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Claudia Gazzini

Unexpected Cooperation

Yet contrary to worries, the rival governments have found a way to work together. Humanitarian aid is arriving from abroad and international rescue teams have hit the ground running. Assistance is also arriving from across Libya, offered up by supporters of both administrations, which have worked well to get supplies where they need to go.

As for foreign donors, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), both of which have for years supported the east-based LNA, were especially timely and generous with their assistance. The UAE may have sent the most planes, carrying food and material for shelters, as well as teams specialised in underwater rescue.

The hClaudia Gazziniead of the recently established Derna emergency committee, Brigadier General Baset Bughreis, tells me that since the tragedy, “flights from the UAE bringing aid and technical teams have never stopped”. For its part, Egypt staged a remarkable show to announce the shipment of its aid: President Abdelfattah al-Sisi presided over a televised parade close to the Egyptian-Libyan border showcasing dozens of bulldozers, trucks and ambulances entering Libya.

But other countries have stepped up as well. Within a day of the flood, Türkiye and Italy (supporters of the Tripoli-based government) flew in the first members of their respective search-and-rescue teams and equipment. Days later, both dispatched ships carrying heavier equipment, including helicopters.

I came across rescue workers from Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Spain and Malta searching for survivors in the rubble. On 16 September, on the highway into Derna, I spotted a Russian cargo plane parked at al-Abraq airport, 40km to the city’s west. A local eyewitness told me that the aircraft had unloaded a team of around 40 rescuers and their equipment. I met one of these teams days later, taking a break under the remains of a partially collapsed building. They have found no survivors, they told me; rather, their work consists of helping dig out the dead.

The international relief effort defies traditional geopolitical divides. It is hardly surprising that old allies of Haftar’s, such as the UAE and Egypt, would step in to help. “It is in Egypt’s strategic interest to ensure that things stabilise here as soon as possible”, suggested a Western political analyst. But even some of the LNA’s former foes are now at the forefront of search-and-rescue operations.

Türkiye is perhaps the most striking example. Only a year ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Turkish naval vessel docking in eastern Libya, much less Turkish personnel deploying on the ground here. After all, barely three years have passed since Ankara intervened militarily in Libya to stop the Haftar-led advance on Tripoli. At one point in mid-2020, there was even a possibility that Ankara would launch a counteroffensive against Haftar-led forces in eastern Libya.

But Türkiye clearly does not want all of its eggs in one basket. Over the past year, it has been working hard to engage politically and build business ties with eastern Libya’s authorities and military, in parallel with its diplomatic overtures toward Egypt. The current rescue effort is contributing to strengthening those ties.

Brigadier General Bughreis suggested that Türkiye is one of the biggest providers of assistance in the Derna crisis, after the UAE and Egypt. Qatar, which also sided with Tripoli during the same Haftar-led offensive, likewise has sent aid to the east.

On the ground, Libya’s rival governments appear to have found a modus operandi to enable international help to reach Derna. According to a Western diplomat in Tripoli, foreign governments typically notify Tripoli of their intention to provide support.

Once Tripoli approves the deployment, Haftar’s people step in to arrange logistics, such as authorising the landing of planes and providing vehicles and lodging for personnel. Dabaiba subsequently sends a public thank-you note to the governments in question. I continue to hear rumours that Western assistance is being blocked, but I have found them to be unreliable, and the foreign representatives I speak to tend to have positive things to say. “We haven’t faced any difficulty in setting up operations here”, the head of the Italian assistance mission, Luigi D’Angelo, told me from a base just a stone’s throw from Derna’s devastated city centre

It is also heartening to see that ordinary Libyans do not seem hamstrung by political allegiances when it comes to helping the people of Derna. So many have volunteered. Trucks filled with humanitarian aid coming from faraway towns line the access roads to the city, from points of origin that defy political boundaries.

The Libyan Red Crescent has done a remarkable job in setting up temporary lodgings for the displaced and distributing aid. Libyan rescuers have been doing the bulk of the digging in search of survivors as well as the work pulling out the dead. Even boy scouts are taking part in the relief effort.

Still, it is unclear whether cooperation between the two governments goes beyond facilitating international aid. A former senior UN official who has stayed in contact with Libyan politicians in both camps assured me the two are working together, albeit “out of the public eye”. There are no reported sightings of members of the Tripoli government in Derna or its environs, and I have heard from a minister of the east-based government that they are not welcome here.

But, somewhat surprisingly, military and security officers from Tripoli apparently are. On 22 September, I ran into two military officers from western Libya. The day after, the Tripoli-based head of intelligence Husayn al-Aieb visited the disaster zone, flanked by his eastern counterpart Sulayman Abbar and Saddam Haftar, the field marshal’s son.

Two Worries

That foreign aid is arriving is good news, as is the fact that ordinary Libyans are setting aside political differences to help Derna in its time of need. But looking forward, two things concern me.

First, I fear that once the search-and-rescue efforts are called off and international attention turns to other crises, foreign capitals, especially Western ones, that have sent humanitarian aid and rescue missions to Derna will either stop engaging or substantially reduce their assistance. Some will stay: the UAE, Egypt and Russia, which have longstanding alliances with local authorities, will continue to assist at levels proportionate to their financial means.

Türkiye, which appears to be focused on consolidating its newfound relations with local leaders, will also remain on the ground. But most Western countries are likely to soon forget this disaster zone. I have already seen the Spanish and the Maltese teams leave during my stay.

It is too bad: the Western presence is important. From a humanitarian perspective, European capitals have expertise to offer and are just across the sea. As a geopolitical matter, it is curious that the European powers would want to cede ground to growing Arab, Turkish and Russian influence here.

Secondly, I worry that Libya’s rival governments might use this crisis in opportunistic ways. They could divert reconstruction funds, for instance, depriving those in need and souring donors on providing support. Or they could throw themselves into a bruising competition for control that detracts from the recovery effort.

There are already signs of turf wars (and corresponding disinformation campaigns) between the rivals over who should take charge of reconstruction efforts. Each of the two governments has announced its own plan to hold a “reconstruction conference”, in a bid to administer the Libyan and foreign funds earmarked for rebuilding.

One would like to believe that this crisis may finally wake up the country’s political elite to the need for it to heal its schisms and work together to face common challenges. Certainly, the cooperation that the governments, international donors and the Libyan public have shown since 11 September suggest this possibility.

But, thus far, it remains uncertain whether cooperation will endure, and the nascent competition over reconstruction monies already suggests that it may be premature to expect a meaningful break from the dispiriting trajectory of Libya’s modern history.

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Claudia Gazzini

Unanswered Questions

Still, Libyans across the country suspect that the authorities are to blame, and their suspicions are understandable. Since the tragedy, it has been widely reported that while the authorities knew that the dam needed upkeep, the necessary maintenance was never done. As far back as the 1990s, when Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi still reigned over Libya, Sweisi said, government officials understood that Wadi Bu Mansour had structural deficiencies. “We contracted a Swiss consultancy to study the issue and draw up a plan for how to resolve it”, he told me. “Eventually, we hired a Turkish company to carry out the dam’s renovation works”.

The company, Arsel, signed a contract in 2008 and started working on the dam in 2010. Sweisi said the two-year lag in starting work on the dam was due to delays in payment. Then, with the 2011 uprising against Qadhafi and the ensuing NATO-led intervention that led to his ouster, the Turkish team left. Subsequently, thieves made off with all the equipment Arsel had left behind.

Sweisi went on to explain that in 2014, the government (then led by Prime Minister Ali Zeidan) signed a new contract with Arsel, compensating it for the lost equipment. But by that time, Islamic State militants had taken over Derna and the security situation did not allow the company to resume the renovation. By the time other local Islamists defeated the Islamic State, and the Haftar-led Libyan National Army subsequently stepped in to control Derna, it was 2018. By then, Libya had already split into two rival governments, one in the east and the other in Tripoli. Türkiye was supporting the Tripoli government, with which Arsel had the contract. It was thus impossible for the company to operate in the east. 

Still, Sweisi was categorical that the disaster could not have been prevented even if a brand-new dam in tip-top condition with the same dimensions had served as the barrier. “Not even a perfectly new dam could have blocked that amount of water”, he told me. “For us, this was 100 per cent a natural disaster”, echoing the Tripoli-based water ministry’s official position. 

Maybe Sweisi is right, but it is hard to be sure. The tragedy indeed started as a natural phenomenon: a passing storm dropping record-breaking volumes of rain. But it is also clear that the infrastructure protecting Derna was not in optimal condition and that its neglect had many parents. War and political division are among them, but there are also questions about how the renovation contract with Arsel was managed. In particular, The New York Times has raised questions about whether some of the money allocated for rehabilitation of the dam went to kickbacks to Libyan officials.

Libya’s audit bureau, which has hundreds of documents related to the Arsel contract, has handed them over to the General Prosecutor’s office for investigation. The latter is conducting a range of probes of the dam collapse and he has reportedly ordered the detention of several individuals in relation thereto.

Both Tunisi and Sweisi could be among those who have been detained as part of these inquiries (I could not reach them by telephone at the time of writing). If they have been detained, it does not mean they are guilty or that a crime has been committed, of course: in Libya people can be arrested without probable cause. Adherence to due process safeguards will be critically important as Libyan authorities look into why the dams burst – both to avoid ensnaring innocent people and to help make sure the truth comes out.

Finally, there is a further reason to question whether this tragedy would have happened in a country with a functioning and unified government, one in which the population trusts state institutions. Many Derna residents are deeply wary of the security forces controlling the city after years of strife as well as the war to defeat the Islamic State, in the later phase of which the Haftar-led forces also targeted Islamist groups that enjoyed popular support. Some suggest this history could have led people to resist the police’s evacuation orders.

What Now?

To reach a definitive assessment of what happened on 10-11 September, local and international experts will need to verify precipitation levels, carry out on-site inspections of what remains of the Wadi Bu Mansour dam, analyse contracts and other documents, and speak with eyewitnesses. Understandably, Libyans want answers.

Given people’s pervasive distrust of their country’s institutions, the authorities and foreign partners should consider appointing an independent commission of inquiry tasked with conducting a thorough investigation into this tragedy. It is too late for the thousands of people lost in the Derna flood, but the lessons learned can help the city prepare for a safer future, while also offering insights to other communities that sit downstream of dams and may be similarly exposed.

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Claudia Gazzini is the International Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for Libya. She has covered this role since 2012. 

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Claudia Gazzini

A Natural or Preventable Disaster?

In the aftermath of massive flooding that killed some 20,000 people, Crisis Group expert Claudia Gazzini travelled to Libya to look into what caused the disaster and who might bear responsibility.

After visiting Derna and witnessing the devastation caused when the city’s two dams crumbled in the early hours of 11 September, I decided to see what remains of the largest of the barriers, the Wadi Bu Mansour Dam.

It was the collapse of this dam and another smaller one on the city’s outskirts, known locally as Sadd al-Bilad (City Dam), that turned the flooding of Derna into a human tragedy. I wanted to understand what happened that night and why the dam did not withstand the torrential rainfall that the huge Mediterranean storm named Daniel had unleashed on eastern Libya the day before.

To reach the source of the deluge requires a major detour, because the road that flanks the valley and connects it to the city was wiped away along with everything else in its vicinity. As a result, a journey of what would have been 13km is now more than seven times as long. An old Libyan friend from the area accompanied me when I went.

We drove south from Derna into the desert and then slowly made our way through the barren hills and deep valleys of the Green Mountains. We passed a checkpoint called Bawaba al-Nuwar, which has an ignominious past: when Islamic State militants controlled Derna between 2014 and 2016, guards killed many military officers who were travelling along the road connecting Tobruk to Benghazi. A row of rocks was blocking the last stretch of asphalt leading to the dam, but we managed to manoeuvre around it.

I wanted to find out why this dam built by a Yugoslav company in the mid-1970s fell apart. Libyans, rightfully outraged by the calamity that killed an estimated 20,000 people (with thousands still missing), have blamed politicians for failing either to properly maintain the dam or to give orders in time for Derna residents to evacuate, even though they knew that a dangerous storm was headed toward the city. 

There are other theories circulating about the collapse. Some Derna residents say the dam’s valves were not open when Daniel hit, which would have made it much more vulnerable to failure in a storm of that magnitude. There are also troubling allegations about politicians embezzling funds earmarked for the dam’s renovation.

Which official Libyans single out for censure often depends on which side they pledge allegiance to in the country’s fragmented political system. Since 2022, the administration has been split between an internationally recognised government headed by Abdelhamid Dabaiba based in Tripoli, and its rival in eastern Libya, led by Osama Hamad.

It is the Hamad government, backed by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army, that oversees the east and has control of Derna. Western Libyan activists opposed to Haftar point their fingers at him and his forces. In turn, Haftar’s forces tend to scapegoat Derna’s former mayor, who is related to the east-based parliament speaker, Aghila Saleh. Both men come from the Derna area. Saleh backs the east-based government, and is nominally a Haftar ally, but he has been at loggerheads with the field marshal over the past year.

For their part, Tripoli-based Islamists intimate that Egypt (which backs Haftar) blew up the two dams intentionally, though I have seen no evidence supporting this charge. No matter which side they fall on, most ordinary Libyans are inclined to blame some combination of neglect and malfeasance, rather than solely forces of nature, for the disaster.

At the Site

When I arrived at a cliff overlooking Wadi Bu Mansour, it dawned on me what may have happened that terrible night. Below lay a valley at least 200m deep that descends from the south and continues to the north. It is a dry valley, which collects water only when it rains. I could see just the last 10km of it, but I knew from maps that upstream it goes on for at least another 100km to the west, running roughly parallel to the Mediterranean coast.

At the bottom of the valley, I detected what remained of the dam: a clay mound that used to be covered with rocks. (More technically minded people called the Wadi Bu Mansour structure a clay-injected embankment dam.) Water smashed through the central part, breaking up the road that ran along the top of the dam. Experts say this type of clay-and-rock dam is quite sturdy, but its foundations are vulnerable to the eroding effects of overflows, especially when it is built on a clay base, as appears to have been the case here.

Eyewitnesses told me the flood seemed to come out of nowhere. “At sunset, the valley was still dry”, a young man who lives nearby said. He was referring to a valley that descends at least 200m and feeds into Wadi Bu Mansour. The dam’s security guard joined us and gave a recitation of that evening’s events that confirmed what the young man said. “The dam started filling up around 8pm, but at midnight it was only half-full.

It was between midnight and 2am that [the water] started rising at a dangerous speed. By 2am, the water reached 2m above the dam, pouring over to the other side. That gradually weakened the dam’s structure, causing it to collapse”, he said. “We could hear the friction of the rocks as they gave way, which also left a peculiar smell of burnt material in the air”. The dam finally caved in at 2:40am.

The guard added an important data point to this description. The valves of the dam’s passageways were open – and had been since the 1990s. Later, I spoke by telephone to his boss in Derna, Abdullah Tunisi, who is in charge of the dams in the valley; subsequently, I spoke with Tunisi’s superior in Benghazi, Abdelqader al-Sweisi, who administers all the dams in eastern Libya. Both work under the authority of the Tripoli-based government’s water ministry.

They both asserted that the valves had been open since the 1990s. Tunisi explained that the dam was originally conceived for irrigation, but in the late 1980s officials realised it had structural problems (as water was leaking from underneath it, creating a new canal), and so they stopped using it to retain water. For this reason, the valves were left open.

If the valves were in fact open, that would undermine the allegation that has circulated in Derna pinning some of the blame for the calamity on the dam operators. A number of Derna residents, however, say they do not believe the valves were open. They claim that local farmers closed the valves to irrigate pomegranate trees at the base of the dried-up wadi below the dam.

I am not in a position to determine who is correct, but according to the Tripoli-based water ministry’s calculations, the dam was doomed no matter how it had been operated. Up to 100 million cubic metres of water may have filled the valley that night.

The pressure it generated eventually led the dam, which is designed to retain no more than 22 million cubic metres of water, to collapse. Sweisi told me that the total water discharge capacity of the dam is 170 cubic metres per second but, that night, “we calculated that to discharge all the water entering the valley would have required a discharge capacity of 1,200 cubic metres per second”. In essence, according to their calculations, what befell Derna was a natural disaster rather than one of human provenance.

One point upon which there appears to be widespread agreement is that almost no one in Derna or in the dam’s vicinity saw the calamity coming. Just a few days before the storm, a group of Derna residents met to discuss how to protect themselves.

A person who attended the meeting said no one seemed overly alarmed. “It was a theoretical, hypothetical discussion”, he said. “It did not prompt anyone to alert the authorities and warn of serious danger of collapse”.

A few days later, I met Abdelmonem al-Gaithi, the mayor of Derna who was fired in the storm’s aftermath, in a hotel lobby in al-Bayda, a city to the west. (Four days after our meeting, he was arrested and taken into custody.) During our meeting, he claimed that “nobody in the city had suggested to us that the storm could cause the dam to collapse”.

Furthermore, in the days before the storm struck eastern Libya, the local authorities’ principal concern was Benghazi, the region’s main city, which lies in what was Daniel’s predicted path. Instead, the storm unexpectedly turned east, leaving Benghazi relatively unscathed. He also rejected the claim that the Derna municipal council he headed bore any responsibility for the dam’s maintenance. “Dams are strategic sites, and they come under the authority of the competent ministries, not of the local council”, he said.

In Derna, the greatest fear before the storm was that it could damage the seafront residential area. “We thought the danger would come from the sea”, al-Gaithi said. Residents were also bracing for a possible overflow of the dams – something they had experienced already twice before – but not the dams’ actual collapse.

The mayor nevertheless insisted that the city’s emergency committee set up three days before the storm had given orders to evacuate the three neighbourhoods (Sayda Khadija, Heyy al-Bilad and Jebeila) most at risk of flooding because they were on lower ground. On social media there are videos that show policemen in their vehicles instructing people to leave. “Unfortunately, few heeded the warning”, the mayor told me.

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Claudia Gazzini is the International Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for Libya. She has covered this role since 2012. 

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Claudia Gazzini

In the aftermath of a burst dam and massive flooding, Crisis Group expert Claudia Gazzini travelled to Derna in eastern Libya to cover the relief effort and assess the two rival governments’ response.

It is devastating to visit the coastal Libyan city of Derna after dams burst and floods deluged the town in the early hours of 11 September, resulting in an estimated 20,000 deaths. The city’s landmark al-Sahaba mosque and its golden dome are intact, but what remains of the city centre can best be described as a vast plain of concrete blocks. 

I am told the floods instantly flattened many of the buildings that once stood here, sweeping some out to sea, where they now lie in the Mediterranean mud. The few structures that withstood the flood have hardly been spared – their first four stories having been submerged when the waters roared through.

I recently had the privilege of glimpsing an alternate reality for Derna and its people. I have been an observer and analyst of Libya for the past eleven years, and I was in Derna barely two months ago. Despite years of civil war and long-term government neglect, the city was thriving. Buildings that had been damaged during the years of conflict were going back up.

Workers were putting the finishing touches on a new public library. Restaurants were open for business. Now, the city is an expanse of rubble. The chances of finding the thousands still missing, let alone survivors, diminish by the day.

Fortunately, the city is receiving a helping hand. Contrary to fears and some expectations, foreign assistance is making its way to Derna. Moreover, ordinary Libyans – even those from parts of the country ruled by Tripoli-based authorities who do not control this corner of the east – have rallied to send aid.

But while the outside help is unquestionably good news, I worry that as time passes, international attention to the city will wane and Libya’s rival factions will revert to form – manipulating the crisis for financial or political gain rather than allowing it to serve as a catalyst for greater cooperation in rebuilding, whether in Derna or in the country as a whole.

The Roots of a Tragedy

The tragedy that befell Derna resulted from the sudden collapse of the city’s two dams, which had been built by a Yugoslav company in the mid-1970s. They fell first and foremost because heavy rains brought by the cyclone-like storm named Daniel – which hit eastern Libya on 10 September – was channelled into the valley to Derna’s south, causing water to surge over the dams and, eventually, to overwhelm them.

Work to renovate these dams had started in 2008, but it was never completed. How much blame to place on this fact is subject to debate. Local authorities and Libya’s water ministry argue that even a brand-new, perfectly constructed dam could not have held back the record-breaking quantity of rain that poured down on Derna that night.

