only grown in importance as Libya’s northern groundwater supplies are depleted by salinization.

Water has also aggravated a deepening sense of socioeconomic exclusion by Fezzan’s inhabitants, who comprise 10 percent of Libya’s population.

Today, Fezzan is Libya’s poorest region, even though it is home to important oil fields that produce one-quarter of the country’s total crude output. Though Qaddafi set up thousands of hectares of state-owned farms in the south, the infrastructure has fallen into disrepair since the 2011 revolution.

Moreover, the Qaddafi regime rewarded favored Arab tribes with preferential access to the smuggling trade and other privileges and marginalized non-Arab ethnolinguistic minorities, such as the Tabu and the Tuareg. The Tuareg, however, were slightly better off because they had been included in the security services and had access to agricultural land.

Those disparities are felt today in outbreaks of violent conflict between and within these groups, often over access to increasingly important fixed economic streams derived from the cross-border smuggling of people and goods as well as access to the region’s oil fields.

Climate change, with its attendant effects of water scarcity, expanding desertification, and extended droughts, will further inflame these fissures and also amplify the grievances the people of Fezzan feel toward the north.

Already, Fezzan’s importance as a source of water has been leveraged as a means of conveying those grievances, with tribes and protesters dismantling or otherwise sabotaging pumps along the MMR network, at one point at a rate of four pumps per month.

In the vital Hassawna area of Fezzan, which supplies Libya with 60 percent of its water, vandalism of wells diminished water output by over 30 percent, causing shortages in the north.

Rapidly diminishing groundwater is yet another problem, especially in the Murzuq Basin, where a major aquifer provides water to towns and farms in the southwest portion of Fezzan not connected to the MMR. According to one projection, the aquifer may be depleted as soon as 2037, causing severe socioeconomic damage throughout the area.

In the Tuareg and Tabu communities of the south, the perception of municipal neglect is magnified by deeply entrenched feelings of ethnolinguistic discrimination by Arab elites in the north.

In the southwest municipality of Ubari, for example—home to substantial agricultural land and Libya’s largest oil field, and the site of fierce intercommunal and political conflict from 2014 to 2016—Tuareg residents have long complained about the diversion of water and petroleum wealth to the north. Some believe that this diversion, and the attendant exodus of youth from the region, will pose an existential crisis for their survival as a distinct minority.

“The Tuareg will disappear,” noted one Tuareg activist from the area, who served as a former deputy minister of water. He described a proposal by a young local Tuareg engineer to purify sewage water and use drip-irrigation to cultivate a tree line from Ubari to Sabha in order to counter desertification without endangering future water access.

“As long as there are people there is sewage, so it is sustainable,” he maintained. But the engineer’s plan remained unrealized, he stated, owing to a lack of support from Tripoli. 

The effects of water scarcity, compounded by climate change, will disproportionately affect Fezzan’s most vulnerable inhabitants.

Even with the deterioration of agriculture infrastructure through conflict, theft, and neglect since 2011, many still depend on farming for their livelihood. Displaced persons and migrants—whose numbers in Fezzan are likely to grow in the face of climate shocks and slow-onset climate pressures—are especially reliant on agricultural work, sometimes in forced labor conditions under armed groups and smugglers.

Though men provide the primary labor, women often assist in the rearing of livestock, and children under the age of sixteen provide farming labor, especially during school vacations.

Given its remoteness, the south also faces challenges of transporting crops to northern markets. Road networks are especially vulnerable to worsening sandstorms, which raise transportation costs.

Throughout Fezzan, there are often fruitful exchanges between private and public entities in towns and cities. One such meeting took place at a workshop on the challenges and prospects of sustainable development in southern Libya, convened in February 2023 between Tripoli University, Sebha University, Sahara and Sahel Observatory, and the Libyan Center for Studies & Researches for Environmental Science and Technology.

An agricultural research center in the northern coastal city of Misrata, as another example, is teaching farmers in the south to grow crops using less water and to use water with greater salinity, while also introducing newer, more durable seed varieties that are better adapted to the increasingly arid conditions.

Even with these indicators of progress, municipal officials in Fezzan have complained vociferously about the lack of appropriate central government legislation, authorization, and funding, which would empower them to act as agents for climate adaptation rather than simply as providers of services such as water and waste removal.

They also face outmoded laws that prohibit direct interaction with foreign companies and officials, which prevent them from obtaining outside expertise and equipment. Partly as a result, local-level efforts to harness the region’s great potential in solar and wind remain sporadic and unrealized.

These same concerns about sustainability in the face of government inertia are also present in Libya’s third climate-affected periphery, the mountains of the east, where historically abundant rainfall is rapidly diminishing.

***

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on governance, conflict, and security in Libya, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf.

______________

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

Social Mechanisms in the Rise and Fall of Militant Islamists

Many of the patterns that are emphasised by prevailing approaches to jihadist mobilisation are also visible in the spread of militant Islamist groups in Libya. Young men joined these groups, and other militias made pacts with them to defend themselves against threats from third parties or because they assumed that militant Islamists had the best military prospects.

Such mechanisms are summarised below as tactical logics of action. Tactical considerations can also help to explain the decline of militant Islamists – namely when such groups no longer had any chance of prevailing militarily and could no longer offer protection, and having connections to them became a vulnerability.

However, such tactical logics of action do not explain why militant Islamists in Libya expanded rapidly in the period 2012–2014, although they were not yet operating in the context of an open conflict at that time.

They also do not provide a sufficient answer to the question of why militant Islamists did not benefit from the outbreak of the war over Tripoli in 2019, as they did in the second civil war in 2014– 2015.

Two other social mechanisms offer complementary explanations. Firstly, their social embeddedness made it easier for militant Islamists to gain social acceptance through mutual trust, loyalty and consensual ideological discourse.

The decline of militant Islamist movements therefore also manifested itself as increasing social isolation, as a distancing of their former allies and followers, along with a shift in societal discourse.

A final mechanism – the search for social recognition – helps to understand how dynamically and rapidly such processes of association and dissociation can take place. Of relevance here is the dialectical relationship between the quest for distinction and for conformity.