It is too early to form a conclusive view as to whether this contention is accurate, though I hope to offer some thoughts on this score in a later piece. What can be said unequivocally is that a decade of poor governance, intermittent conflict and political infighting has devasted Libya in general, and Derna in particular, making its people especially vulnerable to bursting dams and other force majeure events.

Derna’s struggles date back decades. The city suffered during the 42-year reign of strongman Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi. Factions in the city had opposed his rule, and he starved it of investment in retaliation. But after a UN-mandated international coalition ousted the Qadhafi regime in 2011, the situation became even worse. Libya eventually descended into civil war. In 2014, contested elections split the country in two. The following year, Islamist militants seized Derna and declared it part of the ISIS caliphate.

While the militants were ousted in 2016, war continued in Derna for another year – this time between local Islamists, on one hand, and forces headed by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar on the other. During that time, Libya fragmented, with authority divided between two rival governments and military coalitions.

The country remains split to this day, with an internationally recognised government headed by Abdelhamid Dabaiba, based in Tripoli, and a rival administration in the east, led by Osama Hamad. These factions have for the past two years focused on vying for power and money, investing only at a small scale in reconstruction of buildings and bridges in the areas they respectively control, while neglecting the country’s major infrastructure, including the dams and waterways.

The government split is directly relevant to the situation in Derna because the internationally recognised Tripoli-based government, which includes a Presidency Council headed by Mohamed Mnefi, exercises no authority in the stricken area of eastern Libya.

It is the Hamad government, backed by Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), that oversees the operations in the east and has effective control of Derna. Moreover, international donors line up on different sides of the divide – with some backing Haftar and others the government in Tripoli.

There was widespread concern when disaster struck that such rivalries would impede relief efforts and prevent Derna from getting the help it needs.

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Bilgehan Öztürk

Libya’s African connection and its potential to be affected by Africa’s “problems” are not limited to the fact that it neighbors Chad and Niger via the Fezzan region.

Libya has not been on the international political agenda since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war as much as it was in the prewar period, yet recent major developments in the country have the capacity to influence both local Libyan and international actors involved in Libya. In fact, the protracted military and political developments in Libya have been triggered by the vacuum created by this relative decline in “international interest.”

With the end of the post of Stephanie Williams, the dominant leader of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) and, more generally, the political transition process has been left “unattended.” In this vacuum, the power struggle among Libyan actors escalated, military conflicts erupted occasionally, and the atmosphere of relative stability brought about by the political transition became extremely fragile.

With the disengagement of the UNSMIL, regional actors, especially Egypt, gained a lot of room for maneuver, and through their influence over certain Libyan actors, they were able to shape the political developments in the country and even attempted to redesign the political arena. These attempts naturally deepened the existing fault lines between Libyan actors and made conflicts inevitable.

When Aguila Saleh, the speaker of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives, announced that he withdrew his vote of confidence from the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU)—effectively acting on behalf of parliament—and when the Government of National Accord (GNA) appointed Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha as prime minister to form the the Government of National Stability; when Khaled al-Mishri, the head of the Tripoli-based Supreme State Council (SCC), initiated a series of negotiations to establish a legal basis for the elections—effectively taking over the political transition process—and when Mishri and Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh dismantled the GNA and attempted to form a new “unity government,” they all found Cairo as a strong supporter and benefactor.

Cairo’s activism in the western (Tripoli) region, taking advantage of the vacuum, was met with reactions and counter-mobilizations from Western regional actors, and periodic waves of instability in Libya. For a long time, Libya has been unable to achieve internal instability due to the influence of external actors. Important political and military developments in its periphery and on its borders seem destined to add fuel to the fire in a country struggling to gain internal unity, reach a political solution, and overcome its fragmented structure.

The Fezzan equation in the region

Although Fezzan, one of Libya’s three main geographical regions, has a much more modest role in influencing Libya’s destiny compared to the eastern (Barka) and western (Tripoli) regions, it constitutes a small African component of the country. Arab identity, as an extension of the Gaddafi regime, is, of course, a phenomenon that encompasses the whole of Libya, but this identity is somewhat more “diluted” in Fezzan compared to other regions. This is certainly due to Fezzan’s geographical, demographic, social, and cultural proximity and strong links with Libya’s African neighbors.

In the period after Gaddafi’s ouster, the borders, due to the disappearance of the state mechanism and the fragmented military and political structure, have become even more uncontrolled and porous. While completely controlling all of Libya’s borders is impossible both in terms of length and the difficulties inherent in desert regions, the southern border of Libya is the least controlled of all. The situation of Fezzan’s border with Chad and Niger has natural, humanitarian, man-made and criminal dimensions.

The social contact between the northern regions of Chad and Niger and Fezzan through tribal and kinship ties constitutes the natural and human aspect of uncontrolled borders. On the other hand, smuggling is the main economic activity in these border regions due to their largely desert nature and the sparseness of population density and settlements. In other words, in addition to natural social ties and interactions, economic and illicit activities and interactions are also very strong.

This strong bond and interaction between Chad, Niger, and Fezzan brings with it the possibility that in the event of a crisis, instability can easily spill over from one to the other. The Chadian FACT (Front for Change and Concord in Chad) rebels, recruited to fight on Haftar’s side and finding a safe haven in the Fezzan region, have used Fezzan as a springboard to attack the Chadian border periodically, fight the Chadian army, and were even blamed for the death of Chad’s former president Idriss Déby as a result of one of these attacks.

In response to FACT rebel incursions into the border region, the Chadian army has occasionally entered Libya’s Fezzan region and bombed FACT rebels. Due to Libya’s large surface area, these conflicts, which take place at a great distance from the capital Tripoli, do not occupy the country’s agenda much since Tripoli does not have de facto control over these distances. However, if the conflicts grow and spread, it is clear that the instability of Fezzan will be added to the priority issues that occupy the country’s agenda.

Meanwhile although the consequences of the recent coup in Niger are uncertain, it constitutes an area of risk that could export instability to Libya via Fezzan. Even when Libya’s southern neighbors Chad and Niger were stable and there was no active crisis, illegal migrants from these countries and almost every country in Africa were already using Libya as a destination and transit country to Europe. In the event of a destabilization or conflict in Chad and Niger, the problem of illegal migration, which Libya has been unable to cope with for years, will emerge on a much larger scale, and Libya’s current weak state capacity will be even more incapacitated than it is today.

Libya’s African connection and its potential to be affected by Africa’s “problems” are not limited to the fact that it neighbors Chad and Niger via the Fezzan region. The positioning of Libya in the envisioning and geopolitical projections of the country by the external actors which have been involved in Libya also connects Libya to Africa. France, the most prominent of the European countries involved in Libya and so far the most decisive actor in the dynamics of the crisis, has strongly supported Haftar in many respects, and not only because it shares Haftar’s revolutionary and anti-“Islamist” ideological stance.

France’s goal of maintaining its presence and influence in the Sahel region, in general, and Operation Barkhane, in particular, has led to its interest and active intervention in Libya, which by virtue of its geographical and demographic elements is a natural part of this region, In fact, France’s perception of Turkey’s presence in Libya as having a potential impact beyond Libya, for example in North Africa in general or in the Sahel region, is behind France’s sharp anti-Turkey moves in its Libya policy.

Likewise, for Russia, another of the most influential external actors involved in Libya, Libya functions as an important part of its more macro-level African designs. The Wagner mercenary army, which is the mediator of Russian influence and presence in many African countries, has also been Russia’s choice in Libya. The regions where the Wagner mercenary army, which is estimated to number around 2,000 today, is engaged, deployed, and operating on Libyan soil show that Russia attaches particular importance to the “Africa-facing” side of Libya and makes its operational investments there.

In short, Libya is inevitably becoming part of Africa, not only because of the strong land connection of its southern Fezzan region with Sahel countries like Chad and Niger, but also because of the policies pursued by influential external actors. The juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali, and now Niger are notable for their anti-French and pro-Russian rhetoric. If the series of coups in the Sahel turns into an active struggle for influence between France and Russia, the countries of the Sahel region will be destabilized.

With the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner mercenary army’s head, Russia’s African network is entering a transition period. The importance of Libya within this African network was demonstrated when Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov made his first visit to Libya on the day of Prigozhin’s death. Both the possible instability of the Sahel countries and Wagner’s active physical presence in the Fezzan region increase the risk of Libya being affected by the power struggle and instability of this region in the coming period.

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Bilgehan Öztürk is a foreign policy researcher at SETA Foundation. His research interests include Turkish foreign and security policies towards the MENA region, non-state armed actors, civil war, countering violent extremism, and Turkish-Russian relations. He is the co-author of the report “Countering Violent Extremism in Libya.”

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Adalgisa Martinelli

Libya extreme and catastrophic floods triggered by Storm Daniel is one of the many examples of extreme climate-disaster characterizing 2023. The massive rainfall has caused deaths and destruction in the country urging national and international action immediately.

The climatologist David Faranda warns that the growing warming of the Mediterranean Sea will affect all coastal counties. Bob Henson and Jeff Masters from Yale University link climate change to Mediterranean cyclones, emphasizing the risks posed by intensified rainfall and extreme weather events. In Africa, climate adaptation measures must be implemented to become more resilient. 

Since the beginning of 2023, innumerous and catastrophic environmental damages have inflamed the political debate. After the devastating earthquakes in Morocco, Libya is now facing an alarming  humanitarian crisis due to the following devastating floods triggered by storm Daniel, which struck the country’s eastern region.

Storm Daniel, described as an extreme weather event due to the massive amount of rainfall, has already caused 27 deaths in Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria before reaching Libya. It significantly impacted coastal towns like Jabal al-Akhdar and Benghazi, where a curfew was imposed and schools closed.

This flood is already counting many deaths and missing people in multiple localities. At the current stage, the situation in Eastern Libya is catastrophic, therefore urging for national and international actions, since the water overflow destroyed and it is still perpetuating the destruction of entire areas including buildings, houses, infrastructure, etc.  

The UN mission in Libya and world leaders, including the French President and US State Department spokesman, expressed solidarity while humanitarian organizations and NGOs are urging for immediate actions.

According to the climatologist David Faranda, the ‘Daniel storm’ will be the nightmare of the countries along the Mediterranean coast: “Due to the ongoing CO2 emissions warming the atmosphere, the Mediterranean Sea will have more energy, more heat, and more moisture to create more intense cyclones.

Therefore, the areas that are most exposed are also the ones that are most vulnerable from an infrastructure perspective. As we have seen, North African countries, but even some southern European countries, do not have the infrastructure designed to withstand these quantities of rainfall.”

From Yale University, Bob Henson and Jeff Masters delve into the complex relationship between climate change and the occurrence of Mediterranean cyclones, referred to as medicanes[1] in the article. With the recent Libya’s flood disaster caused by storm Daniel, the authors underscore how meteorological factors represent an intensifying impact of climate change on extreme weather events. Moreover, they declare that human-induced climate change is, in fact, amplifying the likelihood of tropical cyclones and similar storms producing extreme rainfall.

This is due to the warming of the atmosphere, which allows these storms to draw more moisture from oceans into the atmosphere. As above-mentioned by  the climatologist David Faranda,  all the authors are concerned about the alarming warming of the Mediterranean sea.

Over the past four decades, the Mediterranean Sea has experienced an average temperature increase of approximately 2 degrees Celsius (3.6°F). “This summer the daily average sea surface temperatures of the Mediterranean hit new records for July (topping 28 degrees Celsius or 82°F for the first time in any month) as well as for August”. These rising sea temperatures provide the energy necessary for the formation of more frequent and more intense medicanes.

To further support their analysis, Bob Henson and Jeff Masters link their conclusions with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, which draws parallels between the future of medicanes and tropical cyclones. The IPCC predicts a decrease in the frequency of medicanes under warming conditions; however, it also anticipates that the strongest ones will become even more potent.

This is a worrisome trend as stronger storms typically result in more significant damage and increased rainfall. By following the IPCC’s predictions, the authors mention Dr. Liz Stephens, associate professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading, which highlights the linkages between climate change and intensified rainfall associated with medicanes. This indicates a heightened risk of flooding, as seen in the Libyan disaster.

In the second part, the article discusses the potential influence of climate change on mid-latitude atmospheric blocking patterns in summer. Such changes in atmospheric patterns can contribute to extreme weather events (like Storm Daniel) and unusual heat waves especially in the area of central Europe.

Researchers suggest that this correlation can be due to the disproportionate warming in the Arctic compared to mid-latitude regions. Furthermore, the article goes beyond underscoring that climate change is mostly anthropogenic. 

 Indeed, the authors highlight how climate change ca, be worsened by various aspects of human society, including ecosystems, housing patterns, and infrastructure. For example, in Libya, inadequate dam maintenance may have heightened the risk of flooding, highlighting how human actions and development choices can worsen the impacts of climate change. 

In the third section, the authors address the broader context of climate change-induced extreme weather events in the African continent. Despite improved forecasting and disaster preparedness and the differences across each nation, Africa has experienced an alarming increase in deadly weather-related disasters in recent years. Many factors such as higher vulnerability, population growth, and more frequent extreme weather events contribute to this trend.

A mention of “attribution science” in the article points to a field that investigates whether human-caused climate change played a role in specific disasters. Several African extreme weather events have been linked to climate change through attribution studies, including droughts, floods, and heatwaves. Lastly, the article acknowledges the varying impact of climate change on different events; while some, like East Africa’s drought, have become significantly more severe due to climate change, others may lack sufficient data to establish a clear connection therefore enduring the difficulty of understanding the causality link. 

In conclusion, extreme events and their impact in the case of Libya underscore the urgent call for immediate actions against climate change and the impacts on countries and populations. With the growing risks and the several disasters, adaptation measures are the short term solution that countries should implement to not further aggravate the alarming situation. 

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Hafed Al-Ghwell

Floods have not been a rare occurrence in the history of Derna. However, the power of Storm Daniel this month was on a scale unlike any of the other shocks, natural or otherwise, the Libyan city has endured over the years, including its recent transformation into a battleground between Islamists and a notorious warlord.

Some might argue that the “reverse tsunami” marked Libya’s initiation into the uncertain future of climate change but the country already had a foot in that door, situated as it is in one of the most climate vulnerable regions of the world.

However, the threats are magnified by the extent to which Libya’s future, and its resilience to inevitable shocks, is compromised by the corrosive legacies that amplified Derna’s tragedy and will continue to have similar effects on the country for years to come.

We are already seeing some of the ways in which the effects of those legacies manifest themselves, just days after the devastating storm swept through. The residents of Derna are now trapped by an almost apocalyptic mix of corruption, death and destruction.

A despairing populace, rightfully aggrieved and furiously demanding accountability and change, is left to salvage what remains of their destroyed city, abandoned by a homeland that persistently betrays them at every turn.

Having survived the most catastrophic storm since records began in the 1900s, Derna’s survivors have seen their lives reduced to rubble. Some have told how they watched, helplessly, as loved ones were swept away by the torrent.

The full extent of the horrors becomes more apparent each day, with entire families wiped from civil registries. Meanwhile, authorities busy themselves policing dissent rather than rendering aid or facilitating recovery efforts, while the hopeful gather with the mournful along the coastline as now-unrecognizable bodies continue to wash ashore.

Their ordeal is far from over. As if to add insult to injury, this week Derna was inexplicably cut off from the rest of the world. Libyan authorities — continuing to coast on dubious claims of legitimacy bought by the gun and assured by a disinterested international community — have proffered only a conflicting stream of statements and press releases about the communications blackout.

It is unclear whether the intent is to buy time to find a convenient scapegoat, or to come up with palatable justifications for isolating the residents of a devastated city who, with no hope of recourse or relief, took to the streets to protest in a rare display of public furor against a firmly entrenched ruling elite.

However, their demands for an investigation into the disaster and calls for the UN to oversee the reconstruction of Derna have been met only with further oppression for daring to voice their grievances. In a stark reminder of the kind of disconnect that pervades Libya today, the very authorities responsible for handling the aftermath of the devastation would rather brand the foremost voices of the rightfully aggrieved as “terrorists.”

The media and internet blackout was imposed in the name of “safety,” it is claimed — but whose safety? Certainly not the survivors of the disaster, who now face a second crisis given the UN’s recent warnings of possible disease outbreaks stemming from contaminated water and lack of sanitation.

For the few journalists who managed to reach Derna before the enforced isolation of the city, the stories they uncovered were harrowing. Survivors, desperate for their voices to be heard, gave chilling accounts of their experiences so far. Aid and rescue workers said they had never seen such scenes of destruction, even in Turkiye after the earthquakes in February.

Yet pleas for help and calls for swift action continue to be swatted aside by a greedy and corrupt cabal that is rapidly positioning itself to exploit Derna’s tragedy, eagerly anticipating the influx of international aid and the opportunity to control its distribution.

They could not care less that their repression and blackouts only send the horrifying message that the lives, grief and rage in Derna — or elsewhere else for that matter — will never be worth more than their own self-preservation.

Naturally, the knee-jerk lunge to silence, refute, arrest and “disappear” any dissenting voices has further fueled the intense anger, and galvanized Libyans far beyond Derna and even outside the country.

Meanwhile, rather than acknowledge the gravity of the situation in the city and how it is emblematic of a deeply flawed system that is crumbling under its own weight, to the global community the situation in Libya remains business as usual.

Take the US, for instance. Given the absence of stable, functioning state institutions in Libya, Washington could have easily facilitated the full empowerment of the UN and other international bodies to manage the aftermath of the disaster, while sidelining an apathetic, callous, inept and corrupt Libyan political elite.

Instead, the US opted for a bizarre, tone deaf and, frankly, insulting response by publishing pictures of a meeting between the head of its US Africa Command and the leader of the Libyan National Army, Khalifa Haftar.

For one thing, he is the de facto overseer of Russian private military company Wagner’s operations in eastern Libya, which the US Treasury Department stopped short of designating a terrorist group but describes as a “significant transnational criminal organization.”

Secondly, and even more dastardly, it is his Internal Security Agency that terrorized Derna’s survivors in its efforts to arrest organizers of the protests in front of the city’s grand mosque this week.
Worse yet, there have been no notable reports of outrage in the world’s press concerning the blackouts in Derna or the arbitrary arrests of survivors of the disaster, demands for accountability, or the fact that one of Haftar’s sons is overseeing recovery efforts.

Moreover, reporters can only get as far as Benghazi, about 250 km away, in their efforts to cover what is happening in Derna while it is cut off from the rest of the world. It is an insidious recipe for the inevitable result that developments in the wrecked city will end up relegated to a cursory line or two in the margins as attentions shift elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the death toll continues to rise, while Haftar and his ilk set about turning Derna into a potential windfall for their political aspirations and a showcase of legitimacy in their rivalry with the UN-backed authority in the west of the country. Control of access and the funneling of resources, funds and personnel to the disaster area will afford the rival authority in the east more influence and attention, which are already being wielded for nefarious purposes.

Derna could have been the type of wake-up call the global community has consistently missed or resisted concerning Libya. It is unlikely a unified, accountable and receptive government would have come about even if the voices of protest in Derna had not been abruptly interrupted. However, the swiftness and harshness of the repression in an attempt to silence them does indicate the glaring vulnerabilities, and a palpable fear of a contagion of unrest, among the seemingly unassailable elites.

If only Libyan authorities responded to their citizens’ needs as swiftly as they cracked down on dissent.
Meanwhile, we watch as the global community continues to break bread with the same entities complicit in creating the conditions that resulted in the Derna disaster. As the cries for aid grow louder, the international community must heed not only the calls for immediate relief but also the desperate pleas for transparency, accountability and decisive blows to the malignant corruption that is compromising Libya’s future.

As we bear witness to the unraveling of Derna, we must remember that its residents are not merely the victims of a terrible natural disaster, but the casualties of a system that prioritizes power over people. For the people of the city, the nightmare has only just begun.

***

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, D.C., and a former adviser to the dean of the board of executive directors of the World Bank Group.

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Emadeddin Badi

Where the echoes of helpless cries linger amid the ruins of Derna in eastern Libya, its citizens are living a nightmare brought about by the callousness of successive rulers and the unbridled cruelty of military elites. Two dams, remnants of a bygone era under Moammar Gadhafi’s rule, had stood for decades as neglected sentries, guarding a coastal city deliberately left vulnerable to climate-induced changes. As the dams eventually broke under the weight of Mediterranean Storm Daniel’s heavy rains earlier this month, flash floods literally cleaved Derna in two, instantly killing thousands of its residents and washing many out to sea.

It won’t just be nature’s fury that will haunt Derna’s residents, though, but the storm of negligence, manipulation and repression that preceded and followed this tragedy.

Derna’s suffering mirrors in many ways the tragic fate of Libya. Considered a cradle of opposition to Gadhafi during his rule, the city was renowned for its artists, poets and cultural scene. It was deliberately marginalized by the dictator for these very reasons. Post-Gadhafi, the country’s transitional authorities didn’t treat it any better, swapping their promises of new beginnings with disarray and plunder.

Derna’s security deteriorated in the margins, becoming a site for competing Islamist factions, including the Islamic State. By 2017, an internationally supported military general who had served in Gadhafi’s regime, Khalifa Haftar, laid siege to Derna under the guise of countering terrorism—despite the Islamic State already having been defeated by Derna’s own local, Islamist-led coalition. In a Pyrrhic victory in 2019, Haftar’s militia—the self-proclaimed Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) —conquered it at the cost of killing, displacing and imprisoning a quarter of its residents.

The plight of Derna did not end there, as political jockeying between Libya’s successive rival governments and its elites cast a long shadow over the city. The scramble by international mediators and self-serving Libyan politicians to broker bargains with Haftar condemned Derna to ostracism, and its residents suffered silently.

Meanwhile, Derna’s infrastructure crumbled, weakened by neglect. Political elites continued to pilfer, choosing greed over governance. As the clouds of Storm Daniel converged on Libyan shores, authorities had ample warning but displayed only apathy.

Before disaster struck, the negligence of eastern Libya’s authorities stood out. Instead of heeding the warning signs and evacuating the city, they gave contradictory orders. Some of Derna’s coastal neighborhoods were evacuated, but curfews trapped Derna’s residents in its most vulnerable areas.

The ensuing floods tore through the city’s heart, leaving nothing but destruction, death and despair in their wake. Lives were lost, homes were destroyed, and thousands displaced and injured. Residents were left to grapple with the consequences of a tragedy that could have been prevented. Naturally, they felt forsaken by those who should have protected them.

Yet, amid rubble and sorrow, a glimmer of hope emerged. The resilience of Derna’s people shone bright as those alive helped organize rescue and relief efforts alongside civil society, boy scouts and individual volunteers from the LAAF. Across the divided country, an unprecedented wave of popular support erupted, with Libyans from all walks of life rallying to support Derna. Some sold their most prized possessions to provide aid. It was a testament to the enduring spirit of a people who had been abandoned by their own leaders.

But that hope soon gave way to disillusionment as the Haftar family sought to hijack relief efforts through their LAAF, all while skirting responsibility for the tragedy and blaming Derna’s residents. Military units became gatekeepers of the recovery, creating bottlenecks and obstructing the flow of aid.

Saddam Haftar, a man whose only claim to military credentials is his father’s last name, and who has neither trained as a soldier nor an aid worker, appointed himself as de-facto head of the crisis committee responsible for Derna’s relief efforts. While individual soldiers on the ground indeed helped, the military leadership indulged in its usual theft. They set up checkpoints that hindered relief efforts and treated aid as war spoils.

Battered but undeterred, Derna’s residents took to the streets in a massive protest only nine days after the tragedy. Their voices rose above the ruins, echoing through the city’s shattered streets. Their demands were simple: accountability and justice. They called for an international investigation to uncover the truth. They also wanted the city’s reconstruction expedited under international oversight, with the involvement of reputable companies from abroad.

In a disturbing Orwellian turn of events, the military authorities responded by arresting protest leaders, and imposing a media blackout on a city reeking of death. Telecommunications were severed for nearly two days, plunging the city into silence.

Only a select few pro-military outlets and partisan individuals were granted internet access. The military’s crisis committee claimed the blackout was due to cable damage. The few remaining international journalists in Derna were given contradictory orders and were barred from covering the relief efforts.

Revealingly, the crisis committee’s spokesperson stated that one of the committee’s goals was to “manage the flow of information from Derna,” doublespeak for modern-day censorship. To onlookers, the truth was evident: Derna’s residents were being silenced, punished for daring to demand accountability.

Derna’s tragedy is ultimately a tale of leaders who turned their backs on their people and military elites who exploited their suffering for their own gain. Today, the city, like much of Libya, finds itself at the mercy of a dysfunctional political scene rife with disciples of Gadhafi’s nefarious schools of repression and corruption. It comes as no surprise that they are collectively perpetuating his legacy of neglect and avarice at Libya’s expense. But the wounds inflicted upon Derna’s residents will not fade over time; they are now etched into the city’s soul. Though their voices are now muffled, the people of Derna will never cease seeking justice.

In this hour of darkness, their calls should not be ignored. Derna’s story is not just one that should be told or remembered, it must also be acted upon. The truth should be unveiled, and those responsible for this disaster held accountable.

***

Emadeddin Badi is a Libyan consultant and researcher. He is a non-resident senior fellow with the Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council and a senior analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

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Nadda Osman

In an absence of immediate support from the military and aid organisations, the scouts gathered to clear roads, help survivors and distribute medication to those affected.

Over a week after the tropical storm hit the city of Derna in eastern Libya, rescue teams are concluding their search for victims, and crucial aid is beginning to arrive. Amid these efforts, one dedicated group has stood out, operating silently yet tirelessly to provide support and relief to those in need.

The Libyan Boy Scouts have been at the forefront of emergency response efforts, starting work one day after Storm Daniel caused flooding, which resulted in thousands of deaths.

The flooding has also left a quarter of the buildings in Derna completely flattened, while hundreds of others are fully submerged in mud.

With their distinguishable neckerchief fastened around their neck, the boy scouts have led efforts in facilitating aid, clearing roads of debris, distributing medicine, and assisting the injured and foreign search-and-rescue teams.

Wael Habil, a volunteer and translator on the ground in Derna, praised the efforts of the scouts. 

“They have been putting their heads down and working silently from the start, away from the cameras and the media. They are distributing medicine, clothes, food. They are all young people [both] from Derna and out of Derna,” he told Middle East Eye.

“I am proud of them because they are making huge efforts in total silence. They are doing the same work as international organisations, such as the Red Crescent.”

According to Habil, the majority of the scouts are between the ages of 18 and 24.

Malek al-Maghrebi, a Libya-based journalist, said that he witnessed the scouts working firsthand from the day the disaster hit, and that scouts from around the country had gathered and rallied in Derna.

“At first, it was slightly more random, helping assist the injured and removing the dead bodies, and it was all volunteering,” he told MEE.

“The scouts were used according to their expertise. When search-and-rescue teams arrived on the ground on the fifth day, the scouts took a back seat from removing the dead bodies and searching for survivors,” he added.

Days later, as search-and-rescue teams and international aid organisations arrived, the scouts changed the focus of their efforts to helping the organisations by collecting, coordinating and distributing aid, as well as translating for them. 

Zuhair Azouz, the head of the scout emergency team in Derna, was responsible for coordinating their efforts, and wrote a list of aid needed in Derna, which was shared online. The list included items such as children’s toys, wheelchairs, crutches, insulin shots, first aid kits and blood pressure monitors.  

Filling a gap 

According to Emadeddin Badi, an analyst on Libya with the Atlantic Council, the scouts have been instrumental in ensuring that relief is properly distributed in an efficient manner, particularly in the absence of a humanitarian response being coordinated by the military or authorities.

Badi drew parallels between the latest events and the role of the scouts following the military operation known as Al-Bunyan Al-Marsous, which successfully liberated the strategically important city of Sirte from the control of the Islamic State (IS) between May and December 2016.

“The scouts cleared up rubble, they are recovering bodies and are volunteering in different aspects. They know how to organise because they’re to a certain extent local, and their organisational capacity is key to the relief efforts,” Badi told MEE.

“If you compare this to the authorities or the military, none of these [institutions] really have the capacity or a culture of selflessness… the military tends to be more repressive and the state tends to be more incompetent,” he added.  

Badi believes that the scouts are one of the few institutions in Libya that have retained their integrity and values amid the political conflicts in recent years.

“The scouts have a history in Libya of being largely apolitical and have developed a culture of selflessness and volunteering. What’s interesting about Libya is that even [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gadaffi wasn’t able to politicise the scouts or penetrate the scouts the way he did with other institutions,” he explained.

“The scouts have always managed to insulate themselves from political influence, which speaks to the culture they have been able to put into the movement.”

Psychological support for children

Another key area the scouts assisted in was the psychological and mental support of young survivors.

“I have also seen them taking on the role of giving psychological support to children. In the morning they would help the aid efforts and in the night they run activities and games for the children to improve their situation,” Maghrebi explained.

In videos published by AFP, the scouts are shown collecting toys and distributing them to young children who survived the floods.

Mohammed Fathi al-Agha, a scout leader, was responsible for coordinating the efforts.

“We organised the leaders and experts in psychological aid for children and families. We then asked the young scouts and guides in Tripoli to collect gifts for the children in Derna and write letters to them,” he explained.

Experts have raised concerns over the psychological toll the disaster has had on survivors, particularly as children show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The World Organisation of Scout Movement has commended the efforts of the scouts, which they said was “fueled by their unwavering duty towards helping others”.

“Coordination and relief committees sprang up in Benghazi and Tripoli, while emergency response centres were established in various locations,” the statement added. 

“Approximately 500 Scout Leaders, from Derna Crisis Centre and nearby commissions, are actively engaged in fieldwork. These leaders play a crucial role in drainage operations, search and recovery efforts and dignified burials.” 

The scouts also took part in collecting donations, an effort that was initiated by the General Movement of Libyan Scouts and Guides.

***

Nadda Osman is a British-Egyptian journalist and editor based in the UK. She reports on human rights, social trends and issues as well as culture and arts in the Middle East and north Africa region.

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Leela JACINTO

Moscow seized the disaster diplomacy initiative after the deadly Derna floods, with Russian Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov arriving in eastern Libya with a promise of aid. Russia is helping Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar while seeking geostrategic payback. But the Derna tragedy has also drawn the US back into Libya, and that could be a game-changer.

On a moonless night shortly after two dams in the port city of Derna collapsed, killing thousands, a hulking Russian Ilyushin IL-76 military cargo aircraft landed at an airport near Benghazi in eastern Libya.

“Russian Defence Ministry sends logistical reinforcements, rescue & search equipment after Storm Daniel,” noted a post by a local Libyan news site days after the landing on X, formerly Twitter.

Accompanying photographs showed teams unloading aid packages from the aircraft while a military truck, draped with the flags of Russia and Libya, waits on the tarmac at Benghazi’s Benina airport.

The messaging was clear and gained momentum over the next few days: the Russian defence ministry was on the ground, providing a rapid response in eastern Libya, a region controlled by strongman Khalifa Haftar, head of the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA).

On Sunday, September 17 – a week after “Libya’s 9/11” as the Derna disaster has been dubbed – Russian Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov himself was in town, meeting Haftar at the strongman’s Benghazi office.

The Russian defence ministry’s No. 2 is fast becoming Moscow’s “Africa Man”, making several trips to the continent, particularly coup-hit former French colonies such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

Yevkurov was last in Libya when Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash near Moscow on August 23. Over the past few years, Wagner provided indispensable services to Haftar, securing oil wells and deploying fighters during the eastern Libyan strongman’s 2019 assault on the capital, Tripoli, in western Libya. Following the Wagner chief’s demise, Yevkurov is seen as the main organiser of the post-Prigozhin era of Russian relationships with Africa.

Just a day after Prigozhin’s death, Haftar showed that he was ahead of the intrigues in Moscow when his Benghazi media office released a photograph of the Russian deputy defence minister gifting the Libyan strongman a pistol during his visit.

With its 1,700-kilometer Mediterranean coastline across from southern Europe, and its desert land borders providing a gateway to the Sahel and central Africa, Libya is considered vital to Russia’s interests across the two continents. The oil-rich North African nation is divided between the UN-recognised government administering western Libya and Haftar-controlled territory in the east.

Russia has proved to be a new, loyal ally to Haftar. But the septuagenarian Libyan strongman is not known for his geopolitical fidelity. In the course of an intrigue-packed military career, Haftar has switched sides, worked with rival powers, and managed to save his skin while amassing a fortune. The Derna disaster has repositioned him at the centre of a North African “Great Game”, with the victims of the floods in danger of turning into pawns.

Seeking docking rights for Russian warships

Russia’s outreach in eastern Libya predates the Derna disaster and has been largely opaque and shadowy.

Just two days before Yevkurov’s humanitarian trip to Benghazi, the Wall Street Journal published a report warning that Russia was seeking access for its warships in eastern Libya.

“The Russians have requested access to the ports of either Benghazi or Tobruk,” the US daily reported, citing Libyan officials and advisers. Yevkurov’s meeting with Haftar in August focused on discussing “long-term docking rights in areas he controls in the war-torn country’s east,” the newspaper added.

Prigozhin’s death and the Russian defence ministry’s efforts to fold Wagner mercenaries – including around 1,200 fighters still stationed in Haftar’s facilities – into a direct chain of command have increased the geopolitical stakes, according to Emad Badi, nonresident senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Atlantic Council.

“It’s about securing a warm water port on the Mediterranean, at Europe and NATO’s southern flank, which has been a covert objective of Russia for quite a long time, but on which it hadn’t made inroads, partly because its presence in Libya was never made fully official, let’s say. This is slightly changing now, given the increased high profile, and nature of the visits that we’ve seen with the deputy minister of defence,” said Badi.

Since NATO intervened in the 2011 uprising to oust Muammar Gaddafi, Russian President Vladimir Putin has consistently criticised the operation and used Libya as an example of the Western military alliance’s failure.

More than a decade later, Putin is determined to turn that failure to Russia’s advantage.

“I think they are in Libya to stay, both for resource extraction and strategic positioning, from where they can basically threaten southern Europe and destabilise the security of southern Europe,” said a Western diplomat who declined to be named. “Putin wants to undermine democracy in Europe and what better way to do that than to use Libya as a launching pad for cynically sending illegal migrants into southern Europe. I think this is a medium-to-long-term strategic plan.”

From Tartus to Tobruk, or Benghazi

Russia’s efforts to lobby Haftar for naval access are aimed at duplicating Moscow’s achievements in Syria following the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to experts.

Following its 2015 intervention on Assad’s behalf, Russia has substantially increased the use of its naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartus, the only Mediterranean port to which Moscow has access.

With a naval presence in either Benghazi or Tobruk, Russia could significantly increase its reach, by having “surface-to-air missiles deployed, anti-ship cruise missiles, electronic warfare equipment, but more importantly, be able to deploy the Russian Mediterranean fleet to set port,” said Badi.

“This setup in having both, the eastern flank of Europe [from Tartus] and also the southern flank of Europe [from Libya] presents a strategic advantage, both vis-a-vis Europe and against NATO as well,” he added.

‘Discussing fire safety with an arsonist’

Given the geostrategic stakes, the US is keeping a close eye on Russia’s outreach to Haftar in the wake of the Derna flooding.

Just days after Russian Deputy Defence Minister Yevkurov left Benghazi, the Americans were on the tarmac.

On Thursday, September 21, General Michael Langley, commander of the US Africa Command, and Richard Norland, US special envoy to Libya, arrived in Benghazi in an aircraft bearing humanitarian aid.

After a stop in Tripoli, where they held talks with representatives of the country’s internationally recognised government, the two senior US officials met the strongman of eastern Libya.

“Gen. Langley met with LNA commander Haftar in Benghazi to discuss the importance of forming a democratically elected national government, reunifying the Libyan military, and safeguarding Libyan sovereignty by removing foreign mercenaries,” the US Embassy in Libya said in an X post.

The messaging drew snide quips from Libya analysts monitoring the LNA’s crackdown on journalists and activists following a protest by flood-hit Derna residents outside the city’s landmark Al Sahaba mosque.

“Meeting Haftar to discuss democratic elections is like discussing fire safety with an arsonist. Shut the door on your way out mate,” said Anas El Gomati, director of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute, on X.

“I think the West is very naïve about how to engage with Haftar,” said Tarek Megerisi, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “My advice to the US would be to take a very strong line in pushing back against the securitisation of the Derna crisis,” he added, referring to what Amnesty International has called the LNA’s “well-honed machinery of repression to silence criticism, muzzle civil society and evade responsibility”.

‘America’s man’ or ‘Russia’s man’ in Libya?

US policy on Libya over the past few years has been characterised by muddle and absence, according to many analysts.

“Washington is playing catchup on Libya because policy is always overshadowed by other priorities,” said Frederic Wehrey, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Libya surfaces in US consciousness when there are threat concerns: ISIS [the Islamic State group], energy security and Russia’s spoiling influence in Libya.”

Since 2014 – when his military “Operation Dignity” on Benghazi split the country in two – Haftar has positioned himself as an indispensable Libyan player who has at various points engaged with the US, Russia, France, Italy, the EU, Egypt and the UAE, even as he dismays officials in global and regional capitals.

A Gaddafi-era army officer, Haftar began the post-2011 chapter as “America’s man” – the product of a 20-year stay in Virginia after the CIA failed to find another country to house his commando force engaged in covert operations against the longtime Libyan dictator. 

“In the back of Russia’s mind, Haftar is still “America’s man” in Libya, especially after the twenty years that Haftar spent in Virginia,” noted Khalil El Hasse in a Washington Institute briefing.

“On whether Haftar is America’s man or Russia’s man, I think he thrives on being in the grey zone – which is fully, neither. But I do think that the Americans have displayed a naiveite that perhaps the Russians have not because the Russians are as opportunistic, if not more opportunistic, than Haftar himself,” said Badi.

The US and its European allies have played the opportunistic game with Haftar, but they are falling behind Russia in strategy and the Libyan people have been the biggest losers, according to experts.

“A variety of international powers have crafted their relationship with this personality under the guise of counterterrorism,” said Stephanie Williams, former UN special envoy to Libya and currently a nonresident senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Brookings Institution. “Nations tend to prioritise these kind of discrete files – whether it’s counterterrorism or oil or counter-migration – at the expense of frankly, the kind of institution-building that was needed in the wake of 2011.”

More than a decade after Gaddafi’s ouster, the international roadmap for the North African country is focused on a “Libyan-led” process towards parliamentary and presidential elections.

The process, led by the current UN envoy to Libya, Abdoulaye Bathily, a veteran Senegalese diplomat, has a whiff of dismaying familiarity for most Libyans, who have endured election cancellations, obstructions and irregularities by their political elites.

During the September 10 protests outside the Al Sahaba mosque in Derna, residents vented their rage against Aguila Saleh, the eastern-based parliament speaker and Haftar ally. At 79, Saleh is viewed as a symbol of Libya’s political malaise, unilaterally pushing “legislation” through the chamber that favour his cronies and Haftar allies.

Saleh’s nephew, Abdulmonem al-Ghaithi, was Derna’s appointed mayor when the dam disaster that was “decades in the making” struck. Ghaithi was sacked shortly after the tragedy.

The Derna disaster could provide a tipping point for change, and it’s one that should be seized by countries supporting democracy in Libya before the Russians – under a new “Africa man” – can play spoiler.

“Derna does in fact represent an opportunity for responsible international and regional actors to correct the trajectory of their policy on Libya, to first of all stand with the Libyan people,” said Williams. “There is a moral responsibility now because what happened in Libya is going to happen somewhere else, we’re going have a climate change-driven event that will be compounded by conflict, chaos and misgovernance.”

______________________

Nick Turse

Victims’ relatives are fighting to hold Khalifa Hifter accountable for war crimes. Last week, a top Pentagon official held court with him.

***

The story boom of artillery echoed across Tripoli as the forces of Libyan warlord Khalifa Hifter laid waste to civilian neighborhoods. Later, as I walked through the ruins of shattered homes, battered apartment buildings, and wrecked shops, the unmistakable scent of death hung in the air.

It was 2019, when attacks by Hifter, a onetime CIA asset, and his self-styled Libyan National Army killed, wounded, and displaced countless civilians. The following year, relatives of some killed by the LNA sued Hifter in U.S. federal court under the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows relatives of victims of extrajudicial killings and torture to hold perpetrators accountable. That case is now heading to trial.

Meanwhile, Gen. Michael Langley, the four-star chief of U.S. Africa Command, met with Hifter last week during a visit “to further cooperation between the United States and Libya,” according to an AFRICOM press release. “It was a pleasure meeting with civilian and military leaders throughout Libya,” Langley said afterward.