Rise: Tactical logics of action

Tactical considerations propelled both the rise of militant Islamists and their fall. These include a spectrum of logics of action ranging from pure opportunism to tactical radicalisation and emotionally charged acts of revenge. It is often difficult to judge whether actors operated out of sober calculation or emotional affect; in many cases, both may have played a role.

What these logics of action have in common is that they reflect reactions to the conflict or expectations about its future course. One example of how difficult it is to separate different motivations is the tolerance of many actors for militant Islamists in the period 2011–2014.

As shown below, this tolerance was partly rooted in social proximity and loyalties that go back to the 2011 war. However, the question of whether actors felt threatened by militant Islamists – or whether their violence was rather directed against their political opponents – played an equally important role.

In Benghazi, many leaders of revolutionary groups considered themselves Islamists and displayed a certain lenience towards the murders in the city – at least some of which were certainly attributable to militant Islamists.

A leading figure in the Rafallah Sahati Brigade told the author in November 2012 that former intelligence officers had only themselves to blame if they fell victim to murders, as their mere presence threatened social peace.

According to him, the extremists responsible for some of the murders could be appeased by excluding former regime officials from political life. In Darna, the leaders of the most powerful armed group, the Abu Salim Brigade, had a similar perspective on the killings in their city.

In April 2014, a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party (JCP) admitted that jihadists were probably responsible for some of the murders in Benghazi, but at the same time played down the danger posed by Ansar al-Sharia.

This forbearing attitude also explains why extremists who later joined Ansar al-Sharia or IS were sometimes able to operate under the guise of state institutions, such as the Supreme Security Committee, in the first few years after 2011 and thus gained access to state resources – such as in Sirte. It is obvious that such access to resources had to be conducive to mobilisation, as emphasised by theories of social movements as well as analyses of Islamist groups in other contexts.

It is not always clear at what point it changed from being a question of tolerance to one of of alliances. However, the more the conflicts escalated, the more actors were willing to make pacts with militant Islamists.

For example, a revolutionary commander in Sabratha said in retrospect about the involvement of later IS members in the town’s armed groups: “We knew them, we tolerated them until they started kidnapping and killing people. Before that, we didn’t care about them, and we thought it was good that they were supporting the fight against Assad in Syria.

In the 2014 war, we were already aware of Abdallah Haftar’s [later head of IS in Sabratha] inclination towards IS, but he fought with us as an individual, he didn’t have his own group. However, we decided to only give him heat-seeking missiles one by one – because we knew we could soon be in conflict with him and his kind. We never considered IS as an ally – they were just individuals fighting with us.”

In Benghazi, it became particularly clear how conflict dynamics contributed to the formation of alliances with militant Islamists. The alliance formed between the main revolutionary armed groups and Ansar al-Sharia in the Benghazi Revolutionaries Shura Council in June 2014 was a direct reaction to the attacks they had been subjected to by Haftar’s alliance since May.

“This is a counter-revolution! Haftar has not only attacked Ansar al-Sharia, but also the revolutionaries. Of course we are now fighting together against Haftar,” one of the leaders of the alliance told the author at the time.

Voices that opposed this alliance – not least for tactical reasons – were in the minority. Prominent among them was Ziyad Balam, head of the Omar al-Mukhtar Brigade, who refused to join the Shura Council.

According to Balam, he warned the leader of the Shura Council, Wissam ben Hamid, against allying with Ansar al-Sharia: “I told Wissam: ‘Foreign governments regard Ansar al-Sharia as al-Qaeda, and here in Libya they are associated with the assassinations.

Foreign fighter jets will come and bomb you.’ But Wissam dismissed the warning – he thought he could quickly defeat Haftar, make peace with Haftar’s allies and then once again distance himself from Ansar al-Sharia.”

Such logic later repeated itself in a modified form, after Haftar’s opponents, having been driven out of Benghazi, realised how much the alliance with jihadists had harmed them. By forming the Benghazi Defence Companies, they actually sought to distance themselves from jihadists, as explained below. However, in order to reach Benghazi from central Libya, they collaborated with fighters from Ajdabiya who were accused of having links to jihadists.

At the time, the group’s leaders defended this approach: “It is true that Usama al-Jadhran used to be with Ansar al-Sharia and is now with us, but he is not really religious. We need him until Ajdabiya, then we can get rid of him.” But in retrospect, the group’s most important figure, Ismail Sallabi, admitted: “The problem lay in our alliance with Ajdabiya, with Jadhran’s people.

They had their own connections with extremists, and we had little influence over the composition of their group.” One of the most controversial issues is the relationship between Haftar’s opponents in Benghazi and the local branch of the Islamic State.

While the Haftar camp demonised all opponents as Dawaesh (IS members), his opponents often denied any alliance with IS. With the passage of time, a more nuanced picture has emerged. In the words of one member of the Shura Council: “When IS supporters appeared, many of our fighters said: ‘Let them fight, the defence of our city unites us.’ Others confronted Wissam [ben Hamid], asking how he could fight alongside IS. Wissam replied that he was not in a position to fight the group.”

Another member of the Shura Council confirmed this: “After Haftar’s militias attacked our homes in October 2014, we were forced to withdraw into the city to protect our families. These attacks drove fighters into the arms of IS.

I spoke to Wissam about this. He told me that he couldn’t open a second front against IS now and had to give them some ammunition, otherwise they would attack us. But he was trying to prevent IS from gaining strength by only giving them a few weapons. Later, when we learnt that IS was buying weapons and ammunition from Haftar’s people, we stopped altogether.”

During the civil war of 2014–15, groups such as Ansar al-Sharia and IS benefited from alliances with revolutionary groups.

However, groups such as Ansar al-Sharia and IS not only benefited from alliances with revolutionary groups, but also from the fact that some of the latter became radicalised through conflicts.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Frederic Wehrey

Libya’s climate-vulnerable regions of Jabal Nafusa, Fezzan, and Jabal Akhdar underscore the important role played by civil society and municipalities in protecting marginalized communities.

A vast, arid, oil-dependent country of nearly 7 million people, Libya is acutely exposed to the deleterious effects of climate change. These problems include soaring temperatures, declining rainfall, rising sea levels, extended droughts, and sand and dust storms of increasing frequency, duration, and intensity, to name a few. The Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative Country Index ranks Libya 126 of 182 states, just after Iraq, in the lower-middle tier denoting most vulnerable countries.

The diminishing availability of water is Libya’s most pressing climate-related risk. Eighty percent of the country’s potable water supply is drawn from nonreplenishable fossil aquifers through a network of pipes known as the Great Man-Made River (GMMR), which suffers from deteriorating infrastructure, evaporation in open reservoirs, unsustainable extraction rates, and uneven service to Libya’s far-flung towns.

The lack of a national water strategy or integrated water policy, along with heavily subsidized water tariffs, has further exacerbated the effects of this scarcity. The provision of clean water increasingly has become a source of regional, communal, and political competition. Electricity is similarly threatened by climate disruptions, particularly temperature spikes, due in no small part again to eroding infrastructure and heavy subsidization, which contributes to exorbitant consumption rates and outages.

Oil dependence is yet another vulnerability. Libya, which has the largest proven reserves in Africa, has long relied on oil exports as its primary source of revenue. This pattern of reliance has resulted in a disproportionately large public sector, which employs 85 percent of the population and leaves the country severely exposed to future declines in oil prices caused by the transition to renewable energy and net-zero carbon pledges. Oil is also used to generate electricity, which is not only costly but contributes—along with the wasteful “flaring” or venting of gas during oil production—to Libya having the highest per-capita carbon emission rate in Africa.

At the height of the dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s ambitions, arable land comprised only 1.2 percent of the country’s territory and has since shrunk to less than 1 percent. The agricultural sector itself has been contracting steadily since the 2011 revolution, owing to the cumulative effects of conflict, supply chain disruptions, rising costs of agricultural supplies, and the lack of renewable water supplies.

And while it contributes to a miniscule portion of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), estimated at less than 2 percent in 2022, the agriculture sector continues to be a source of income for a not-insubstantial percentage of its inhabitants—estimated at 22 percent in 2020. Libya’s low agricultural output means that it is forced to import three-quarters of its foodstuffs, making the country extremely vulnerable to disruptions in global food supplies, including those resulting from climate change. Endemic government inattention to the agricultural sector has only worsened this dynamic. “They don’t prioritize it because they think it doesn’t contribute to the gross income,” noted a Libyan soil scientist in a telephone interview. “But if we lose local food production, we have food insecurity.”1

These vulnerabilities present an especially dire threat to the well-being and human security of people living in the sparsely populated regions of the Jabal Nafusa (Nafusa Mountains), also known as Jabal Gharbi, west of Tripoli; the southern Fezzan region; and the Jabal Akhdar (Green Mountains) in eastern Libya.

Here, climate shocks are being aggravated not only by environmental degradation but also by socioeconomic marginalization, political and intercommunal conflicts, and collapsing infrastructure. The cumulative impacts of these factors on food security and subsistence farming are a particular concern in these three areas, given that the Jabal Akhdar region produces half of all of Libya’s crops and the Jabal Nafusa region, its adjacent Jafara Plain, and the Fezzan grow the other half. Farmers interviewed in these regions were acutely aware of how climate change combines with political and socioeconomic problems, especially poor governance, to threaten their livelihood.

“The main factor is neglect,” noted one farmer in the Sidi Sayeh area south of Tripoli. “There is no oversight, no support, no investment in growing our capacity as farmers. Climate change adds another layer, but it is the juxtaposition of its effects with the lack of institutional oversight and support that will push farmers like me to leave behind their ancestral practices.”

It is not only farmers who are threatened in these areas. Migrants and refugees are especially at risk, given the proximity of some of these agricultural areas to borders and their resultant role in hosting displaced persons. So too are Libyan ethnolinguistic minorities, for whom climate change compounds preexisting grievances of discrimination. Workers in the informal sector, women, and children are also imperiled.

Understanding how climate change is affecting the well-being and livelihood of these at-risk populations is therefore essential for the crafting of a viable, more inclusive climate strategy, one that mobilizes local resources and knowledge to build better pathways for resilience—for all of Libya’s inhabitants.

The Climate-Governance-Misgovernance Nexus in Libya

Long-standing problems of governance, institutional fragmentation, political tensions, and recurring armed conflict have sharpened Libya’s vulnerability to climate change and also impeded a coherent government response to climate mitigation and adaptation.

The roots of the country’s climate fragility are found in Qaddafi’s poor management of resources and inefficient state-owned monopolies managing water and electricity. Added to this were Qaddafi’s overly ambitious agricultural schemes that saw the rapid depletion of coastal aquifers and a dependence on his much-touted megaproject, the GMMR. He often used the project politically, prioritizing access for favored communities and excluding others who were deemed less loyal.

His peculiar brand of socialist rule oversaw the collectivization of land in the mid-1980s, a process that removed existing legal safeguards on nature preserves and hastened the deforestation of the Green Belt around Tripoli and other cities, which for decades had contributed to a beneficial microclimate, slowed desertification, and stopped soil erosion.

Since Qaddafi’s death in 2011, a worsening spiral of factional conflict, corruption, infrastructural decay, and predation has left ever-greater numbers of people exposed to climate shocks. The chaos has also produced a profound lag in the country’s official response to climate change. Of the 196 signatories to the 2016 Paris Agreement, only Libya has not signed a Nationally Determined Contribution. And even though the country has established a renewable energy plan and has enormous potential for solar and wind energy, it has made little progress on these fronts, in part because of a lack of competitiveness in the private sector and bureaucratic resistance from state-owned monopolies.

Political fissures and elite rivalries are in no small measure to blame for this paralysis. The country is nominally ruled by a Government of National Unity (GNU), but in practice it is split between the Tripoli-based administration and Khalifa Haftar’s increasingly militarized administration in the east. Despite some climate-related cooperation and exchange of information, this split continues to hobble progress.