AFRICOM failed to answer questions about Langley’s meeting with Hifter and whether they discussed the warlord’s human rights record.

“It is disgraceful that any senior U.S. official would be interacting, much less seen, with General Hifter, given the allegations against him,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer representing a group of plaintiffs in the federal case. He described Hifter as “a warlord accused by the international community of horrific crimes against humanity involving his own people.”

Langley’s visit was the latest twist in America’s on-again, off-again relationship with Hifter, once a favorite of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who, in the late 1980s, joined a U.S.-backed group of dissidents seeking to topple his former boss. After their coup plans fizzled and the rebels wore out their welcome on the African continent, the CIA evacuated Hifter and 350 of his men to the United States, where he was granted citizenship and lived in suburban Virginia for the next 20 years.

The 2011 revolution and NATO intervention, including U.S. airstrikes, toppled Gaddafi and plunged Libya into chaos from which it has never emerged. In the years that followed, Hifter renewed his long-dormant project to seize power in his homeland.

In 2014, railing against the Libyan central government’s failure to beat back militants, Hifter announced a military coup that quickly evaporated. But the warlord’s fortunes changed after he launched a campaign to clear the eastern half of the country of Islamist militant groups like Ansar al-Sharia, which conducted the 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Hifter quickly gained a reputation for attacking terrorist groups, but critics have long questioned his commitment and effectiveness, casting his activities as a cultivated effort to curry favor, including with the United States.

Over the years, Hifter’s LNA has been backed by France, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In 2019, a State Department official told The Intercept the U.S. had not aided Hifter’s forces, but retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa from 2015 to 2017, said that under Obsidian Lotus — a so-called 127e program that allows the U.S. to use foreign troops on U.S.-directed missions targeting America’s enemies to achieve America’s aims — U.S. commandos trained and equipped more than 100 Libyan proxies. Those forces, according to three Libyan military sources and a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, became elite troops within Hifter’s LNA. “They could do all the direct-action missions. They could do raids, ambushes, and … go out, sneak around, and do intel,” said Bolduc, referring to intelligence gathering. He described Hifter as a “guy that we could trust.”

By the late 2010s, Hifter’s LNA increasingly controlled the east of the country, while the U.N.-backed central government held the west. On April 2, 2019, Gen. Stephen Townsend, then the incoming AFRICOM commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Hifter’s LNA and other paramilitary groups constituted a grave risk to Libya’s stability. Days later, Hifter ordered his forces to take the capital. “Use your weapons only against those who prefer to confront and fight you,” he commanded, promising, “Anyone who stays at home will be safe.” Safe hardly describes the scores of displaced people I met as Hifter’s forces rained rockets, missiles, and artillery shells on their neighborhoods. 

The U.S. civil lawsuits alleged that, among other crimes, Hifter and his subordinates “waged indiscriminate war against the people of Libya … kill[ing] numerous men, women and children through bombings” and that they “tortured and killed hundreds of Libyans without any judicial process whatsoever.” Journalists and human rights groups have chronicled innumerable atrocities by Hifter’s forces. In 2019, for example, Amnesty International documented indiscriminate strikes often using inaccurate weapons, in violation of the laws of war, by Hifter’s LNA. A year later, Human Rights Watch reported that fighters affiliated with Hifter “apparently tortured, summarily executed, and desecrated corpses of opposing fighters.” Last year, Amnesty researcher Hussein Baoumi stated that armed fighters under Hifter’s command, and led by his son Saddam, have “terrorized people … inflicting a catalogue of horrors, including unlawful killings, torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, and forced displacement — with no fear of consequences.”

On April 15, 2019, then-President Donald Trump spoke to Hifter. Days later, in a striking reversal, the U.S. joined Russia in blocking a British-led U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities. After a brief embrace, however, the Trump administration cooled on the warlord. AFRICOM later took Hifter and his Russian backers to task. “The world heard Mr. Haftar declare he was about to unleash a new air campaign. That will be Russian mercenary pilots flying Russian-supplied aircraft to bomb Libyans,” Townsend said in a press release that blamed Moscow for prolonging the war and “human suffering.”

But the U.S. continues to send mixed signals about, and to, Hifter. In March 2020, a senior State Department official suggested there might be a “role for Hifter in shaping Libya’s political future.” Months later, as he announced sanctions against two commanders of the Kaniyat militia — part of Hifter’s LNA — then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said they “tortured and killed civilians during a cruel campaign of oppression in Libya.”

In March, a State Department human rights report chronicled allegations of “arbitrary or unlawful killings” by the LNA and charges that “contracted elements of Russia’s Wagner Group supporting the Libyan National Army committed numerous abuses.” The next month, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf “spoke with LNA commander Haftar on the urgent need to prevent outside actors, including the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group, from further destabilizing Libya.” 

In a press release issued Friday, AFRICOM focused on America’s humanitarian response to the recent devastating floods in Libya and mentioned only in passing that Langley “met with Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar,” without providing any details about their talks. “The United States stands ready to reinforce existing bonds and forge new partnerships with those who champion democracy,” said Langley after meeting with a warlord who has been involved in numerous attempted coups and rebellions going back about 35 years.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress, citing reporting by The Intercept, have recently raised questions about U.S. aid to coup-makers in Africa. The Intercept has revealed that at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel over the last two decades. While his rebellions in 2014 and 2019 took place in North Africa, Hifter is yet another foreign military officer with U.S. ties who has engaged in armed uprisings.

A federal judge in Virginia issued a default judgement against Hifter last year after the warlord failed to adequately respond to the lawsuit. The judge later reversed the decision. When the case goes to trial next year, Zaid said, the court will likely “render a determination as to whether the unlawful actions of the LNA to target and harm civilians is the legal responsibility of its leader General Hifter.” Faisal Gill, another lawyer representing plaintiffs in the case, said the evidence of Hifter’s crimes would be “overwhelming.”

“It is our hope and intent,” Zaid told The Intercept, “that the same laws and policies that helped show the world that Nazi leaders must be held accountable for their crimes will reveal that General Hifter is legally responsible for his actions, and justice will be achieved.”

***

Nick Turse is a contributing writer for The Intercept, reporting on national security and foreign policy.

_____________

Karim Mezran

Judging by the relentless media coverage and official inquiries, it would be natural to deduce that the tragic events on September 10 in the flood-ravished eastern Libyan city of Derna, with its destruction and heavy death toll of more than eleven thousand, was a catastrophe aggravated by the collapse of two dams that were decades old. This outcome results from a combination of factors converging to produce the visible consequences seen today. With that in mind, discussing what transpired in Derna within a broader geographical and political context is crucial.

Focusing solely on the Mediterranean Sea area provides sufficient grounds to draw some conclusions. Natural disasters are abundant in this region—including devastating earthquakes, torrential rains, and tornadoes—occurring frequently enough to establish a recurring pattern that is undoubtedly caused by climate change. In each of these disasters, the response from Mediterranean governments progresses through various phases.

Phase one involves assessing the event, determining the extent of the damage, and conducting necessary activities to save lives and provide relief to the distressed population. The second phase involves assigning blame. In the case of the coastal city, Derna, under whose responsibility did preventing such a cataclysmic aftermath fall? Who is answerable for the flooding that affected the city so severely? Why were there no protocols regarding a building’s location and why were dam repairs neglected, among other factors?

Statistically and historically, this second phase has seldom led to meaningful accountability in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Responsibilities have been attributed rarely, if ever, and the norm has been that no one is deemed guilty. One example is the 5.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Egypt in 1992, causing massive damage and over 370 deaths. Poor construction caused many of the buildings to collapse, and the government response was next to nil primarily due to corruption. If anyone receives blame, it is typically past officials and politicians who are either deceased or incapacitated.

Eventually, the third phase kicks in, focusing on reconstruction and rebuilding. At this point, the ruling elite no longer perceives phase two as a risk, allowing them to divert funds allocated for this phase, which leads to corruption, poor governance, and cronyism.

Phase four aims to push the entire event into oblivion, preventing public opinion from demanding effective justice and reparations despite the preceding scandals, as evident with the 6.7 magnitude earthquake that hit Algeria in 2003 and killed more than four hundred. At the time, the quake eroded public confidence in the Algerian government because of corruption and because no one had been held accountable.

This pattern has repeated itself in the area for almost every natural calamity over at least the past two centuries. The tragedy of Derna is likely to follow suit. General Khalifa Haftar, who controls Eastern Libya, has already visited Derna on September 15, announcing immediate reconstruction plans, assistance for the injured, and support for displaced persons, thus, presenting himself as the city’s savior. However, it’s widely known that, in 2017, during Haftar’s campaign to eliminate Islamists from Libya—believing Derna to be a hotbed of such groups—he subjected the city to a year-long siege and, in 2019, to heavy bombardment and military incursions.

A key difference in the case of Derna sets it apart from others. In the last century, the disasters that struck Mediterranean countries—for example, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Morocco, and Turkey—occurred in countries with legitimate governments—or even authoritarian ones—that had the capacity and willingness to act.

Despite corruption and poor governance, the international community played little to no significant role in offering aid in these cases. The case of Derna may differ. In short, the tragedy of the dam collapse results from neglected dam maintenance, city infrastructure, and civil services, such as inadequately trained and equipped firefighters and medical personnel, the absence of a warning system, and numerous other issues.

While this situation can be traced back to dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, the degree of neglect and mismanagement contributing to the current events can be primarily attributed to Haftar’s authoritarian rule and the duplicity of the House of Representatives (HoR) leadership. The latter claimed to serve the people but played a destructive role in administering eastern Libyan cities.

While the official government in Tripoli cannot be directly blamed, it bears a significant responsibility due to its unwillingness to resolve divisions with the eastern component nor provide a model of good governance. This lack of legitimate governance sets Derna’s case apart from others in the region.

Libya lacks a government with legitimate—through free and fair elections—and effective authority. Coupled with the widespread discontent among the population, this offers an opportunity for the international community or a limited number of states with stakes in stabilizing Libya—such as Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria—to act decisively.

Their intervention could deprive the current illegitimate actors of authority and propose a solution that involves empowering individuals of high moral standing and international institutions overseeing the devastated populations. The goal would be to establish a government solely focused on managing the emergency and preparing the country for elections. This intervention should not necessarily be through military means. Instead, it should consist of pressures by on-the-ground military actors to push for a solution that guarantees a change of government and a new direction for adopted policies.

This narrow window of opportunity is unlikely to remain open for long. Taking this honest, effective, and decisive action for the benefit of the general Libyan population—rather than the “pragmatic” approach of dealing with the existing powers, as seen in the Italian government’s policy of reliance on the Abdul Hamid Dbeibah government in Tripoli and Haftar in the east—would be considered a positive step. It’s time for European governments to understand that said “pragmatic” approach—one that is centered on dealing with any individual power based on its governance qualities—will only lead to more disasters and be unlikely to succeed.

***

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

________________

Osama Al-Sharif

Last week’s deadly deluge that hit the eastern Libyan port city of Derna, killing thousands and leaving many more homeless, was brought about by a natural disaster that caught Libyans unawares. But while the uncommon Mediterranean hurricane that hit eastern Libya did the initial damage, it also detonated a silent bomb — the collapse of two crumbling dams south of Derna, which ultimately destroyed half the city and did most of the killing.

Derna has become a symbol of what post-Qaddafi Libya has become: a broken country and a failed state. It has gone through more than a decade of turmoil and bloodshed since the collapse of the regime. It became a base for paramilitary militias embroiled in tribal and religious wars against their fellow countrymen. Later, it became a stronghold for various extremist groups, including Daesh in 2014. It was a base for the group until it was driven out by a coalition of Libyan forces in 2015.

Today, Derna is under the control of the transitional government of eastern Libya based in Sirte, which owes its allegiance to the self-styled Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Now 79, he was once Qaddafi’s most trusted soldier before they parted ways following the Chad war disaster. Later, Haftar conspired against his mentor, only to fail and be whisked away by the CIA to America, where he became a citizen. Following the 2011 uprising, Haftar returned to Libya, where he would expel the extremists from the east and take control of Benghazi. His ambition to rule as the country’s strongman was derailed when his army, aptly called the Libyan National Army, was repulsed on the outskirts of Tripoli in the west after Turkiye’s intervention.

He took control of Derna after a long and bitter siege. But Haftar was never able to put together a working government in the east, despite the backing of a number of Arab countries and the Russians. There were many warnings over the sad state of the two Derna dams, even in the days before Storm Daniel arrived. These warnings were not heeded.

Now, Haftar and his aides want to take credit for the rescue and recovery operations in Derna while skirting responsibility. But most people in this city that was once home to 120,000 point the finger at the ruler of Benghazi.

Haftar has resisted pressure to hold presidential and legislative elections under a law that would have favored others, especially the former ruler’s son Saif Al-Islam Qaddafi. Haftar has control over the parliament in Tobruk, which withdrew confidence from the Tripoli-based administration of interim Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah in September 2021, thus creating an impasse.

Under UN auspices, presidential and parliamentary elections were set to occur in Libya on Dec. 24, 2021. However, three days before the vote, the High National Elections Commission dissolved Libya’s electoral committees and announced the indefinite postponement of these elections. The postponement resulted from disagreements about holding elections and a failure to reach a consensus regarding the electoral framework.

One thing that Haftar has been saying is that he is fighting religious extremists, including those supporting the government in Tripoli. This is one reason why he is getting support from outside the country.

That is not to say that the UN-recognized government, based in Tripoli, is doing much better. Bitter rivalries and personal agendas have derailed attempts to unify the country and hold presidential and legislative elections. Successive governments have failed to establish control over the entire country and faced opposition from rival factions based in other parts of Libya. More than once, fighting between armed militias with opposing loyalties has broken out in Tripoli, bringing life in the capital to a halt.

In addition, while being recognized as the legitimate government, it has failed to build strong state institutions in Tripoli, including the police and judiciary. Weakening it further is the fact that control over the oil fields, the oil crescent and ports in the northeastern part of the country along the coast of the Gulf of Sidra has been contested many times. The region has been under the control of various factions and entities, making it difficult for the Tripoli government to gain access to oil sales.

And with turmoil, chaos and foreign meddling comes corruption. A number of neutral sources have accused the Tripoli government of corruption, with politicians and officials accused of embezzlement and misuse of public funds. Foreign powers, such as Turkiye, Russia, Egypt and others, have played a significant role in the conflict in Libya, providing support to rival factions and prolonging the crisis.

What it all boils down to is the fact that this oil-rich country of no more than 7 million inhabitants, strategically located in North Africa and close to European shores, which is rich in oil and gas, has not been able to recover from the 2011 uprising — and the ensuing civil war — and the ominous decision by NATO to step in.

The Derna debacle, which is apocalyptic in proportion, is a stark reminder of the deep political and social divisions that have torn the country apart. The sad fact is that the absence of a central government that can take responsibility for the entire country and embark on a comprehensive plan to rebuild afflicted cities and towns and maintain a dilapidated infrastructure, while nursing social scars, means that Libya’s road to rehabilitation will not materialize anytime soon.

Partition is not the answer, nor is maintaining the current status quo. Libyan leaders must come to their senses and find the middle ground to overcome their differences and save their country from the next natural or human-made disaster. The Derna catastrophe could have been averted if a strong national unity government was in charge. This is the message that both Tripoli and Benghazi must accept.

The current political impasse must end and foreign players must stop meddling. That may be wishful thinking at this stage. But Libyan patriots must be reminded: Type “failed states” into Google today and Libya, along with Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen, will be the top hits. Libya should not be on the list for many reasons and the Libyan people do not deserve for their country to be there.

Until divisions are bridged and a stable, inclusive government is established, Libya will continue to be at risk of further violence and instability.

***

Osama Al-Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman.

__________________

Nadda Osman

Arrests and a communications blackout have followed demonstrations in the disaster-hit city.

***

Authorities in the city of Derna in eastern Libya have cracked down on residents protesting against the authorities’ seemingly delayed and mismanaged response to last week’s deadly flooding.

Around 20,000 people are believed to have been killed when Storm Daniel battered eastern Libya on 10 September, overwhelming an aged dam and causing flash flooding on a catastrophic scale.

More than 43,000 people have been displaced by the flooding, according to the International Organization for Migration. 

Evidence points towards eastern Libyan authorities ignoring warnings of imminent danger and misguidedly telling people to stay indoors as the waters rose.

In response, Derna residents gathered in protest on Monday at the central Sahaba Square and railed against officials they blamed for the disaster. Some even set fire to a house believed to belong to Derna’s unelected mayor, who is also a nephew of the powerful parliament speaker, Aguila Saleh.

Since then, a clampdown has begun, including on foreign journalists.

A medical student in Derna, whose name Middle East Eye is withholding for security reasons, said all communications in the city were cut off on Wednesday in response to the protests, making it incredibly difficult for people to reach loved ones amid the chaos and convey the situation to the outside world.

“We have not been able to contact our family,” the student told MEE. “We are also hearing rumours that people who went to the protests are being arrested.”

Abdelgader Legnain, a Canada-based journalist originally from the eastern city of Benghazi, said around 20 people have been detained following the protests.

“I am trying to communicate with a lot of people on the ground, especially journalists,” he told MEE, adding that he has heard that most of the TV news channels have left the area. Only Libyan channels al-Hadath and al-Masar are left, Legnain added.

Meanwhile, Sahaba Square has been completely closed off by soldiers belonging to the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), the coalition of militias led by eastern commander Khalifa Haftar, who dominates Libya’s east.

Emadeddin Badi, a senior analyst at the Atlantic Council who is currently in Tripoli, said residents had been “silenced” by the authorities’ clampdown.

“Sahaba Square – where Derna’s protesters gathered to voice their demands – is now off-limits to citizens thanks to barricades & LAAF security. There is no place left in Derna for citizens to publicly assemble,” he posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Earlier this week, Amnesty International called on the LAAF to immediately lift all undue restrictions imposed on the media and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to all communities. It also accused the LAAF of leading a clampdown on journalists following the Sahaba Square protest.

“Instead of focusing on facilitating humanitarian access to all affected communities, LAAF is resorting once again to its well-honed machinery of repression to silence criticism, muzzle civil society and evade responsibility,” Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

***

Nadda Osman is a British-Egyptian journalist and editor based in the UK. She reports on human rights, social trends and issues as well as culture and arts in the Middle East and north Africa region.

___________________

Raja Abdulrahim

Derna, which lost entire neighborhoods and thousands of residents in the deluge, has a history as a cultural and intellectual hub as well as a rebellious streak.

In the days after much of the coastal city of Derna, Libya, was washed away by devastating floods, Mahbuba Khalifa wrote a poem to honor her hometown, known by Libyans as the “city of poets.”

I used to carry your great legacy in my conscience and on my shoulders, and I walked with arrogant pride and I had a certain pride that I did not deny.

Whoever sees me and sees the radiance of light that I bear as a mark on my features must know — without asking me where I am from — that I am your daughter.

For Ms. Khalifa, a Libyan writer and poet, it was the most poignant way to mourn a city with a history as an intellectual and cultural hub — and a long tradition of rebellion against occupation and authoritarian powers.

Like the aging dams on Derna’s outskirts that burst on Sept. 11, sending a torrent of storm water into the city and sweeping entire neighborhoods into the sea, the city had been neglected by the Libyan authorities for decades, residents and experts said.

That treatment was punishment from the various authorities who have controlled the area for the penchant of residents to resist control, they said.

Map locating Derna, a coastal city in northeastern Libya, which was almost totally destroyed when two dams burst creating massive flooding. Map also locates Tripoli, the capital, on the northwest coast. The flood not only wiped away large parts of the city, ripping it in two with a wall of water and earth and killing thousands of its inhabitants, but it also destroyed a cradle of Libyan culture.

Derna, a once-lush seaside town on Libya’s northeastern coast, was built on the ruins of an ancient Greek colony in the late 15th century by Muslims fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They brought with them the culture and architecture of Al-Andalus Spain, and the city became a place for different religions and nationalities to mix.

It was the site of Libya’s first theater and included cultural centers, cafes for discussions and debate, and bookshops, keeping the intellectual streak alive even in difficult times.

But the flood destroyed many of the cultural and religious buildings that represented those traditions — like a cultural center where residents debated issues of the day, as well as mosques, churches and a synagogue, residents said.

slam Azouz, an aid worker from Derna, lamented the destruction of what he called the Derna legacy. “The Old City, its streets, its churches, its houses of worship, its mosques,” he said, “all of it has gone in the flood.”