Even within the GNU, there has been competition over control of climate policy, most evident between the Ministry of the Environment and a climate authority within the prime minister’s office—though the two bodies have reportedly improved their collaboration and coordination.

Increasingly, key ministries and institutions have been taken over by armed groups, in both the east and west, which have further contributed to climate vulnerability through environmental predation, converting tracts of forests into more profitable money-laundering schemes like apartments, malls, and resorts, while also selling chopped-down trees as charcoal.

The effects of such predation, particularly acute in the western Jafara Plain and in the eastern Jabal Akhdar, have only worsened the effects of climate change, particularly for those Libyan citizens who make a living off the land.

“The consequences of climate change became more acute ever since they started breaking down the forests into smaller units, cutting the trees, and selling off the land,” noted a farmer in the southern environs of Tripoli.6 And although the agricultural police department that operates in both the east and west has publicized its crackdown on illegal clearing, it does not cross the red lines of dominant armed groups.

Elsewhere, Libya’s ability to build climate policy is hobbled by a dearth of qualified personnel, insufficient technical capacity, poor local data collection, poor collaboration between the government and universities, and a lack of local-level participation and activism.

Libyan municipalities in particular have important roles to play on climate change advocacy and awareness, but they have been frustrated by a lack of administrative, budgetary, and political support from the capital.8 Libya’s civil society is similarly constrained by a lack of support and increasingly repressive security measures from authorities in both the east and the west. This lack of support has had a chilling effect on climate activists.

These daunting structural and political problems will have profoundly negative consequences for the country’s ability to surmount the challenges of climate change—and they are felt acutely in the mountainous zone just west of the capital.

***

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on governance, conflict, and security in Libya, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf.

______________

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Georgetown Security Studies Review

The Wagner Group’s entrenched and increasingly overt operations in Libya reflect Russia’s strategic challenge to Western influence and its ambition to solidify its geopolitical power in North Africa. By backing Khalifa Haftar, Russia has leveraged private military contractors (PMCs) to exploit global distractions and Libya’s political disarray, cementing its presence in the Mediterranean and extending its reach into Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Wagner Group’s evolution from covert operations to a pronounced military role aligns with Russia’s broader objectives of controlling strategic resources and key geographic areas that can encircle Western powers and challenge them on multiple fronts. 

The Wagner Group’s History in Libya

Functioning as an instrument of Russian foreign policy, Wagner’s presence in Libya dates back to early 2017, initially involved in demining operations. Their significant engagement began in May 2018, with around 300 mercenaries aiding the LNA in various military operations. Wagner’s influence expanded during the LNA’s offensive to capture Tripoli in 2019, with substantial financial backing from the United Arab Emirates. Despite suffering setbacks due to Turkish military intervention supporting the Government of National Accord (GNA), Wagner shifted focus to defending strategic locations in eastern Libya, constructing defense lines, and collaborating with regional militias such as the Sudanese Janjaweed and Chadian militia FACT.

Throughout its operations, Wagner employed various advanced military tactics and equipment, including drones, anti-aircraft systems, and armored vehicles. Politically, Wagner has supported Khalifa Haftar and established contacts with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the late dictator Muammar Gaddafi, to influence Libyan politics in favor of Russia’s strategic interests. 

The Wagner Group’s expansion into North Africa, West Africa, and the Sahel has become a critical element of Russia’s foreign policy, which has expanded its footprint in the region by exploiting Libya’s political fragmentation. Despite the upheavals following the death of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group’s operations have been integral to the Kremlin’s support of General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA).

For instance, during the Tripoli offensive in 2019, Wagner was accused of using illegal booby traps and land mines and recruiting Syrian fighters to bolster Haftar’s forces. In addition, Wagner has facilitated weapons transfers, established bases, and trained LNA forces, which has solidified Russia’s role as a dominant power in the region. Lastly, Libya’s geographic location, linking Niger, Chad, and Sudan to North Africa and Europe, makes it of vital strategic importance to the Kremlin. Indeed, Wagner’s involvement in Libya has facilitated Russia’s use of Libya as a logistical hub for operations extending into the Sahel and beyond and interference in unstable and war-torn countries like Niger and Sudan. 

As Libya remains divided between the UN-backed Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, and a rival administration in Benghazi, dominated by Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), Wagner’s alignment with Haftar has allowed the group to leverage Libya’s vast oil reserves and gold deposits in Africa, ranking among the world’s top fifty to reinforce Russia’s energy dominance across the Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa.

This strategic alignment with Haftar allows Russia to control and influence one of the world’s most significant oil-producing regions. By securing access to Libya’s extensive oil reserves, Russia not only ensures a steady flow of energy resources but also gains leverage over global energy markets. This control can be used to manipulate oil prices, exert political pressure on oil-dependent nations, and create economic dependencies. Furthermore, by establishing a presence in Libya, Russia can potentially disrupt European energy supplies, particularly as Europe seeks to diversify its energy sources away from Russian gas.

General Averyanov’s Leadership and Expansion Strategy

Since Prigozhin’s death, the Wagner Group’s operations in Libya have increasingly come under the direct control of the Russian Defense Ministry, as the involvement of General Andrei Averyanov and Colonel General Yunus-Bek Yevkurov shows. As the de facto leader of the Wagner Group, General Averyanov has orchestrated a series of military and diplomatic initiatives across Libya.

Since his appointment, Averyanov has been implicated in high-profile operations, such as targeted killings of opposition leaders and orchestrating attacks aimed at destabilizing rival factions. These actions serve to weaken opposition to Haftar and consolidate Russian influence in Libya. Averyanov’s strategy involves orchestrating destabilization efforts to create chaos among anti-Haftar forces, thereby facilitating the Libyan National Army (LNA) to gain ground. His strategy has been instrumental in advancing Moscow’s geopolitical goals in the region by enhancing military training programs, securing key oil fields, and providing essential resources to support Haftar’s forces.​

In September 2023, Averyanov met with General Khalifa Haftar to solidify their alliance, followed by diplomatic trips to Mali, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Niger. Under Averyanov’s command, analysts estimate several hundred to 2,000 Wagner operatives remain in Libya, with an additional 4,600 spread across sub-Saharan Africa. These contractors run three significant airbases in the oil-rich Sirte basin, in al-Jufra, and Brak al-Shati, facilitating the movement of goods and military supplies between allies in Sudan and other sub-Saharan regions. 

In April 2024, significant quantities of military equipment, including towed artillery, armored personnel carriers, and rocket launchers, were offloaded from Russian vessels at the port of Tobruk, sourced from the Russian-controlled port of Tartus in Syria. Further talks are underway to provide Russian warships with docking rights at Tobruk, enhancing military collaboration by exchanging air defense systems and training LNA pilots.

This expansion is part of a comprehensive strategy to boost Russia’s regional naval presence. The strategic location of Tobruk, near the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, would effectively turn Libya into a critical operational base for Russia’s African and Mediterranean military and strategic actions. Additionally, granting Russian warships docking rights at the port of Tobruk would enable Russia to exert substantial control over Libyan airspace and project military power across the Mediterranean. 

Such a development would diminish Western influence in the region, undermining the strategic and operational flexibility of NATO and the EU while bolstering Russia’s ability to challenge and counteract Western geopolitical interests.

Averyanov’s initiatives have also enabled Haftar to exert significant influence over the civil war in Sudan by using bases under his control to ship weapons to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF). These moves are part of Russia’s broader strategy to strengthen its military presence in Libya and exert influence across the Mediterranean and North Africa. By positioning itself as a formidable counterbalance to Western powers like NATO and the European Union, Russia aims to counter Western geopolitical interests in the region.

Implications for Regional Security and Western Response

The visible escalation of Russian activities in Libya presents a direct threat to Western interests and regional stability. Wagner Group’s operations now potentially include manipulating migration flows to Europe and restricting airspace rights, strategic moves that could enable Moscow to exert significant pressure on the European Union and NATO.

This manipulation is seen in Russia’s leveraging of migration through Libya, where the instability and human rights abuses in migrant detention centers contribute to a surge in migrants heading to Southern Europe, creating socio-political strain within the EU. The presence of the Wagner Group and its influence over local militias and detention centers exacerbate this humanitarian crisis. Research indicates that 20% of transit migrants in Libya come from countries like Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan, which have high asylum acceptance rates in Europe.

To curb Wagner’s influence in Libya, the United States and its allies should implement a multi-faceted strategy. This may include enacting new legislation similar to the RICO Act to increase punitive measures against Wagner’s financial operations, thereby disincentivizing their presence by cutting off financial gains. Strengthening diplomatic ties with Libyan factions aligned with Western interests, particularly the Government of National Unity (GNU), and imposing targeted sanctions on key Russian figures will further limit Wagner’s support.

Additionally, enhancing NATO’s presence in the Mediterranean and providing military assistance to anti-Wagner factions in Libya could bolster local resistance. The evolving dynamics in Libya underscore the need for a coordinated international response to counterbalance Russia’s strategic maneuvers and mitigate its growing influence. Russia’s exploitation of Libya further demonstrates that its challenge to NATO is not confined to the Eastern flank but also aims at the Southern flank. Addressing Russia’s multifaced strategy is the best option for NATO to avoid a future multi-front confrontation with Russia.

_______________________

Mohamed Abaid

Power outages remain a significant global issue, affecting numerous countries and their populations. These interruptions can range from minor inconveniences to severe, prolonged disruptions that cripple essential services and economic activities. This report explores the causes, effects, and durations of recent power outages worldwide, and highlights how Libya, once plagued by frequent blackouts, has managed to stabilize its power grid under the leadership of Dr. Mohamed Al-Mashay and the General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL).

Causes of Power Outages

Power outages can stem from various sources, including technical failures, adverse weather conditions, insufficient infrastructure, and geopolitical conflicts. Technical failures often involve breakdowns in critical components like transformers and transmission lines. Adverse weather, such as hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves, can cause direct damage to power infrastructure and increase electricity demand beyond supply. Many developing regions suffer from outdated infrastructure and inadequate maintenance, heightening the risk of outages. Additionally, geopolitical conflicts can disrupt fuel supplies necessary for power generation, leading to shortages.

Recent Global Instances of Power Outages

Southern Europe and the Balkans

In June 2024, a major power blackout hit Southern Europe, including the Balkans. Countries like Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro experienced significant disruptions due to a cascading grid failure. The blackout lasted several hours, causing widespread economic and social impacts as the interconnected nature of modern power grids means a fault in one area can affect multiple regions simultaneously.

Ecuador

Ecuador experienced a nationwide blackout in June 2024 due to a faulty transmission line. This outage, which lasted over three hours, disrupted healthcare, transportation, and commerce, highlighting the critical need for robust infrastructure and rapid response mechanisms.

Malta

Malta faced a nationwide blackout with unclear causes, underscoring the island’s vulnerability to power interruptions. Additionally, scheduled power outages were implemented in specific localities to manage grid stability and conduct essential maintenance.

Kenya

In Kenya, multiple counties experienced power interruptions due to scheduled maintenance by Kenya Power. Although planned, these interruptions caused significant inconvenience, emphasizing the challenges of maintaining an aging infrastructure amidst high demand.

West Africa

Ghana and other West African countries faced blackouts due to disruptions in gas supplies from Nigeria, crucial for power generation. Known locally as “dumsor,” these outages highlight the region’s dependency on fossil fuels and the impact of supply chain issues on electricity availability.

Effects of Power Outages

The effects of power outages are far-reaching, affecting societies and economies alike. Short-term impacts include disrupted daily activities, productivity loss, and potential damage to electrical appliances. Prolonged outages lead to more severe consequences such as food spoilage, disrupted medical services, and increased crime rates due to unlit streets and homes. Businesses suffer financial losses, and overall economic growth can be stunted. Additionally, frequent power cuts cause significant psychological stress on residents.