Ms. Khalifa said the intellectual and cultural traditions of the city, reflecting the rebellious nature of its inhabitants, had survived repeated crackdowns by the authorities — until the flood washed many of them away.

“Because Derna people were always rebellious, they don’t accept what is wrong,” she said. “And one of the things that leaders have done was to crack down on Derna.”

That tradition of speaking out was on display Monday when hundreds of Derna residents gathered for a protest in the devastated city, demanding the removal of those responsible for the collapse of the dams.

Many stood on the muddy, rocky earth that the floods carried through the city center, while others perched on the roof of a mosque that was still standing. Some appeared to be part of relief and rescue efforts, dressed in white biohazard suits and reflective vests.

“Aguila, out, out,” they yelled, referring to Aguila Saleh, the speaker of Libya’s Parliament, who has deflected blame for the disaster even though Libyans have said the catastrophe and its enormous scale were rooted in government neglect and mismanagement. And then, “Libya, Libya,” they chanted.

In the wake of the protest, communications to the city were cut off for many hours, and the authorities arrested protesters and activists who were demanding accountability.

“The city, whatever its condition, it always rejected oppression,” said Jawhar Ali, 28, a Derna native who lives in Turkey.

During the 32-year Italian occupation of Libya that ended in 1943, the Green Mountains above Derna were a haven for armed resisters, said Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the book “The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya.”

Decades later in the 1990s, some in the city took up arms against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s dictatorial rule, using the same mountains as a base. Colonel el-Qaddafi’s government responded with even more heavy-handed repression against the city and its people, Mr. Wehrey said.

In the 2000s, some young men from Derna went to Iraq to join the insurgency against the American military occupation there.

When the Arab Spring revolution came to Libya in February 2011, Derna was one of the first cities to join and came out strongly for the removal of Colonel el-Qaddafi.

Years of control by various armed groups followed Colonel el-Qaddafi’s ouster by rebels in 2011, aided by a NATO-led military intervention.

In 2015, local fighters defeated and expelled a local branch of the Islamic State terrorist group in Derna.

For a while, Derna remained the only city in eastern Libya that was not under the control of Khalifa Hifter, the renegade commander and former C.I.A. asset.

Under the guise of fighting the Islamic State, Mr. Hifter tried to defeat the forces that controlled Derna, laying siege to the city and pummeling it with artillery and airstrikes. After years of battle, Mr. Hifter’s Libyan National Army seized it in 2018.

Stephanie Williams, the former United Nations acting special envoy, said she remembered visiting Derna afterward. She said what she saw reminded her of the destruction she had seen in the Iraqi city of Mosul, parts of which were left in ruin in 2017 after a nearly nine-month campaign to defeat the Islamic State there.

Since then, Mr. Hifter has sought to punish Derna for its resistance. His army has kept a tight grip on the city, appointing a mayor who is the nephew of Mr. Saleh, the Parliament speaker.

Ms. Khalifa, the writer from Derna, remembers how as a child the city’s identities as a place of culture and resistance intertwined.

In the 1960s she attended a play at the city’s theater with prominent female actresses, she said. The proceeds of the play went to support the Algerian resistance to the French occupation.

That theater was demolished by the attacks of Mr. Hifter’s forces, she said.

Just days before the floods, Mostafa Trablsi, a poet from Derna, attended a meeting at the Derna Cultural House, a hub for intellectual debates and the arts, about the dams looming outside the city, their neglect and the risk of collapse.

On Sept. 10, he posted a poem on his Facebook page titled “The Rain” that appeared to emphasize his fears about the dam and warning of an “alarm.”

Exposing the wet streets;

And the cheating contractor;

And the failed state.

Mr. Trablsi died in the flood that surged through the city a day later.

The Derna Cultural House was destroyed.

“The city is not called the city of poets for nothing,” said Mr. Ali, the former resident who lives in Turkey, referring to the verses Mr. Trablsi posted on Facebook. “Even in our catastrophe, poetry played a role.”

As the search for flood victims continues under the rubble and in the sea, some residents say that culture will rise again in a city that has survived so much.

Ms. Khalifa said she planned to write a book about notable people from Derna, including intellectual and cultural luminaries, but that must wait until this mourning period is over. Each day brings news of more friends and family whom she has lost.

At least 49 relatives died in the flood, including several cousins and their families, she said. On Wednesday she found out that two of her teachers had died. Her poem reflects her deep sorrow. It ends:

“But you are tired of the injustice of history and the injustice of tampering with you and your city’s legacy, So you chose to leave when the water met the water to hide in the depth of the sea, pure and pure.”

***

Raja Abdulrahim is a Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem covering the Levant.

__________

Rayhan Uddin

Sons of warlord Khalifa Haftar increase visibility after floods, having taken vastly different political and military journeys.

On 11 September, just as Storm Daniel was beginning to wreak havoc on Libyan shores, Elseddik Haftar was in Paris soft-launching a presidential bid. 

“I think I have all the means to relieve and stabilise Libya, and put in place the cohesion and unity of Libyans,” he told reporters. 

The eldest son of Khalifa Haftar, the eastern commander who heads a coalition of militias known as the Libyan Arab Armed Forces and controls Libya’s east and south, was soon returning home to confront a devastating natural disaster.

At least 11,300 people have died and more than 10,000 are still missing after Storm Daniel tore through Libya’s east. The collapse of two dams in the city of Derna resulted in entire neighbourhoods being swept into the sea.

Upon his return, Elseddik said that his father “sensed” the disaster before it hit, and had ordered an evacuation. Libyan commentators have strongly refuted that assertion, claiming that people were in fact told to stay put in their homes. 

Elseddik’s brother, Saddam Haftar, soon entered the international news cycle, too. 

From behind the wheel of a vehicle, he told Sky News on Monday: “Yes, we need help but the rescue teams are doing their job.”

Asked if the disaster could have been prevented by authorities, including through the upgrading of the collapsed dams, he said that “all was well” and he had “no criticism”. 

Elseddik and Saddam, two of at least six sons of Haftar, have increased their public profile in eastern Libya since the deadly floods. Both have national political ambitions, arriving at this critical juncture through vastly different journeys. 

Elseddik: The civilian who looks like his father

Like several of his brothers, including Saddam, Elseddik was born and raised in Benghazi during the longtime rule of Muammar Gaddafi. 

During the brothers’ youth, their father was exiled in the United States (from 1991 until 2011), after Gaddafi disavowed the former colonel following a failed military campaign in Chad. 

“[Haftar’s sons] were known by Gaddafi. He was okay with them,” Jalel Harchaoui, Libya expert and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Middle East Eye. “Haftar was not considered a dangerous opponent in exile… He was not like an Ayatollah.”  

As his father returned to Libya after the 2011 overthrow of Gaddafi, eventually leading forces that took control of vast swathes of eastern Libya, Elseddiq kept a low profile. 

The Libyan National Army (now the LAAF) waged war on western factions after the country split in 2014, including a brutal 14-month offensive to take Tripoli that was eventually repelled. Elseddik took no part.

“He has never been associated with any armed group or security matters. He is completely civilian,” said Harchaoui. “That’s the reason he has gained importance.”

In that civilian role, Elseddik is involved in ceremonial events such as the opening of police precincts and stadiums. His striking resemblance to his father has helped the family project on-the-ground visibility. 

“It provides his father with a means of projecting influence and presence,” said Harchaoui. “It’s a way of saying… We are engaged in a constructive project. We have a civilian vision.” 

lseddik had never been considered a powerful figure, but that appears to have shifted in recent months. 

Libyan elections in 2021 broke down for a number of reasons, including disagreements about the eligibility of military officials or dual citizens as candidates. Benghazi-raised civilian Elseddik should have no such issues – unlike his father, and some of his brothers. 

“He’s like a wildcard for the Haftar family,” said Harchaoui. “If Saddam and Khaled [another brother] and their father can’t run because they are military men, you go to the next best thing.” 

In February, the low-key Elseddik created several social media accounts. 

On his new Twitter profile, he lists his job as “intellectual”. His Instagram and Facebook accounts are, curiously, run out of Lebanon. 

Earlier this year, Elseddik became the honorary president of Al-Merrikh SC, one of the most successful Sudanese football clubs, which recently ran into financial difficulties.

The Haftars reportedly donated $2m to the struggling club, and the new honorary figure was subsequently hosted by Rapid Support Forces leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemeti). He insisted the meeting was not political. 

Emadeddin Badi, a nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Programme of the Atlantic Council, doubts Elseddik’s traction.

“He is honestly viewed as a joke,” Badi told MEE. “Despite being Haftar’s eldest son and having made his political ambitions overt, he has little credibility.” 

Saddam: ‘Authoritarian in the making’

In contrast to his eldest brother, Saddam Haftar is more well-known, and has his fingers in many pies. 

Also born and raised in Benghazi, the youngest of Haftar’s sons (in his mid-thirties) is named after Saddam Hussein. 

Like the man he was named after, analysts believe he has a strongman streak. 

“Saddam is an authoritarian in the making,” said Badi. “He is attempting to take over aspects of the family enterprise that is the LAAF, all while expanding into new ventures – which include a lot of illicit activities.” 

The soldier has taken part in his father’s campaigns since 2014, including seizing Cyrenaica and the failed attempt to take control of Tripoli. He is seen by most observers as the most likely successor to his father as the future figurehead of the LAAF. 

Saddam leads the Tariq Ben Zeyad Brigade – named after the Muslim military leader who conquered Andalusia – which has become one of the most influential armed wings of the LAAF. 

The organisation was accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes and serious abuses aimed at “crushing any challenge” to Saddam’s father. 

“He is… relying on the use of heavy repression through praetorian units that he’s empowered, which will likely be his go-to strategy to claim his father’s throne when push comes to shove,” said Badi. 

Saddam’s soldiers also demolished Italian colonial-era properties in the old city of Benghazi, prompting warnings about the impact on architectural heritage. 

He has allegedly been involved in a number of trafficking activities, according to Africa Report, including drugs, fuel, gold and scrap metal from confiscated factories. 

The general was also linked with people smuggling, and was accused by survivors of the deadly Greece shipwreck in July of “overseeing” boats setting sail from eastern Libya to Europe. 

On the international scene, Saddam enjoys close relations with Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE, and Russia, including the Wagner Group, who have been a key player in helping Haftar gain control of Libyan territory. 

“His increased proximity to Russia is also a reflection of the contemporary geopolitical zeitgeist,” said Badi. “One where the perception of a retrenched US has diminished America’s global standing, and where many authoritarian leaders balance alliances on that basis.”

Two years ago, Saddam even landed in Israel, despite Libya having no relations with the country. Reports suggested it was related to a normalisation agreement in exchange for military and diplomatic support of his father.

Who will succeed Haftar?

For Harchaoui, the lack of mention by Western governments of Saddam’s name in relation to the many accusations against him, has emboldened the general. 

“They don’t mention him. So he will be thinking ‘what is the likelihood that I will be subjected to sanctions?’. The likelihood is low,” Harchaoui explained. 

He drew a comparison to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who is also accused of war crimes and widespread abuses but has been rehabilitated internationally with the help of the UAE and others. 

“[Saddam] enjoys diplomatic and ideological cover,” Harchaoui said. “Until there are British and French diplomats saying anything about him, he has a boulevard, a wide avenue of possibilities.”

It remains to be seen which brother, if either, can garner support and succeed their 79-year-old father. 

“Love him or hate him, Haftar represents a specific piece of history,” said Harchaoui. “He took a Benghazi where there was very real security problem, and real concerns among the population.” 

The analyst believes that Haftar’s seizure of control of the major city from an array of Islamist militant groups gave him a form of legitimacy. 

“But the minute he dies, we have no idea how tribes will respond,” added Harchaoui, casting doubt on whether any of Haftar’s sons can draw on his supporters. 

“[Saddam] lacks any legitimate claim beyond being his father’s most ruthless and criminally-inclined offspring,” said Badi. “Whether his ambitions come to fruition will largely depend on how inclined western powers will be to entertain them.”

***

Rayhan Uddin is a Middle East Eye journalist based in London, with an interest in the UK, MENA, social media, sports and human rights. He has previously contributed to The Guardian, The Spectator and New Statesman.

_____________

Leela Jacinto

Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of eastern Libya, has placed his six sons in positions of political and military power. The deadly floods in Derna have seen his youngest, Saddam, rise to head of disaster relief management and the top of his succession charts. For Libyans, it spells more bad news.

Wearing camouflage fatigues and his customary scowl, Saddam Haftar pours over a map of Libya in an airy chamber identified as the “Libyan Emergency Room” in a post on X, formerly Twitter. At his side are three Russian officials, part of a Russian defence ministry team that arrived in eastern Libya days after dams collapsed in Derna, unleashing a disaster of biblical proportions.

“Brigadier General Saddam Haftar, Head of the Libyan Emergency Room, follows up on the latest developments of search and rescue operations,” notes the post by a Libyan local news site barely a week after the September 11 catastrophe, which has been dubbed “Libya’s 9/11”.  

The youngest son of Khalifa Haftar, Saddam is often cited as the “possible successor” to the 79-year-old strongman who has controlled eastern Libya for nearly a decade. 

As the head of Tareq Ben Zayed (TBZ) brigade in his father’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), the youngest Haftar is better known for seizing money from Libya’s Central Bank vaults, according to the UN, and “inflicting a catalogue of horrors” in eastern Libya, according to Amnesty International.

At 32, the Haftar scion has no experience in relief administration or management. But last week, he was appointed head of the Disaster Response Committee to handle a humanitarian crisis of shocking proportions.

As millions of dollars of humanitarian aid pours into eastern Libya, the international community will be forced to coordinate relief operations under a strongman’s son with a documented record of embezzlement and human rights violations. For the Libyan people, this is yet another source of despair heaped on the loss and trauma of the flooding, which was caused by decades of state neglect.

Gaddafi falls, Haftars rise

Saddam Haftar was born in 1991, a year after his father, a top commander in Muammar Gaddafi’s army, fled into exile in the US.

The youngest of Haftar’s six sons grew up in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi with his mother while his father was in the US, according to The Africa Report. “Little is known about his youth apart from the fact that he has no known secondary school qualifications,” noted The Africa Report.

He was 20 when the 2011 anti-Gaddafi uprising erupted, bringing his father back home from exile. The young man’s fortunes started to rise after 2014 when his father attacked rival armed groups, triggering the second Libyan civil war, which resulted in Khalifa Haftar’s LNA controlling the eastern Cyrenaica region. 

In 2016, Saddam Haftar was appointed head of the TBZ brigade, one of the most powerful armed groups operating under the LNA. “Since then, TBZ fighters have been committing violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, some of which may constitute war crimes,” noted Amnesty International in “We Are Your Masters”, a chilling, 21-page report detailing rampant violations committed with impunity in LNA-controlled areas.

Saddam Haftar’s name also appeared in a 2018 report by a UN panel of experts on Libya, which accused him of seizing control of the Benghazi branch of the country’s Central Bank in 2017 and transferring “substantial amounts of cash and silver to an unknown destination”.

The contents of the bank safe included $159,700,000, €1,900,000 and 5,869 silver coins, noted the report. “Several bank managers indicated that LNA commanders had put them under serious pressure to grant them access to cash and letters of credit. Some had decided to move abroad for security reasons,” the UN report noted.

Avoiding the ire of the Haftar family is a fundamental survival strategy that residents of eastern Libya have adopted for nearly a decade, with good reason. On November 10, 2020, Hanan al-Barassi, a Libyan human rights lawyer and women’s rights activist, was shot dead in broad daylight in Benghazi a day after she posted a Facebook message promising that she would reveal alleged corruption by Saddam Haftar, according to Amnesty International.

Brothers compete but are loyal to patriarch

The young Haftar derives his power from his father, an indispensable Libyan player who has at various points engaged with the US, Russia, France, Italy, the EU, Egypt and the UAE, even as he dismays officials in global and regional capitals. But within the family, there are persistent rumours of competition between Haftar’s six sons.

Saddam was once commander of the LNA’s 106th Battalion, which functions as Khalifa Haftar’s personal guard. He was replaced as battalion commander by his elder brother, Khaled, who has a university degree and is considered more polished than his youngest sibling.

Loyalty to the patriarch is paramount among Haftar’s sons, who lack the military training and experience of their progenitor. 

On September 11, when Derna’s dams burst, another son, Elseddik Haftar, was in Paris, where he declared he would be open to a Libyan presidential bid in the future.

The master of disaster relief takes a question from the press

In the aftermath of the Derna catastrophe, Libyans inside the country and the diaspora are on alert over the disbursement of aid that has poured in from across the world, wary of corruption and the “securitisation of aid”, according to Tarek Megerisi, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.  

The signs are worrying. “In the evening following Derna’s catastrophe, you could see the guilt and incompetence shake the ranks,” said Megerisi. “From the third day onwards, Derna was essentially turned into a military zone. The area was filled with armoured personnel carriers and multiple checkpoints.”

LNA-controlled parts of Libya have long been an “informational blackhole”, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), with foreign journalists denied access while local reporters are unable to criticise the Haftars or their cronies. “In the country’s east, reporters are under Haftar’s power, and no media can criticise the military,” notes RSF.

As news of the extent of the Derna disaster trickled out last week, a few international news teams managed to make it into the flood-hit city. They encountered scenes of utter devastation as well as surreal displays of Haftar power.

A Sky News team spotted Saddam Haftar touring Derna in a pickup truck packed with armed guards. But when the 32-year-old crisis management chief was asked a few questions, his face was “a picture of irritation with me”, noted correspondent Alex Crawford.

The rare, brief exchange with a journalist promptly went viral on X, with one commentator noting, “He seems annoyed he can’t murder her”.

By Tuesday, international news teams were ordered to leave Derna – a day after residents protested in front of the landmark gold-domed Sahaba mosque.  Telephone and Internet links were also cut. A UN aid team was also refused access to Derna, according to a spokesperson for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).  

Eastern Libyan officials denied the communications and access cuts  were linked to Monday’s protests. 

But analysts had no doubt the developments were linked. “The city’s communications are shutdown with Libyan & international aid teams kicked out. Locals are now terrified of an impending military crackdown as collective punishment for yesterdays protest and demands,” noted Megerisi on X.

Succession saga 

The Derna disaster saw Libyans from across the divided country come together to provide aid to the victims of the flood. But few believe the displays of unity will extend to Libya’s fractious political elites.

While the floods have washed away several city districts, killed thousands and displaced tens of thousands, Haftar and his sons appear firmly entrenched in eastern Libyan power circles.

On November 7, Khalifa Haftar will turn 80, a milestone that has seen the strongman of Cyrenaica place his sons in lucrative posts and top military ranks. Rumours of Haftar’s failing health have led analysts to question if any of his sons will be able to replace the father. 

Likening the prospect to the TV series “Successor”, Megerisi predicts a fraught process. “Eastern Libyans, the tribes and community leaders have made it clear that they didn’t sign up for a new hereditary monarch. They don’t accept the idea of Haftar’s sons taking over. Haftar’s sons find it very hard to impose themselves on the military since they don’t have the educational or military training and they are engaged in considerable corruption,” said Megerisi.

While many Libyans have little love for Khalifa Haftar, they acknowledge that the prospect of his sons taking over their father’s networks could plunge the country into another round of instability.

“Libya must be in a more stable place before Khalifa Haftar dies,” said Megerisi. “The structures and institutions need to evolve before that. Over the past few years, different countries have been backing different son. Each son will try to be more feudal, protecting his interests and inflicting more corruption, death and destruction in Libya.”

_______________

Frederic Wehrey

What a deluged town reveals about a broken country

Footage and eyewitness accounts have conveyed harrowing scenes from the storm-struck Libyan town of Derna: overflowing morgues and mass burials, rescuers digging through mud with their bare hands to recover bodies, a corpse hanging from a streetlight, the cries of trapped children.

Two aging dams to Derna’s south collapsed under the pressure of Storm Daniel, sending an estimated 30 million cubic meters of water down a river valley that runs through the city’s center and erasing entire neighborhoods. Some 11,300 people are currently believed dead—a number that could double in the days ahead. An estimated 38,000 residents have been displaced.