Libya’s Transformation

Amidst these global challenges, Libya stands out as a success story in stabilizing its power grid. Once notorious for chronic electricity shortages, Libya has made significant strides in recent years under the leadership of Dr. Mohamed Al-Mashay and GECOL.

Leadership and Initiatives

Dr. Mohamed Al-Mashay took charge as the Chairman of GECOL in 2022. Under his leadership, GECOL implemented various reforms to improve the reliability of the national electrical grid. One of the key initiatives was the distribution of 55,000 prepaid smart electricity meters, which helped reduce electricity theft, improve customer service, and facilitate renewable energy integration. GECOL plans to distribute 1.4 million meters over the next two years, enhancing revenue collection and reducing energy usage by 20%.

Increased Generation Capacity

Libya’s power generation capacity has increased significantly, reaching 8,200 megawatts (MW) in 2023, up from less than 6,000 MW in previous years. By summer 2024, the capacity is projected to reach 8,700 MW, ensuring a reliable power supply even during peak demand periods. This increase has been crucial in meeting the growing electricity demand and preventing the frequent blackouts that once plagued the nation.

Technological and Operational Improvements

GECOL has also focused on integrating renewable energy sources and improving grid management. The development of an app providing real-time information on scheduled power cuts and ways to reduce electricity demand has empowered consumers and improved grid stability. Additionally, GECOL’s extensive fiber optic network has been leveraged for telecommunications, generating additional revenue and reducing dependency on government subsidies.

Conclusion

While many countries continue to struggle with power outages, Libya’s turnaround offers a beacon of hope. The nation’s success in stabilizing its power grid and achieving a surplus of electricity sets a remarkable example. Through strategic leadership, technological innovations, and international partnerships, Libya has transformed from a country known for frequent blackouts to one with a reliable and robust electricity supply. This achievement underscores the potential for other nations to overcome their power challenges and ensure a stable, prosperous future for their citizens.

______________

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

What are militant Islamists?

When searching for an appropriate explanation, it is first necessary to define the object of the analysis: militant Islamist movements. We are not simply looking at terrorism: the latter is one tactic among others that militant Islamist movements can potentially use – depending on the balance of power they find themselves in with their opponents.

The terms “extremism” and “radicalisation” also do not necessarily apply, because extremism is always relative: extreme in comparison to socially accepted ideas. The literature on radicalisation is mainly concerned with individuals, tight circles or small underground groups that isolate themselves from society.

The few existing studies of the decline of militant Islamist groups explicitly concentrate on terrorist groups. They emphasise military dynamics and aspects resulting from the strict isolation of these organisations from the societies that surrounded them.

In contrast, Libya’s militant Islamists developed largely openly in the first few years after 2011 and enjoyed considerable social acceptance. This is not the only reason why it makes sense to view them as social movements.

Social movement theory has long been applied to both violent and civilian Islamist groups; it also provides part of the conceptual toolkit for understanding the Libyan case. This includes the importance of political opportunity structures, access to resources that enable mobilisation, and the varying resonance of narratives and frames.

Analyses of Islamist movements fall into two camps when it comes to categorising them: those that emphasise the differences between various tendencies and those that group all Islamists together.

Social scientists in the first camp seek to differentiate between violent Islamists and moderate, civilian movements. They usually use the term “jihadism” for the former and “Islamism” or “political Islam” for the latter. In the second camp, authoritarian governments from the Persian Gulf to North Africa use “Islamists” and “terrorists” as interchangeable terms for all their political opponents.

In Western public discourse, right-wing social scientists and scholars of Islam also adopt this generalisation, and in countries such as Germany, the media and the authorities increasingly use “Islamist” as a synonym for “terrorist”.

There is no need to explain here that this equivalency is fundamentally wrong, regardless of whether it is based on political motivation or ignorance.

The term “jihadism” is ill-suited to adequately describing Libyan realities.

The term “militant Islamism,” as used in this study, distinguishes itself from both camps. Militant Islamism can be defined as violent mobilisation that is based on an Islamic idiom and pursues the declared aim of reshaping the political and social order. This definition is explicitly broader than the category of jihadism – a term that is itself rather controversial.

The use of “jihadism” generally assumes that this denotes a clearly defined doctrinal school – which, however, turns out to be incorrect on closer inspection. The Libyan context alone offers several examples of how ambivalent the term “jihadism” is: after all, the fight against Italian colonisation entered collective memory as a jihad and was mythologised as such by Gaddafi.

In the post-Gaddafi era, the supposed anti-Islamist Haftar and so-called Madkhalists in the ranks of his forces also called for jihad. And yet, the Madkhalists are reactionary Salafists whose doctrine above all emphasises absolute obedience to the ruler and is actually regarded by Islamic scholars as quietist, and hence incompatible with Salafist jihadism.

Due to their explicitly reactionary agenda, they do not fall under the definition of “militant Islamism,” whose period of decline in Libya was also that of the Madkhalists’ expansion. The fact that this study examines not only Salafist jihadist groups, but militant Islamism more broadly, is also due to Libyan realities. The country’s Salafist jihadist groups cannot be separated from other Islamist movements as easily as those who prefer to emphasise differences and nuances would suggest.

As this study shows, jihadist groups gained their initial strength not least from their many links with Islamists who were more flexible in their approach to ideology. Moreover, moderate, civilian Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood were evidently exposed to much the same dynamics as the militant forces, since the decline encompassed the entire Islamist spectrum. This also speaks in favour of not limiting the analysis to groups that were ideologically aligned with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

Methodology

This study identifies mechanisms at work in the expansion and decline of militant Islamist mobilisation as seen in Libya between 2011 and 2020. These mechanisms partly follow prevailing approaches, but go beyond them. They were developed from recurring patterns that the author discerned from 39 interviews. The interviewees included former leaders, members and allies of militant Islamist groups as well as other actors and observers who closely followed the rise and decline of such groups in their social environment.

The majority of these interviews were conducted in Libya and Istanbul in 2022–2023. By that time, militant Islamists were no longer relevant actors in the conflict. This enabled conversations that were generally more open and less characterised by politically motivated distortion than was the case when the groups in question were active. This is another reason why it can be advantageous to examine Islamist mobilisation after it has subsided.

Where the interviewees tended towards ex post facto rationalisation, the author was able to compare their assessments with his own, which he gained from discussions with the same groups of actors in the years following 2011 – at a time when militant Islamist groups were rapidly growing.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Hafed Al-Ghwell

The recent European parliamentary elections have set the stage for interesting shifts in the bloc’s policies toward North Africa, a region that is increasingly pivotal, and not only for its proximity to Europe.

In recent years, North Africa has risen sharply in Western policy priorities owing to rapidly increasing roles in managing migration, bolstering European energy security, counterterrorism cooperation, regional stabilization, and climate change mitigation. Given the outcomes of these elections, it is critical to explore how EU-North Africa relations might evolve or prefer continuity in Europe’s approach toward its closest southern neighbors.

On migration, the changes in the European Parliament’s composition signal potential continuity of favoring stringent immigration controls, and increased reliance on externalization policies that empower North African countries to stem migration flows before they reach European shores. The policy aligns with existing practices, where the EU has sought to reinforce its borders indirectly through collaboration with third countries, coupled with financial incentives to bolster their capacity to deter migrations.

The sustainability of these policies, however, has come under intense scrutiny. Externalization has proven effective in reducing numbers, but it does not deal with the underlying causes of migration, such as instability, economic hardship, and climate change impacts that prevail both in origin countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and transit countries, mainly in North Africa. The resulting policy framework thus risks perpetuating a cycle where short-term containment overshadows long-term solutions.

North African governments appear to have embraced their sharply expanding roles as gatekeepers of “Fortress Europe.” After all, the threat of a repeat of the 2015 crisis has and will continue to provide significant leverage in negotiations with Brussels.

The jury is still out on whether a continuation of the dynamic will eventually shift discussions toward more comprehensive partnerships that include investments in key sectors, infrastructure development, and climate resilience. However, with the current makeup of this next parliament, the EU will likely resist adopting more nuanced strategies beyond the current “contain first, answer later“’ approach, even when faced with continued migration pressures and heightened criticism from human rights groups.

On climate policy, the proposed outcomes and sentiments expressed in continental frameworks such as the European Green Deal make it clear that energy security and sustainability are taking on a new-found primacy in European policy circles. These are not just shaping the internal dynamics within the European bloc but also recalibrating extrinsic partnerships, particularly with its resource-endowed southern neighbor North Africa.

In turn, North African countries are keenly aware of the evolving energy narrative within the EU for various reasons. Aside from Algeria’s meteoric rise as an alternate supplier for disrupted Russian gas, there is also the region’s unmatched potential in solar and wind energy that makes it a pivotal player in the EU’s “greenification,” and mitigating the dependence on non-renewables.

Such a trajectory holds great promise for North African countries willing to harness this potential. A concerted move to establish clearer policy directives and bolster infrastructure can channel substantial EU investment into renewable projects — investment that can be a catalyst for broader economic revitalization and diversification within the region. 

However, while the EU’s policy shift toward the green transition and the enshrined goals such as net-zero emissions by 2050 stand as a testament to its commitment to addressing climate change, this shift is not without its complexities.

The impetus toward a green transition, while supported by some European political factions, faces resistance from others, particularly from sectors with entrenched interests in traditional energy sources or those that perceive environmental regulations as threatening to economic competitiveness. Such actions have a direct bearing on the magnitude and pace of green investment flows, and by extension, the benefits to North Africa.

Moreover, the greening of European economies is likely to prompt a systemic shift in global energy markets. North African countries, therefore, perceive the existential necessity not only to align with this transition but also to integrate into the emerging green value chains — motivated by opportunities to create new industries, jobs, and economic diversification.

Simultaneously, North African states are disproportionately affected by climate impacts, such as water scarcity and agricultural disruptions, which worsen existing vulnerabilities. Arguably, a deeper collaboration with the EU on climate finance and technology transfers presents not just a route to economic development but also a way to bolster climate resilience — a synergy that dovetails with both EU’s foreign policy aspects of the Green Deal and North Africa’s overall development in future.

In light of security recalibrations in the Sahel, notably the termination of the EU Training Mission in Mali and other missions in Niger, the bloc insists that it will remain a steadfast security partner to Africa. Despite withdrawals from specific operations in the Sahel due to the region’s political instability and the arrival of competing security entities such as Russian mercenaries, the EU’s resolve to engage with African nations on security matters, notably through new civilian-military missions, signals a flexible approach to tackling transnational threats.

North African policymakers are also cognizant of these shifts. Approaches that combine direct military training with broader, capacity-building missions align with both current and future efforts to bolster regional stability and counter threats that could spill over from the Sahel. This operational reshaping indicates European readiness to adapt its security strategies to political changes within its territories and external geopolitical fluctuations, shoring up its role as a critical security partner for a region that sits right next to a volatile Sahel and Horn of Africa.

Lastly, on democratization, the EU’s stance has evolved toward democracy support — a noticeable pivot from an assertive democratization agenda — to safeguard democratic spaces in restrictive contexts. The recalibrated strategy is less about exporting a specific democratic model and more focused on preserving the civic freedoms necessary for democracy to breathe.

The change signifies a recognition of the complexities inherent in supporting democracy in environments where political repression and challenges to civic freedoms are prevalent. Thus, the EU will likely increasingly favor initiatives that strengthen the resilience of civil society, rather than pushing for immediate political transformations.

In sum, the trajectory of EU-North Africa relations in the wake of European parliamentary elections presents a complex interplay of continuity and potential shifts. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for navigating existing challenges and leveraging opportunities to redefine the region’s engagement with Europe. Future strategies should remain nuanced, aiming to balance national interests with collaboration in areas of shared threats, from energy security to climate action, while pursuing a migration agenda that respects dignity and promotes development.