Libya has seen no shortage of suffering and misery since the 2011 revolution that toppled its longtime dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Yet Storm Daniel promises to be a singular event. Already, Libyan commentators inside the country and out are pointing to the apocalyptic loss of life in Derna as the product not simply of a natural disaster, but of Libya’s divided and ineffectual governance. The west of the country is run by the internationally recognized Government of National Unity; the east, including Derna, falls under the rule of the renegade strongman Khalifa Haftar.

Derna has become an emblem of ills that afflict many of Libya’s 7 million inhabitants: infrastructural decay, economic neglect, unpreparedness for global warming. But to understand the scale of its destruction requires seeing the city in its particularity—as a stronghold of opposition to Haftar’s violent consolidation of power in eastern Libya, and before that, a hub of intellectualism and dissent. Derna’s suffering is not entirely an accident. Though for that matter, neither is Libya’s.

Founded on the ruins of the Greek city of Darnis, Derna has always been a place apart in Libya, distinguished by its cosmopolitanism, creative ferment, and fierce independence. It sits along the Mediterranean coast, at the base of the aptly named Jabal Akhdar, or Green Mountains, which constitute Libya’s wettest region and account for anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of its plant species. A port city of 100,000, Derna is famous for its gardens, river-fed canals, night-flowering jasmine, and delicious bananas and pomegranates.

Muslim Andalusians fleeing persecution in Spain helped build the city in the 16th century, leaving their imprint on the designs of mosques and ornamental doors in its old quarter. Waves of other settlers would make their way there across the Mediterranean.

By the early 20th century, Derna had become a font of literary output and nationalist agitation. Poets and playwrights gathered in a weekly cultural salon called the Omar Mukhtar Association to rail against colonial rule across the region, and after 1951, against the Libyan monarchy.

An officers’ coup ousted that monarchy in 1969, and the country’s new ruler—Colonel Muammar Qaddafi—naturally took a wary view of the coastal city’s troublemaking potential. By the 1980s, he had made Derna a place of despair, its arts scene eviscerated, its prosperous traders dispossessed, its youth crushed by unemployment.

Many of Derna’s young men joined the Islamist insurgency against Qaddafi that spread through the Green Mountains in the 1990s. The dictator responded by shutting down the region’s water service and detaining, torturing, and executing oppositionists.

By the mid-2000s, the city’s rage was channeled outward, as hundreds of young men flocked from Derna to Iraq to fight the American military occupation. The U.S. military captured documents attesting to the militancy of these recruits, also revealed in a U.S. diplomat’s 2006 cable titled “Die Hard in Derna.”

In the years after  Qaddafi’s fall in 2011, Derna became the site of violent infighting among Islamists, including a radical faction that sought to make the city an outpost of the Islamic State.

Haftar, a Qaddafi-era general and defector, began his military campaign under the guise of eliminating jihadist militias and restoring security. But his sweep was actually a bid for national power, and Derna’s fighters were among its staunchest opponents.

He was determined to subdue the city. With remorseless, siege-like tactics and substantial foreign assistance, including air strikes and special-operations forces from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and several Western countries, he did so in 2018, though at the cost of destroying swaths of the city and displacing thousands.

In the years since, Haftar has kept Derna under a virtual military lockdown, ruled by an ineffective puppet municipality and deprived of reconstruction funds, human services, and, crucially, attention to its decaying infrastructure, including the two dams that collapsed during Storm Daniel. Studies and experts had long warned that the dams were in dire need of repair.

Derna’s officials and Haftar’s military authority reportedly issued contradictory instructions as the storm approached: Some advised an evacuation and others ordered a curfew. The confusion suggests a lack of coordination within the eastern government, which, a Libyan climate scientist told me this week, habitually paid little attention to expertise. Haftar will exert tight control over relief and reconstruction efforts in the weeks ahead, funneling contracts to companies run by cronies and family members.

Having obstructed Haftar’s ambitions, Derna has become a particular target for repression. But Haftar’s style of rule—kleptocratic, authoritarian, extractive—has made for poor stewardship of eastern Libya’s infrastructure and natural environment, leaving other communities vulnerable to climate-induced extreme weather events as well.

Haftar’s militia controls a body called the Military Investment Authority, which is essentially a profit-making enterprise for the Haftar family. The authority has taken control of eastern Libya’s agriculture, energy, and construction, with dire consequences for the environment.

Climate activists from the east have told me that under Haftar’s watch, the deforestation of the Green Mountains has accelerated. Elites and militias have cut down trees to build vacation residences and businesses, and to sell the wood as charcoal. Urban development and new settlements have expanded into once-forested areas to accommodate people displaced by war.

The absence of tree cover, other human-induced transformations to the Green Mountains, and irregular patterns of rainfall caused by climate change are worsening the damage that floods can wreak. Those that hit the eastern city of Al-Bayda in late 2020 displaced thousands of people. And without the cooling effect of the mountains’ sizable forests, the average mean temperature in the area has risen, which in turn raises the risk of wildfires among the trees that remain. Already, soaring heat waves set forests aflame near the towns of Shahat and Al-Bayda, in 2013 and 2021 respectively.

In most countries, civil society and other grassroots actors can help address such ecological concerns. But in Haftar-ruled east Libya, climate and environmental activists face an extremely repressive security machinery that either stifles their involvement or confines it to politically safe initiatives, such as tree planting.

“Young people are willing, but they are afraid,” an official from the region told me candidly in July. “There is no state support.” A member of a climate-volunteer group in the east told me this week by phone that Haftar’s government had blocked their group’s attempt to obtain weather-monitoring equipment from abroad, citing “security concerns.”

I’ve heard variations on this theme time and time again during my research in Libya—an arid, oil-dependent country that is among the world’s most vulnerable to the shocks of climate change, including floods and rising sea levels, but also soaring temperatures, declining rainfall, extended droughts, and sandstorms of increasing frequency, duration, and intensity.

According to one reputable survey in which higher numbers correlate with greater climate vulnerability,  Libya ranks 126th out of 182 states, just after Iraq, in the lower-middle tier. Despite the recent inundation of Derna and the east, water scarcity poses the gravest climate-related risk to the majority of its inhabitants: Libya ranks among the top six most water-stressed countries in the world, with 80 percent of its potable-water supply drawn from non-replenishable fossil aquifers by means of a deteriorating network of pipes and reservoirs. And yet Libya has done little to address its climate vulnerabilities.

The country’s political rivalries, corruption, and militia-ruled patronage system have stymied its response. The eastern and western camps engage in only modest exchanges of climate-related information and technology.

Even within the internationally recognized government in Tripoli, the ministry of the environment and a climate authority within the prime minister’s office have been jockeying for control of the climate file. (They reached a modest modus vivendi in recent months, some insiders told me this summer.)

Derna’s plight is so extreme that perhaps—so activists and commentators hope—it will not be ignored, as countless other Libyan calamities have been, but may instead lead to lasting and positive change. Derna holds a lesson for Libya’s elites, if they are listening, about the costs of division and self-aggrandizement. Momentum toward such recognition, however tragic its origins, would be in keeping with the city’s storied and sometimes controversial role as beacon of dissent.

“It’s a revolutionary city,” a climate scientist with family roots there told me this week.

***

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

______________

Alexander Freund

Storm Daniel wreaked havoc in southeastern Europe before becoming a Mediterranean storm. The “medicane” then slammed into Libya, where coastal towns were encircled by the sea on one side and flash floods on the other.

It’s the heaviest rainfall Libya has seen in the past 40 years. Storm Daniel had already caused severe floods in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. Then, above the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, it swelled to a so-called “medicane” – a portmanteau of “Mediterranean” and “hurricane”.

It was the result of a weather pattern known as an “Omega block”. Now dissipated, the omega block over central Europe had led to a series of unusually hot late-summer days. Low-pressure systems from the Atlantic, approaching from the northwest, subsequently caused this high-pressure effect to shift southeast.

Storm Daniel brought torrential downpours to Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, before moving toward the northern African coast, which it hit with storm surges and heavy floods.

The devastation was particularly catastrophic in Libya, which has been plagued by civil crisis and political instability since 2011. Coastal towns to the north of the country have been flooded, with dams breaking and entire neighbourhoods being swept away. Thousands are feared dead.

What is a medicane?

A medicane is a cyclone over the Mediterranean Sea. The term was coined in the 1980s when satellites picked up images of cloud patterns reminiscent of a hurricane over the Mediterranean. Like a hurricane, they were shaped in a spiral, with a cloudless centre, known as the “eye” of the hurricane. Spinning around the eye at high wind speeds were sheets of clouds and rain. Hence, the combination of the terms “Mediterranean” and “hurricane”.

With a diameter of 300 kilometres at most, medicanes are significantly smaller than hurricanes, which can reach five times that size. They usually dissipate after a few hours and rarely last two days. Hurricanes, on the other hand, frequently build momentum over the span of an entire week.

Medicanes such as Storm Daniel are most frequent in the autumn but can be observed throughout the winter. They develop when cold air from temperate latitudes pushes towards the equator, forming what’s known as a cut-off low – or cold drop – in the upper airflow. The low-pressure system that became Storm Daniel was one such isolated cold drop.

The summer was far hotter than usual, which left the Mediterranean Sea warmer than usual. Once water temperatures rise above 24 degrees Celsius, water vapour condenses and creates a cloud vortex. In most cases, these vortexes do not exceed wind speeds comparable to those of a tropical storm, which are approximately between 63 and 118 kilometres per hour. However, they carry immense amounts of water, which can lead to severe floods.

Mountainous topography

The medicane hit the coastal cities Derna and Jabal al-Akhdar particularly hard, as well as the towns of Sus and Marj. Other damaged towns include Bayda, as well as the key port city of Benghazi.

The fact that cities along the coast were so severely affected is in part due to Libya’s topography. The thin strip of coast is encircled by a long and steep mountain plateau that spans some 300 kilometres. On average, the mountainous range is about 400 metres to 600 metres high, with the highest point reaching 880 metres. Its northern face has a relatively steep drop towards the Mediterranean and is rocky and jagged, marked by numerous water courses and covered with loose red soil.

It was along this plateau that the extreme rain clouds dumped the immense amounts of water they carried. Unable to absorb the deluge, rivers and lakes swelled over their banks and spilled down the slopes to the valley below in flash floods. In this way, coastal towns were practically surrounded on all sides by cascades of water. Eventually, dams were no longer able to withstand the pressure, causing huge swathes of land to flood in a very short time.

______________

Samer Al-Atrush

Citizens vent at officials who ignored warnings while the authorities look to absolve themselves of blame.

As Storm Daniel swept across the Mediterranean Sea on a collision course with Libya, officials in the east of the country began to issue conflicting warnings. Some residents in the coastal city of Derna were ordered to stay in their homes, while others were told to evacuate. So when the storm struck, bringing with it torrential rains and ferocious winds, there was no time to prepare as two ageing dams holding back the river in the hills above the city suddenly collapsed.

Torrents of floodwater ripped through Derna, washing buildings, roads, cars and residents out into the open sea and killing more than 5,000 people. Almost a week on, the recriminations are being felt across the divided country that has endured more than a decade of chaos and conflict. This has left its infrastructure in decay and its institutions weak and hollowed out. While experts have long warned that Derna’s dams were liable to burst, the authorities have been quick to absolve themselves.

Aguileh Saleh, who heads the eastern-based parliament, told Libyans that no one was to blame. “God wills and acts. Don’t say ‘if only we’d done this or that’,” he told an emergency session of parliament. “What happened in our country was a natural catastrophe.” Ahmed Al-Mismari, spokesman for the warlord Khalifa Haftar, who controls the eastern part of Libya that includes Derna, said the disaster was “completely unexpected”, despite meteorological warnings of possible floods that were issued before the storm made landfall. “It happens in all countries,” he added at a press conference.

Only Libya is not like other countries. The vast north African state with a population of 6mn sits on the continent’s largest proven oil reserves. It has natural riches to rival the United Arab Emirates, but its citizens struggle to access basic services, while a divided and ever-feuding political elite have sliced up the country into personal fiefdoms. The failures even to maintain Derna’s dams — for a small fraction of what Haftar, for example, is estimated to have spent on the Russian and Sudanese mercenaries that he relies on to prop him up — have left Libyans seething.

“All should resign,” prominent journalist Khalil Al-Hassi said of the officials who he and many others Libyans believe are culpable. “We’re bringing corpses out of the sea with nets as if they’re fish. It’s been 14 years with those people who caused this catastrophe. We don’t trust their investigations, their judiciary. We don’t trust anything from this failed Libyan state,” he said in a television interview. The flood washed away bridges and destroyed a 10 sq km swath of the ancient city, which had seen Greek, Roman and Islamic rule.

Libyan officials have given wildly conflicting tolls, but at least 5,500 people have died so far, with others saying as many as 20,000 may have perished. They are being buried in mass graves, and numbers are likely to increase as more bodies are recovered. “This isn’t the result of the storm. It’s the direct result of governance and cronyism of officials over the years, with the dams exploding under that weight,” said Emadeddin Badi, a Libyan researcher and senior analyst with Global Initiative.

“Storm Daniel was just the match” that lit the fuse, he added. “It’s the political elites and security authorities that set the stage for Derna to become the crime scene that it is today.” The lead-up to the disaster underscored the state’s dysfunction. An academic study last year published by a Libyan university journal warned of fissures in the dams and “disastrous consequences” should they fail. As Storm Daniel approached, authorities in Derna, led by the mayor, who is a relative of Aguileh Saleh, told some people to leave and ordered a curfew for others.

Survivors have struggled to put the extent of the calamity into words. “It’s impossible to describe,” said one, from a hospital bed in a video posted on social media. “Bodies were floating on the water, cars floated by, girls were screaming. It lasted an hour or an hour and a half, but it felt like more than a year.” The dams were constructed in 1970s with the help of a Yugoslavian company, when Libya was ruled by the dictator Muammer Gaddafi.

Only a couple of years before his overthrow in 2011, his government contracted a Turkish firm to conduct repairs, but the work was apparently called off due to the chaos surrounding the civil war that ended with his Nato-backed ouster. Since then, Libya has seen a succession of conflicts, including a devastating battle to retake Derna from al-Qaeda-linked militants that ended in 2019. Months later, Haftar marched his Libyan National Army on the capital Tripoli to overthrow the internationally recognised government there, drawing in military intervention by Turkey, the UAE and Russia’s Wagner mercenary group.

A 2020 ceasefire was meant to be followed by elections. But the new government in Tripoli, which was intended to be transitional, has clung to power and lobbied against an election, while Haftar has kept the east.

They are firmly entrenched, playing both patron and proxies to militiamen and political allies in their fiefdoms, and foreign powers such as Turkey, which still has a military presence, and Russia, whose mercenaries remain in the east. Despite so many players competing for power and influence, none gave much thought to Derna’s residents or its crumbling dams — until it was too late. A former western diplomat who worked in the country spoke of huge public anger in Libya, adding: “I hope it’s enough to throw out all those thugs.”

***

Samer Al-Atrush is the FT’s Saudi Arabia correspondent, covering politics, finance and business in the kingdom. Before joining the FT in 2021, he was posted in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt for Bloomberg and  Agence France Presse.

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Tarek Megerisi

In a devastating storm’s aftermath, a greedy leadership is to blame.

When a natural disaster hits, it’s as if the planet itself has turned against you. Every element of human experience ceases to make sense. This is the situation in Libya, after Storm Daniel arrived on the evening of Sept. 10, resulting in flooding so extreme that tens of thousands are feared dead (at the time of writing, the Red Cross had confirmed 11,000 deaths, with the mayor of Derna saying the toll could be 20,000 in the city alone), with another 30,000 estimated to have been made homeless and destitute.

For those who were there, the solid ground liquefied beneath their feet, with water cascading in such quantities that it swept away everything in its path. Even time has been distorted, with the minutes and hours of desperation and praying to be rescued unnaturally stretched, only to rush through the hours and days of searching for survivors.

Ironically, for an experience that exposes the insignificance of man before nature, the factors that mitigate natural disasters are the decisions, planning and actions of people. Buildings can be made to shake with the earth, structures can collect and guide floodwaters, possessions can be protected and people can be evacuated. People can prevent disasters — or at least lessen their effects.

But it requires leadership of empathy, social consciousness and planning. And all this is lacking. The leadership in Libya has been greedy, divisive and small-minded for decades. The result is a historic catastrophe, a staggering loss of people and property, which now risks being exacerbated by a shameless leadership that has seemingly learned nothing.

Libya is a young country, having become independent on Dec. 24, 1951, and born into turbulent geopolitics and poverty, yet with the promise of oil wealth. After his military coup of 1969, Col. Moammar Gadhafi completed the last five-year plan of the dethroned King Idris (with an infrastructure drive that included the Wadi Derna dams), but what followed was four decades of stagnation, neglect and negligence, alongside stratagems of divide-and-rule and patronage to control the population. The tricks stopped working, and Libyans turned to revolution in 2011, but although he was killed, the cultures he created remained.

Today Libya is divided between the families of Gadhafi’s former disciples. Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who controls the northwest of the country, is the cousin of Ali Dabaiba, the former head of the Organization for Development of Administrative Centers, responsible for infrastructure that rotted during Gadhafi’s tenure as he accrued billions. The rest, including the shores where Storm Daniel hit, is under the military dictatorship of Gadhafi’s one-time co-putschist Gen. Khalifa Haftar.

Libya’s politics, with two governments, two parliaments and a military dictator, gets confusing quickly. But despite the diversity of political offices, the policies remain largely the same. Politicians in both parts of the country explore avenues for self-enrichment while repressing or financially co-opting any dissenters.

After 42 years of Gadhafi and 12 years of civil war, the country is falling apart. To be a Libyan today is to be self-reliant, to have your own generator for electricity, access to a private well for water, reserves of fuel for when the proprietor of Africa’s largest oil reserves has shortages, and personal networks to get anything out of the state bureaucracy, turn your bank balance into cash, or get any assets out of the country.

So Storm Daniel was unleashed upon a land of individuals, not a functioning state. As the rains started, the streets flooded (not an unusual occurrence in Libya), and Libyans responded as they usually do to their state’s failure: with good humor. For most it began as a joke, and videos of kids diving off half submerged pickup trucks into the flooded streets circulated on social media. But the waters ominously continued to rise.

As the relentless waters gushed down nearby mountains, they swelled behind Libya’s tired, creaking and cracking dams, most forebodingly of all, the two Wadi Derna dams. In 2021, Libya’s audit bureau reported that nearly 2.3 million euros had previously been appropriated by Libya’s Ministry of Water Resources to maintain the dam. A company had been contracted to do the work, but the project was never executed.

This was either because of corruption (the relevant minister had received their commission and so was no longer interested), or Haftar’s government blocking a project it hadn’t personally contracted (and thus could not receive a kickback from), or the simple negligence of ministers and ministries which have no real incentive or desire to do the difficult jobs of government.

This is the heady cocktail of negligence and malfeasance that infuses the mundanity of Libya’s state failure. Worse still, Libyan hydrologist Abdelwanees A.R Ashoor had warned in a research paper in November 2022 that “immediate measures must be taken for routine maintenance of the dams, because in the event of a big flood, the consequences will be disastrous for the residents of the valley and the city.” And there could not have been a more vulnerable city, even in broken Libya, for this disaster to descend upon.

Derna is a city of many faces. For one generation of Libyans it is the font of Libyan art and culture. For another, it is a nucleus of Libyan resistance to Gadhafi and tyranny. But in the years before this disaster, Derna was nothing but bloody, battered and bruised.

The city was a major arena for the power games between rival armed and political groups following the 2011 revolution, before the Islamic State group capitalized on these divisions to seize control in 2014. Local Islamist groups allied with former army officers to drive out the Islamic State in 2015, but thanks to its resistance to Haftar’s growing dictatorship, it was besieged and bombarded for over a year. By the end of this war, 20,000 of the city’s once-80,000 residents were dead, imprisoned or displaced.

Haftar’s rule over eastern Libya has been predatory and suffocating, with Derna particularly marginalized as part of an ongoing collective punishment. A $335 million fund created in 2021 to pay for the city’s reconstruction has vanished with little to show for it.

Meanwhile, Haftar’s Military Investment Authority has been dismantling Libyan infrastructure, including water infrastructure, to sell for scrap. Any form of self-determination has been blocked, as Haftar repeatedly refused the city municipal elections. The contempt and misrule were evident in the preparation for Storm Daniel: Instead of evacuating the population, a curfew was imposed, at a cost that is only beginning to be understood.

As the waters swelled behind the dam and anxieties swelled alongside, the Haftar-controlled Ministry of Water released a post on its Facebook page claiming the dam was fine and that fears were unfounded. By the time they called for an evacuation it was too late.

The Derna dams collapsed. One hundred and fifteen million cubic meters of water surged through the valley, producing over 100 terajoules of energy, hitting the city with a force greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Satellite images would later show that the entire central third of the city, entire blocks, were simply washed away as if they never existed.

Libyan families often live together, with generations stacked above each other in the same apartment block. On the night of Sept. 10, the city heard a thunderous crack as the dam broke in what many assumed to have been an explosion. As the waters started to rise, families kept climbing higher and higher.

The lucky ones found themselves on their roofs, watching, in the flashes of lightning that crackled across the sky, neighbors, friends, sometimes generations of families swept toward oblivion. As morning came, fissures appeared in the Earth as the waters drained seemingly as quickly as they rose. Families wandered out to see their street and their neighborhood gone. The vibrant city had stood in the path of the deluge and was now replaced with an expanse of red mud and a river flowing through the center of town, slicing it in two.

What hit eastern Libya was a natural disaster in all of its terrifying and humbling glory. While Derna is the focal point of the catastrophe because of the collapsing dams, many other areas suffered, too. Some villages, such as al-Wardiya in the Green Mountain region, were completely washed away, while other larger towns and cities, like Susa and Bayda, were flooded and isolated by the waters.

This disaster has been experienced as collective trauma by all Libyans watching the videos coming out of the region, following accounts on social media or talking with friends and family who survived or are now trying to help with the relief effort.

As the storm subsided over the morning of Sept. 11, survivors staggered outside to find they were alone with their tragedy. The same leaderships that failed them were not there to help them. Shellshocked citizens, animated by nothing more than grief, desperation to find survivors and a sense of duty to give the dead their dignity, came onto the streets. They didn’t know whether what they were doing was the correct or even the safe thing to do, as none of them were trained. They just knew that they had to do something.

The scale of the loss was overwhelming, the reality that entire families and neighborhoods were washed into oblivion was gut-wrenching. But only those observing from afar actually had the luxury to have their guts wrenched by that reality.

The survivors were in morgues desperately cataloging bodies or on the coast desperately dragging bodies from a sea turned crimson, so that they could be buried with dignity, and their names, faces and stories would not be washed away with their lives. They worked until their desperation was no longer sufficient to fuel them and they collapsed.

But their stories spread. Videos of Derna’s travesty flooded every screen of Libyan social media, uniting a people often derisively described as divided in grief and rage. A population increasingly impoverished by wars and corruption donated their food, their possessions, their clothes, their time and themselves to travel from all corners of Libya’s great expanse to try and help. Convoys filled the highways, carrying “enough to provide for all of the east, not just the affected,” according to one eyewitness on social media.

As Libya recovers from the initial shock of this catastrophe, the political situation is slowly sliding back to normal. A narrative war is beginning between various sides, and the politicization and profiteering of relief has begun.

Haftar’s military are doing what they’re trained to do: give the appearance that they are in control while shirking any responsibility. In the evening following Derna’s catastrophe, you could see the guilt and continuing incompetence shake the ranks. Haftar’s spokesperson frantically warned that Benghazi (eastern Libya’s capital) could be at risk from another dam collapse, panicking residents before retracting his statement after engineers lined up to contradict him.

As the clumsy “official” relief effort stumbled forward, checkpoints were manned, and Haftar’s army very visibly accompanied foreign search and rescue teams that quickly traveled from Turkey, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates — geopolitical rivals that had warred against each other over Libya now working together to save Libyan lives.

A primary part of this operation appears to be managing the optics. Journalists have reported being denied access or having their equipment seized at the airport, while many of those leading aid convoys report being stopped at Sirte and told to surrender their cars and aid because it’s Haftar’s army that must be seen to be distributing the aid and leading the relief. As time passes, more reports come out of Haftar’s army stealing aid and relief equipment, like generators, while survivors put out calls for help over social media, saying aid hasn’t reached them and they’re starving.

Libya’s politicians are also doing what they’ve been trained to do, looking for profit while shirking any responsibility for what occurs. Rival governments are frantically briefing journalists that the criminal negligence that transformed this disaster into a catastrophe is their counterpart’s fault.

Meanwhile, four days after the travesty, Libya’s Parliament finally convened (although they’re supposed to be in continuous session during times of crisis). But instead of planning or leading any relief effort to assist the thousands of their citizens who are stranded, starving or trying to bury their dead, the Parliament’s speaker instead harangued those blaming the authorities.

Then, in place of any immediate response, the Parliament prioritized appropriating 10 billion Libyan dinars ($2 billion) into a new trust fund for Derna’s reconstruction to be managed by their speaker — who many hold responsible for squandering Derna’s last reconstruction fund.

While there’s little that can be done to stop the planet unleashing its power when and how it decides, political dysfunction and negligence can elevate these disasters into catastrophes. Human failure elevated the disaster of Storm Daniel into a historic catastrophe for Libya, and this conclusion is resonating with all Libyans.

As the grief ebbs, rage flows toward Libya’s entire leadership class. In return, internal security is reportedly surging, as narrative wars divisively try to refocus Libyans away from the relief effort and back toward factionalism. But it is questionable whether the tried and tested cynical powers of Libya’s elite can contend with the raw emotion swelling from this catastrophe.

What happened in Derna, and elsewhere in eastern Libya, is a human-made catastrophe of historic proportions, for a population whose aspirations have long been made to seem impossible. Perhaps the reality-bending power of a natural disaster is what is required to finally deliver change.

***

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

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Ishaan Tharoor

There’s plenty of blame to go around in the wake of an apocalyptic disaster in eastern Libya. Torrential rains brought by a major Mediterranean storm led to the failure of a series of dams near the coastal city of Derna.

The sudden, overwhelming flooding that followed washed whole neighborhoods into the sea, leading to perhaps as many as 20,000 deaths, with thousands still missing in what Libyans are describing as their war-torn nation’s 9/11.

Days later, areas of the city remain underwater. Thousands of bodies are decomposing in the muddied streets, raising fears over the spread of disease. Tens of thousands of residents have been displaced by the catastrophic floods. “I don’t think I can ever go back,” a survivor in Derna told the BBC. “Those streets were my whole life. We knew every corner of the city. Now it’s gone.”

The wrath of the heavens, local Libyans contend, was matched by the incompetence of those calling the shots on the ground. Oil-rich Libya — beset by crises for more than a decade since a pro-democracy uprising precipitated the violent overthrow and killing of long-ruling dictator Moammar Gaddafi — is divided between two parallel, weak governments in the country’s west, based in the capital Tripoli, and east.

The volatility of recent years meant the country’s separate regimes and their feckless officials have left critical infrastructure in a state of neglect.

That included two large dams built a half century ago by a Yugoslav company that sat in the narrow river valley above Derna. The structures had been left in a considerable state of decay and disrepair, to the point that experts last year warned the dams may fail if faced with massive flooding.

“Between 2011 and 2014, there were already concerns about the state of Libyan infrastructure,” Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya expert at the Middle East Institute, told my colleagues. “And then Libya went through a six-year civil conflict from 2014 to 2020 and a lot of infrastructure was damaged during that conflict. In the three years since, you have a situation of rival government, which has yet again complicated political dynamics. Political elites, whether in Tripoli or eastern Libya, haven’t prioritized the huge infrastructural challenges Libya faces.”

Libya’s feuding factions and fractured polity laid the groundwork for the devastation that followed. Libyans have suffered through years of intermittent fighting and lapsed cease-fires; the years that followed Gaddafi’s fall saw Libyan cities become beholden to a hodgepodge of warring militias and tribes.

The country is a security official’s nightmare — the conduit for vast, sprawling illicit networks where smugglers move drugs, arms and people. Derna itself was the site of a brief takeover by an Islamic State offshoot in 2014, which was eventually quashed by local forces. The petty squabbles and rivalries of the country’s minor potentates have led to human rights abuses.

But Libya’s unstable status quo is also the result of the intervention of outside actors. That began with the NATO-led intervention in 2011, where Western governments invoked the need to protect civilians from the Gaddafi regime to embark upon a bombing campaign that steadily moved the needle of the conflict in favor of a coalition of rebel groups.

The West’s enthusiasm to enter the war was not equaled by its commitments to the peace; Libya receded from the global conversation as brutal post-Arab Spring conflicts in Syria and Yemen exploded.

That didn’t mean that foreign powers weren’t influencing conditions in the country. When the civil war flared a few years later, the rival forces would end up receiving significant support from abroad — Turkey and Qatar backed the U.N.-recognized government in Tripoli, while Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and, to a certain extent, France found common cause with the fighters in the east, led by controversial Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter.

For each of these countries, the actual fate of Libyans was secondary to their particular vested interests. Qatar and the UAE played out their geopolitical rivalry through a proxy embrace of Libyan Islamists and anti-Islamists.

Turkey and Russia used Libya as a testing ground for affiliated mercenary companies. After the 2015 migrant crisis, European governments focused on whatever incentives could be arranged to keep migrant boats from leaving Libya’s long Mediterranean coast.

Italy’s Meloni campaigned on stopping immigration. It’s not working.

In the United States, meanwhile, a solipsism took root. Former president Donald Trump decried the toppling of Gaddafi and waved away any future American responsibility for the country.

Benghazi, the main seat of power in Libya’s east, became a buzzword in the context of U.S. political theater, the watchword for an earlier era of Republican hysteria over the killing of four U.S. diplomats that launched a marathon series of congressional hearings. All the while, an under-resourced U.N. mission struggled to achieve any meaningful political reconciliation among the warring parties, which were motivated to fight for maximal gains in part because of the continued support of outside backers.

Libya’s calamity now offers the chance for a reset. “After years of treating Libya as a problem to contain and keep at bay, the United States has an opportunity, now, through this disaster, to re-engage directly with the Libyan people,” wrote Ethan Chorin, a former U.S. diplomat in Libya, pointing to the Biden administration’s new pledges of aid. The European Union is also mobilizing a humanitarian response.

Skepticism abounds among embittered Libyans. Libyan social media “is already rife with criticism of European governments,” noted Tarek Megerisi of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The narrative is that Europeans’ active interventions in Libyan politics helped create the corrupt Libyan politicians being blamed for the disaster, but those same Europeans vanish when they could really help.”

And then there are fears over what may happen with major flows of aid into the country.

“At the societal level, there is a huge outpouring of solidarity and spontaneous support for Derna,” observed Wolfram Lacher, a Berlin-based expert on the country. “But for Libya’s political players … this is all just another episode in the struggle for money and power.”

***

Ishaan Tharoor is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, where he authors the Today’s WorldView newsletter and column. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

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Hafed Al-Ghwell

Once a tranquil, albeit densely populated city on Libya’s eastern Mediterranean coast, Derna now echoes to the sound of gut-wrenching wails, some for help, others for those still missing and likely killed in streets that were turned into swirling rivers by Storm Daniel.

More than 8,000 lives have been snuffed out, with an additional 10,000 reported missing. Infrastructure lies in ruins, roads have been ripped apart and, between the mournful cries, a disheartening silence haunts the spaces where many had worked hard to cobble together whatever they could amid Libya’s decade-long woes.

As the terrible toll of the storm rises and the full extent of the destruction is revealed, we must not forget the lives, dreams and aspirations that were ended not only by unrelenting skies but by the folly of man. Two dams that, designed as bulwarks against such catastrophes, succumbed to the onslaught of pouring rain, their inevitable failure amplifying the disaster.

But it was not only Storm Daniel that did the damage, it was also the sinister negligence of the authorities entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring such disasters could never happen. For example, their refusal to order evacuations, instead calling for curfews, and their failure to repair the dams despite multiple warnings and requests to do so.

There are also reports of how funds set aside to bolster the dams were never spent on such work and instead disappeared into officials’ pockets.

Derna’s plight is a horrifying tale of the underacknowledged interplay between climate change and human failures. However, we must resist the urge to solely pin the blame for the catastrophe on the ever-convenient scapegoat of global warming. Yes, our planet is changing but so, too, should approaches to governance, policymaking and crisis management.

Thus, any discussions or erudite inquiries into the catalog of unforced errors that led to the destruction of Derna should skip the lazy exercise of passing the buck and labeling it as merely a consequence of a changing climate. The floods did not wreak havoc solely because of wrathful skies; the tragedy they wrought is also the manifestation of an undercurrent of systemic dysfunction and malfeasance that essentially made Derna an inevitability.

In other words, it was as much a man-made disaster as it was a natural one, born from the discord that has rocked Libya since the collapse of the Muammar Qaddafi regime in 2011. Now Libyans must once again pay a steep price for collective failure exacerbated by the costs of attritional civil conflict, gross negligence, corruption and appalling incompetence, all fueled by a lack of urgency and a decade-long failure of state amid the squabbles between the east and the west of the country.

It is high time we ended this lazy exercise of blaming climate change alone for such disasters. The world must wake up to the hard truth: Derna is not only a city ravaged by a storm, it stands as a glaring testament to the catastrophic cost of official failure, negligence and incompetence, and a tragic reminder of what happens when critical safeguards are undermined in unconventional ways. Until we truly comprehend this, the storm is far from over.

So, what really went wrong? Our tale of negligence begins with the tumultuous political landscape in Libya, which has been split since 2014 between two rival factions. And so, after nearly a decade of civil unrest, the major storm arrived and dropped more than 400 millimeters of rain in just 24 hours on parts of Libya’s northeastern coast. The deluge was unprecedented in an arid region that normally sees an average of just 1.5 millimeters in September.

The split in governance between the eastern administration and the internationally recognized government in Tripoli is more than just senseless political theater. It has yet again manifested, in a catastrophic way, the consequences of state failures and corruption, which have hampered levels of preparedness, disaster response, and relief efforts.

Derna’s own violent past is tightly entwined with its current circumstances. It was once the ground zero for Daesh’s Libyan splinter group and a persistent pocket of resistance against Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the so-called Libyan National Arab Army, who bombarded the city and razed it to the ground.
After the city came under Haftar’s control, about five years ago, the promise of rebuilding remained just that: a mere promise. Amid the rubble and buildings riddled with bullet holes, it is no wonder the system was already overwhelmed and underperforming, even before disaster struck.

To add to the frustration, days before the calamity, warnings of imminent disaster were issued by emergency-response authorities. Despite knowing the scope and severity of the threat, the due diligence that might be expected from a responsible administration was grossly overlooked, even prior to the arrival of Storm Daniel, given the poor maintenance of the dams and a lack of timely inspections and repairs.

Voices from the devastated region suggest there was negligence even in preparing for potential damage, with a lack of studies of weather conditions or evacuation plans. It is akin to an oncologist spotting a malignant cancerous growth and choosing to leave it untreated, despite sufficient funding, adequate resources and ample warnings. In the case of Derna, one of the warnings was an academic paper published last year by a hydrologist, which called for immediate maintenance work on the dams.

It is very likely that even more harrowing details will emerge, cataloging the series of failures that led to a quarter of Derna being wiped out. Even more upsetting, however, is the fact that efforts to lend aid, organize relief efforts and begin the painstaking work of helping Derna to recover are likely to flounder as well. Because a conundrum has developed concerning international aid — to whom should it go?

With Haftar’s rival military government in Benghazi not recognized by the UN, there is concern about how aid meant for Derna will be administered. The power tussle in the country is effectively preventing emergency aid supplies from reaching those who need them the most, and hampering recovery work.
The tragedy of errors does not end there.

Derna also suffers because it is in the particularly troubled province of Cyrenaica, long Libya’s most neglected municipality. The response to the crisis has been marred by serious miscalculations that led to the underestimation of the effective, substantial action that was needed.

In essence, the flood catastrophe is not only an event that happened but a symptom of prolonged negligence, inadequate administrative foresight, military competition and corrosive political rifts, all nestled within a crumbling ecosystem.

It underscores the lethal interaction between mutable weather patterns and the inflexible, myopic governance that collectively conspired to unleash this catastrophe on Derna. Its hapless residents are unlikely to find any semblance of peace to grieve and scrape together whatever they can in a country ravaged by on-and-off conflagrations, given that they have no government with the nationwide reach required to properly coordinate rescue, relief and recovery efforts.

The distressing scenes from Derna should serve as an urgent wake-up call for a course correction, not only for Libya but for climate and disaster policy worldwide. If left unchecked, the effects of our political and administrative myopia will continue to fuel disaster after disaster, each more grotesque than the last.

Ultimately, it is more than mere floodwaters that swell over the embankments. It is the torrent of negligence and uncaring governance that is responsible for the undertow that pulls entire cities into the deep dark depths of despair.
***
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, and the former adviser to the dean of the board of executive directors of the World Bank Group.

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Pierre Boussel

Following reports of widespread migrant exploitation, Libyan authorities in both Tripoli and Tobruk are conducting a deliberate effort to crack down on smuggling.

larming reports from international organizations are having little effect on the deterioration of living conditions for over 700,000 migrants in Libya.

While many hope to reach the European Union, crossing the Mediterranean is deadly: nearly 2,000 have died or disappeared at sea since the beginning of the year.

This July, Syrians on one clandestine boat begged the captain to turn back when the vessel began to leak, despite risking arrest by the Libyan coastguard. The latter has stepped up patrols to such an extent that some migrants are turned back up to ten times before reaching Europe.

Once arrested, migrants are transferred by the Libyan Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM) to detention centers such as Bir Ghanam, Gharyan, Ayn Zarah, Tarik al-Sikka and Al Mabani.

Cases of torture and sexual abuse are regularly reported by NGOs, and United Nations investigators have found that some migrants, driven to despair, commit suicide by hanging or drinking shampoo. Families of migrants sometimes pay bribes of up to $5000 to secure their release from detention.

In March 2023, a UN fact-finding mission claimed that migrant exploitation in Libya was in violation of international law, with evidence that both armed militias and state actors had committed crimes against humanity.

The report pointed to the fact that the “the smuggling, trafficking, enslavement, forced labour, imprisonment, and extortion of migrants generated significant revenue for individuals, armed groups, and State institutions,” including Libyan state entities that receive significant EU funding to combat irregular migration.

While the EU has denied that it helps smugglers in Libya, the Libyan authorities—both the internationally-recognized government in Tripoli, and the Tobruk-based government in the east—have launched new initiatives to try to combat smuggling and convey a responsible migration policy.

Most migrants in Libya come from sub-Saharan Africa, but in the east, there is additional pressure from the Egyptian border, through which Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and other Asian migrants transit.

On land, local forces are carrying out operations to demolish smuggling warehouses; at sea, there have been reports of migrant pullbacks led by the Tariq Ben Zeyad Brigade, a militia led by Saddam Haftar, the son of Libyan National Army commander Khalifa Haftar. Despite its lack of international recognition, Haftar’s regime may be taking these anti-smuggling measures in part to access European funding.

The authorities in Tripoli, on the other hand, have employed legal proceedings in order to distinguish themselves from Tobruk.

The Libyan Attorney General’s office recently announced the conviction of thirty-eight traffickers who had sent eleven migrants to their deaths in an ill-fated boat. But Tripoli has also resorted to force in the crackdown on smuggling: in May, the government launched military operations in the western Zawiya region to dismantle illegal migrant camps controlled by traffickers.

According to reports, drone strikes destroyed “seven migrant smuggling boats, six drug smuggling depots and nine fuel smuggling tankers.” The Tripoli authorities have also taken measures to escort migrants back to their countries of origin, and to expel hundreds of Egyptians, Chadians and Sudanese to third countries, such as Rwanda or Gambia. 

It remains to be seen whether these initiatives will convince Libya’s partners—the UN, the EU, the African Union, and the US. They, too, face a challenging diplomatic balance: pressuring Libyan officials in both the east and the west to respect human rights, without undermining government initiatives.

But in the face of regional crises, it is certain that Libya’s authorities will continue to be tested. The ongoing conflict in neighboring Sudan has pushed large numbers of refugees to try to cross the border.

Neither the Sudanese nor the Libyan authorities know how many have died attempting the journey, and many of those who survived are now trapped in limbo. As long as it remains divided, Libya will be ill-equipped to cope with these sudden and unexpected migrant arrivals—giving smugglers the upper hand. 

***

Pierre Boussel is an associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS), with a focus on the Arab world and Islamist extremism. Based in North Africa since 1999, his research and analysis have been published by public policy centers in Europe, the United States, and the Gulf.