***

Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

________________

The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Militant Islamist Movements in Libya

Wolfram Lacher

Who were the Islamists?

Part of the answer to the question of how to explain the sudden disappearance of Libya’s militant Islamists is that many supposed Islamists never actually were as such. After 2011, numerous political actors and media in Libya and the wider region used “Islamist” as a stigmatic term.

Political opponents were branded as Islamists in order to discredit them. It was commonplace to label someone a Muslim Brother or to slander them as an al-Qaeda member without any basis. International media, diplomats and analysts often adopted such categorising.

Numerous articles stated, for example, that the paramilitary Libya Shield Forces were close to the Muslim Brotherhood or that Misrata’s armed groups were Islamist – both of which were simply false.

This misrepresentation repeated from one article to the next became widely accepted fact. The struggle over the conflict’s narratives that drove this dynamic was particularly virulent during the second civil war in 2014–2015.

In the 2019–2020 war over Tripoli, pro-Haftar propagandists once again tried to stigmatise their opponents as Islamists and terrorists. Since Haftar’s defeat, there has been much less recourse to such propaganda, thereby strengthening the impression that the influence of Islamists in Libya has greatly diminished. In fact, however, this influence had previously been excessively inflated.

Nevertheless, this development only partially explains why militant Islamists were in the spotlight until 2016 and have almost completely disappeared from it since 2020. In addition to fabrications and often inaccurate reporting, there has also been an actual rise and fall in militant Islamist movements.

What requires explanation, then, is why many actors maintained close ties with militant Islamists in the first few years after 2011, which in turn made it easier for their opponents to brand them Islamists as well, before increasingly distancing themselves from Islamists from 2015 onwards.

Analyses of Militant Islamist Mobilisation – and the Libyan Puzzle

Over the past two decades, both social science research and policy-oriented analysis has dealt extensively with the question of how and why militant Islamist movements spread. By contrast, how to explain their decline has rarely been the subject of investigation. And yet whether or not explanations for militant Islamism are valid should also be examined in terms of whether they can account for its decline. Prevailing approaches to explaining militant Islamist mobilisation differ primarily in how they assess the role of ideology as compared to other drivers of mobilisation.

Simplistic positions, which either declare ideology to be the most important factor or reject it altogether, no longer dominate the academic debate. Another theoretical divide is also gradually being overcome: between the tendency to dismiss ideology as merely an instrument in the hands of elites and the assumption that members of ideologically defined groups are ‘true believers’ whose actions are guided by their beliefs.

A number of studies show that ideology can fulfil these two functions and more within the same organisation. Among politicians and security authorities, however, the vague concept of radicalisation is still very popular, and is often associated with a strong focus on ideology.

Nuanced academic approaches, on the other hand, view the internalisation of extremist ideology as one aspect of radicalisation processes that are often driven more by social isolation and violent confrontation. Nevertheless, it is widely assumed that ideological socialisation and indoctrination make militant Islamist groups particularly tough and resilient.

The very category of a “jihadist group” implies that this is a sui generis actor whose peculiarity lies in the particularly important role of ideology. Some detect an “extremist’s advantage” in using ideology to strengthen trust between members of an armed group and thus also its fighting power.

Fewer analysts note that the proportion of hardened ideologues varies considerably from one group to the next. Conventional wisdom would therefore suggest that ideology gives militant Islamists in Libya cohesion, making them an extraordinarily tenacious political and military force. The sudden decline of militant Islamist groups then raises the question of what role ideology actually played in these groups.

This is relevant beyond the case of Libya. During the same period, the formerly flourishing jihadist movement in neighbouring Tunisia also rapidly lost popularity. The other analytical school also reaches the limits of its explanatory power with the Libyan case: the school that focuses on non-ideological drivers of jihadist mobilisation.

Over the past two decades, it has been common among social scientists, think tanks and non-governmental organisations to see the recruitment and mobilisation successes of jihadist groups primarily as a symptom of fundamental political and social grievances. Arbitrary repression by authoritarian regimes radicalises opposition groups – for example in prisons where young people who have been unjustly arrested are imprisoned together with committed ideologues.

Policy-oriented analyses of jihadist groups as parties to civil wars often emphasise that the rise of these groups can be explained by tactical alliances or by the search for protection against state security forces and their foreign supporters.23 They stress that the counterterrorism campaign of the USA and allied states after 2001 proved extremely counterproductive due to the civilian harm it caused; indeed, it provided jihadists with a “recruitment bonanza”. In the states of the Sahel, identity-based persecution drove entire population groups into the arms of jihadists.

Socio-economic grievances and resentment of economic orders that are perceived as unjust, as well as financial incentives, are also cited as important factors in joining jihadist groups. Accordingly, the fight against these groups primarily requires tackling the fundamental drivers of conflicts as well as building a fairer, more effective state.

There is extensive empirical evidence of links between the perception of arbitrary or collective threats and successful recruitment by jihadist groups. This does not detract from the fact that certain conditions can reverse such correlations, for example if the state’s capacity for repression is so strong that even massive injustice does not encourage militant mobilisation, but rather inhibits it.

And yet, developments in Libya suggest that such explanations ignore important aspects. After all, Libya’s militant Islamists underwent rapid expansion in the first two years after the fall of Gaddafi, when the conflicts had not yet escalated, but when Islamists were no longer subject to repression either.

Above all, however, conflicts continued to rage in Libya in the years after 2016, even as militant Islamist movements grew increasingly marginalised as actors in these conflicts. Contrary to general expectations, the latter also applied to the war over Tripoli in 2019.

And Libya is not an isolated case: in conflicts such as in Somalia or Iraq, jihadists gained importance at times when they offered themselves as allies to other actors and lost this importance once again when they became a threat to their allies. Both ideology and conflict dynamics therefore provide insufficient explanations for the decline of militant Islamist movements in Libya.

***

Dr Wolfram Lacher is Senior Associate in the Africa and Middle East Research Division at SWP.

__________________

SWP Research Paper – June 2024 – German Institute for International and Security Affairs