_______________

Matt Herbert | Rupert Horsely | Emadeddin Badi

Human smuggling and trafficking not only endanger the lives of vulnerable individuals but also contributes to the erosion of human rights and the perpetuation of violence in Libya.

Organized criminal networks involved in human smuggling and trafficking exploit and abuse migrants, subjecting them to inhumane conditions, physical violence and, at times, forced labour. Further, disputes over smuggling routes often escalate into armed conflicts between rival groups, destabilizing communities and undermining stability. Beyond their contribution to overt violence in Libyan communities, these networks’

empowerment is often at the expense of state authority, as they pose a direct challenge to government.

Average prices paid by key nationalities for smuggling services:

Pakistani: €5850–€8360

Egyptian: €1000–€1935

Bangladeshi: €3850–€5770

Libyan human smuggling networks often seek to perpetuate an ecosystem where the rule of law is consistently weakened, and where they can secure institutional titles and affiliations that enable them to masquerade as migration enforcement stakeholders.

This allows them to financially profit from human smuggling and trafficking, as well as reap financial dividends for artificial efforts meant to counter the illicit market.

Tackling human smuggling is essential not only for protecting the rights of migrants but also for restoring peace, security and stability in Libya.

Since 2021, the number of migrants departing Libyan shores for Europe has increased year-on-year, ending a spell of subdued activity that lasted from the end of the last crisis in mid-2017 to roughly 2020.

This increase has been driven by the re-emergence of transnational networks offering a hybrid travel package to migrants from Egypt, Bangladesh, Syria and Pakistan. These packages include regular entry permits and flights to airports in both the west and east of the country.

Benina, the main airport in the east, remains the most popular, apparently due to the lax policies of the LAAF, which benefits from the increased airport traffic by often imposing a separate entry fee. Many packages include transport to the coast and the sea crossing.

This is a revival of the sophisticated networks that linked client populations with overland and maritime smugglers, which drove the previous crisis of 2015–2017.

The elements allowing for such a revival largely link to the post-2020 peace. The operations of sophisticated networks are underpinned by cooperation between a variety of different stakeholders throughout Libya and abroad. This requires trust, both between the network organizers and local actors, and between local actors whose activities for the smuggling network intersect.

Such trust, which was limited during the 2019–2020 conflict, has gradually bounced back, allowing for sophisticated smuggling networks to move large numbers of migrants across nominal lines of LAAF and GNU control.

Human smuggling involving migrants from African countries has continued but now comprises only a fraction of total departures. This has not been manifestly changed yet by the conflict in Sudan.

Interviews suggest that between mid-April and early July 2023, several thousand Sudanese refugees have transited through the southern cities of Kufra and Um al Aranib. An unclear, though reportedly limited, number have also transited from Egypt into Libya along the coastal road.

This itinerary could intersect with the evolving migrant smuggling ecosystem in eastern Libya, raising the possibility of a sharp increase in Sudanese embarking for Europe in the medium term.

Since the start of 2022, departures from eastern Libya centred on the city of Tobruk have risen sharply. Previously marginal to human smuggling, the east saw, as of mid-2023, roughly as many embarkations as coastal Tripolitania, the historic centre of gravity for Libyan smuggling.

Departures from the east carry an inherent risk due to the usage of large vessels, the high numbers of migrants crammed on each vessel and the complexity of the nautical journey to Europe. This danger was underscored by the sinking of the migrant ship Adriana in June 2023, killing hundreds.

Rising levels of migration from the east have been fuelled in large part by networks previously involved in drug trafficking. These are tied into the sophisticated transnational networks detailed previously, which enable the supply of large numbers of migrants directly to eastern Libya.

The rise in departures also appears to have benefitted from the apparent tacit allowance of multiple elements within the LAAF.82 Complicating the situation, many of these elements have, at times, also cracked down on migrant departures, though the larger smuggling networks have been primarily untouched and the overall situation does not appear to have changed.

Tobruk should not just be understood quantitively as the addition of a new potential embarkation point, but as a qualitative game changer, with the potential to drive departures from Libya to levels last seen in 2017.

Finally, the abuse of migrants is an ongoing challenge, though some aspects of such predation have changed in recent years.83 In the 2010s, Libya became notoriously dangerous for migrants, with kidnap for ransom, physical violence, extortion and sexual violence a recurrent phenomenon.

These abuses were linked to smugglers and owners of warehouses used to store migrants, as well as officers of detention centres used by the Tripoli-based government to hold migrants intercepted on land or at sea.

Since 2020, reports of abuses in warehouses and kidnap for ransom have oscillated. Security gaps in the immediate aftermath of the Tripoli war opportunistic predation continued, particularly in areas south of Tripoli, including Mizdah, Shwayrif and Bani Walid.

More recently, reports of warehouse abuse have become less prevalent, though they continue. This may be because warehousing and extortion do not seem to be part of the sophisticated smuggling model seen at present, which has occupied a dominant share of the present human smuggling market. Lack of reporting on abuse may also be due to the displacement of warehouses to remote areas of the south and south-west, limiting access to information.

Detention centres affiliated with law enforcement in the north-west continue to see abuse and extortion, with migrants often viewed as resources to be exploited for bribes or government spending. However, a key danger area is the Fezzan. There, armed groups affiliated with the LAAF have increased abuse and predation of migrants, in part under the guise of a law enforcement campaign countering irregular migration.

In late 2021 and early 2022, this led to the mass expulsion of several thousand migrants into Niger.84 Migrants interviewed reported that these deportations involved abusive conditions, robbery and offers of release in return for bribes.

While deportations have ceased, the same groups reportedly continue to routinely detain migrants, mainly at facilities in or near Sebha.

Interviewees have noted recurrent instances of physical abuse and violence during detention. The sharp rise in human smuggling levels since 2020, and the dispersal of human smuggling to new areas such as eastern Libya, underscores the challenge faced by the international community in addressing the phenomenon in Libya. In part, this is due to the dominant position of armed groups in Libya and the weakness of the state.

It is also the result of rebounding transnational smuggling groups, leveraging Libya’s peace dividend to expand their operations and cater to new types of nationalities. It is likely that this will continue to intensify as long as Libya’s internal peace holds, heightening the likelihood that the year-on-year increases in movement through and departures from Libya will continue in the near to medium future.

***

Matt Herbert is a senior expert at the GI-TOC’s Observatory of Illicit Economies in North Africa and the Sahel. He writes on transnational organized crime and state fragility, and policy responses to these issues, including targeted financial sanctions, security sector reform and governance, and state–community engagement.

Rupert Horsley is a senior analyst at the GI-TOC. He is an expert on Libya, focusing on migration, organized crime, security and conflict trends in the country. He specializes in complex analysis and research in difficultto-access communities.

Emadeddin Badi is a senior analyst at the GI-TOC, a senior advisor for Libya at the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He specializes in governance, organized crime, hybrid security structures, security sector reform and development.

______________

Giorgio Cafiero

Libya’s government in Tripoli is desperately seeking greater legitimacy in the West, but there is desperation in Biden’s administration too.

Many analysts doubt that Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah was truly unaware of plans for his foreign minister, Najla al-Mangoush, to meet her Israeli counterpart in Rome, and they instead believe she was thrown under the bus.

Last month, al-Mangoush met Eli Cohen for talks, and on August 27, Cohen announced the news, fuelling rage in Libya and creating a political crisis for the unelected, interim Tripoli-based government, which is struggling with a lack of public legitimacy.

Israel seemed to be trying to show that normalisation with Arab countries is gaining momentum despite no new states joining the Abraham Accords for almost three years. By announcing the meeting, it appeared to say that it is “normal” for high-ranking Arab officials to meet their Israeli counterparts – but the “Arab Street” did not agree.

Regardless of what Dbeibah knew and when he knew it, his government had to deal with the outcry.

In Libya, especially western Libya, there is no appetite for normalising relations with Israel. Andreas Krieg, associate professor at the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that Libyans have been “the most passionate about speaking out for Palestine and against Israel”.

During Muammar Gaddafi’s 42 years in power, “Israel was the enemy,” said Federica Saini Fasanotti, senior associate fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies.

“That legacy is still very much present in post-Gaddafi Libya, and I would not underestimate it if I were Dbeibah.”

“It’s near impossible to get public support for normalisation with Israel,” Krieg said. “In Libya, there is this civil society, and this civil society may have been limited under Gaddafi, but … that civil society had one rallying point, and that was Palestine. That hasn’t really changed.”

US foreign policy implications

Officials in Washington were livid about the leak against the backdrop of quiet efforts by President Joe Biden’s administration to bring Libya into the Abraham Accords.

Acting United States Ambassador to Israel Stephanie Hallett met with Cohen to express dissatisfaction. One US official said the leak “killed” the possibility of Libya normalising ties with Israel while making it harder to expand the accords to new Arab Islamic countries.

Libya’s Tripoli-based government seemed to have been trying for more US backing and greater legitimacy on the international stage.

“If you don’t have public legitimacy, then you can get international legitimacy, and I think the Biden administration has signaled to the Dbeibah government that joining the Abraham Accords might be a way to get international legitimacy and support in Washington,” Krieg said.

“Libya is so desperate that it is ready to please everyone to get some sort of support. If being nice to Israel is going to sway the US, … why not?” asked Marco Carnelos, former Italian ambassador to Iraq.

“Libyan politicians do not have any authoritativeness before the international community,” Fasanotti said, “so it is crucial to gain public [backing from] countries that carry weight on the international stage.”

Just as Libya’s Tripoli-based government is desperately seeking greater legitimacy in the West, there is desperation in Biden’s administration too.

Mindful of how much Team Biden prioritises bringing more nations towards normalising relations with Israel, the White House’s fury was predictable. “I believe that at this stage, Biden’s administration would do everything to have [more] Arab countries joining the Abraham Accords,” Carnelos said.

Given Libya’s wide-ranging and dire problems, the fact that bringing it into an agreement with Israel is a US priority speaks to the centrality of the Abraham Accords to Washington’s policies.

“The problem here is the focus in Washington should be on public legitimacy and preparing elections [in Libya],” Krieg said. “Knowing that this is very difficult, they have empowered Dbeibah and other players in Libya by saying: ‘We give backing either way – whether there are elections or not – by you normalising with Israel.’ That’s the wrong signal.”

“The narratives that come out of this [are] that the US is only concerned about Israel, it doesn’t care about the rest of the Arab world, and it definitely doesn’t care about Arab public opinion, which is staunchly opposed to normalisation across the board. It also shows that [Biden’s] administration … are out of touch with realities on the ground in the Middle East.”

Carnelos said Washington’s timing is “completely wrong”, considering that “Israel is ruled by the worst government ever in terms of empathy towards Muslims and Palestinian rights in particular”.

“I have no idea who is the genius in Washington who came forward with such an absurd proposal,” he said.

The UAE’s role

The United Arab Emirates was the main Arab state arming renegade General Khalifa Haftar during the 2014-2020 Libyan civil war. He is affiliated with a rival government based in eastern Libya, but Abu Dhabi has recently engaged the Tripoli government with Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed trying to persuade Dbeibah to normalise, according to Krieg.

The UAE being at the vanguard of regional efforts to get more Arab countries to normalise ties with Israel makes the Gulf state extremely important to US foreign policy interests.

For example, in 2020, shortly before Sudan announced its normalisation with Israel, a meeting was held in Abu Dhabi with Sudan, the UAE and the US. Sudan asked for a broad economic support package, giving the UAE the opportunity to use its financial resources as an incentive for Sudan.

For Abu Dhabi, the expansion of the Abraham Accords is important because it can help solidify its standing in Washington.

Because it is using its leverage to expand the accords, the UAE has been granted a “degree of freedom of manoeuvre” in Washington, Krieg told Al Jazeera. “Because every single time someone raises the issue of how the UAE is helping sanctions evasion, financing the Wagner Group or having a Chinese intelligence base in the country – every single time these issues come up, there will be someone in Washington who says: ‘Yes, but they have the Abraham Accords,’” Krieg said.

“It’s a get-out-of-jail card.”

____________

Karim Mezran

The sentence, or some variation of it, has been uttered by diplomats for centuries, but here it proved incendiary. “I spoke with the foreign minister about the great potential for the two countries from their relations,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen in a statement on August 27, confirming a meeting the week before with his Libyan counterpart, Najla Mangoush. News of the meeting between the Libyan and Israeli officials, and the implication that its aim was to advance the North African state in becoming the next signatory of the Abraham Accords, flooded the media in the following days. 

The news provoked several protests and incidents in Tripoli and elsewhere in Libya, which does not recognize Israel. Demonstrators stormed a house owned by the United Nations–backed Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah and torched it. An attempted attack against the main offices of the foreign ministry was also carried out. Disorder in the streets has continued in the days since. Reports that the meeting was championed by Italy, Libya’s former colonizing power, and held in Rome added to the demonstrators’ fury given Italy’s contentious past relations with the country and its people.

Libyans’ outrage is fairly easy to understand. The first criticism is that the Libyan government took a big risk in carrying out such important diplomacy without any public discussion and, in so doing, underestimated the feelings of the population. The second criticism is that the Libyan government appeared open to engagement with an Israeli government widely perceived in the region as very right-wing and uncompromising on the Palestinian issue. Thirdly, news of the meeting provided a unique opportunity for the opponents of Dbeibah’s government, which is widely perceived in Libya as corrupt and nepotistic, to take to the street and attempt to oust the prime minister.

Multiple motivations

Given these easily expected outcomes, what was driving this diplomacy in Rome? The different actors’ thought processes are easily understandable. For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this was an important opportunity to demonstrate his foreign policy prowess while he is confronted by political challenges at home. Furthermore, by taking steps to further increase the number of Arab states that recognize Israel, the Israeli leader might hope to improve relations with key governments in Europe and establish positive momentum while negotiations continue regarding Israel-Saudi normalization.

Dbeibah, too, was attuned to the changing political winds in the international community toward Libya, from a supportive stance a few years ago to a more critical one as of late. He must have wanted to generate as much support internationally for his leadership as possible. What better way than making the Jewish communities happy and grateful? This belief, albeit evidently flawed, that by making Israel happy one could gain the support of the whole Jewish population of the world, and thus of the states where its individuals live, is a deeply rooted belief in the Arab world—and a longstanding anti-Semitic trope.

For the Italians, the reason for playing a part in this meeting may be harder to comprehend but is very similar. Italy’s government must have sensed an opportunity to win over the influential Libyan Jewish diaspora and the votes that the community carries in Italian elections, especially in Rome. Italian officials might have also considered the idea of being lauded for having played an important role in such a breakthrough in international politics. Nevertheless, none of the actors involved is so naive to have believed that such a step could be kept secret indefinitely. For Israel in particular, secrecy would have defeated a main purpose of why it was interested in advancing relations with Arab states—that it hoped to increase its popularity in the international community.

People I have spoken with both in Libya and in Italy who are close to the decisionmakers all agree on one point: It is more probable that the goal among the parties was not for the meeting to remain totally secret, but rather for each of the participants not to actively divulge the news about it. That is, not to give it much publicity in order to defuse opposition and thus reap the fruits of the deed and avoid the repercussions. This hasn’t happened, and now Libya is back to instability and potential conflict among the various armed groups.

The Libyan prime minister has been on damage control in the days since. To stress his government’s distance from the event, Dbeibah fired Mangoush, who has since fled Libya. She seems to be a scapegoat, who most probably will not serve in Dbeibah’s government going forward as he tries to keep his increasingly shaky hold on power. Another potentially more problematic consequence is that of the sudden resurgence of radical Islamist leaders in Libya in response to the news.

Finally, there is also a wider, geopolitical consequence that should not be overlooked. The signing by some states of the Abraham Accords has radicalized the position of regionally important players such as Algeria (and its neighbor Tunisia as well).

If Dbeibah is ousted from office and a new government that includes the forces that pushed him out comes to power, then the new government could be tempted to join the Algerian-Tunisian entente, and in so doing move away from the influence of Egypt.

Even if the situation calms down, there still remains the bitter feeling that this crisis could have been easily avoided if the various internal and international actors had acted with more knowledge and care.

Back to school

What are the lessons to be learned from this incident? Western actors in particular should realize that any regime, even the most authoritarian one, has some form of internal give-and-take with the various constituencies that compose its sociopolitical environment. Therefore, any external pressure should be exercised with attention to the peculiarity of each state in order not to cause uproars and instability. This lesson is particularly important for Italy, whose new government is expressing its intention to play a more active foreign policy, one that sees it acting more energetically abroad. 

For the Israelis, it is tempting to think that the lesson is that such discussions should be handled through intelligence channels, which may be better able to keep secrets, rather than through the foreign ministry. But perhaps today it is no longer possible to keep such matters secret at all, at least not on such a politically sensitive topic. 

Therefore, the lesson should be that it cannot afford such unforced errors in the future, and that any publicity about its diplomacy with Arab countries should be carefully planned and only executed with the full agreement of its partners. Therefore, Israel’s approach should be more pragmatic and focused on the general benefit of whatever action is undertaken, so as to minimize eventual backlashes.

For the Libyan government of Dbeibah in particular, the lesson is that trying to pursue personal interests through international agreements and accords of any kind stands little chance of success if the interest is not widely shared with the population. The question of legitimacy cannot be avoided.

As the Libyan example shows, the principle of searching for a way to begin a process of cooperation, if not regional integration, between Arab states and Israel is an important and noteworthy endeavor that should be nevertheless treated with extreme care. An approach lacking sufficient care can end with a setback to the cause of regional peace and stability.

***

Karim Mezran is a distinguished Libyan-Italian scholar, director of the North Africa Initiative, and resident senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council.

Bottom Line up Front

• Libya’s fractured political structure boiled over into significant fighting among militias in the capital, Tripoli, in mid-August, potentially adding to instability in neighboring African countries.
• The deadly clashes in Tripoli illustrate the difficulty U.N. mediators face in unifying Libya’s governing structure and organizing long-delayed national elections.
• Libya’s instability both worsens, and is worsened by, turmoil in neighboring states such as Sudan and Niger, the presence of armed groups that cross borders, and the near-constant meddling of external actors.
• The instability in Libya creates an additional opportunity for the Wagner Group to extend its influence in the region and rebuild after its failed mutiny in Russia and the killing of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

In mid-August, tensions in post-Qadhafi Libya – already heightened by the competition for power between a U.N.-backed administration in the capital, Tripoli, and political and military leaders based in the eastern city of Benghazi – produced significant combat between rival militias in Tripoli. 

The fighting, which reportedly killed 55 persons and wounded nearly 150 others (including some civilians), erupted as part of a power struggle between two militias: the “444 Brigade” and the “Special Deterrence Force.” In contrast to previous clashes in and around the city over the past two years – all of which were brief and relatively small in scale – the contending militias are both aligned with the U.N.-backed Tripoli-based administration of nominal Prime Minister Abdel Hamid Dbeibah.

The two forces, however, report to different organs within that administration; the 444 Brigade is under defense ministry command, whereas the Special Deterrence Force reports to the Presidential Council that supervises Dbeibah and his cabinet.

Earlier clashes in or near Tripoli during 2022-2023 generally represented efforts by Benghazi-based Khalifah Haftar, head of the factionalized “Libyan National Army” (LNA), and his allies to extend their authority into western Libya by undermining Dbeibah’s government.

Earlier, in 2019, Haftar – backed by Russia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – launched a major military effort to seize Tripoli and the rest of western Libya. After many months of combat, his forces were repelled by militias loyal to the Tripoli administration who were assisted by military equipment and advice from Türkiye.

U.N. mediators, particularly the U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Libya and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) Abdoulaye Bathily, immediately assessed the Tripoli combat as a setback to the U.N.-led effort to unify Libya’s divided political structure by holding national elections. Presidential and parliamentary elections were initially scheduled for December 2021, but were postponed over disagreements between the eastern and western Libyan elites who fear that an election loss would erode their prestige, influence, and control over the sources of revenue.

On August 22, Bathily told the U.N. Security Council that political divisions in Libya “are fraught with risks of violence and disintegration for countries,” and he urged the country’s rival factions to resolve all election-related issues so that long-delayed voting can take place.

He added that: “Of course, we have envisioned the election to take place in 2023, but what is important is that this agreement can become a reality.” Libya has been unable to avoid further instability. Just yesterday, fighting erupted in several Libyan cities after it was revealed that Foreign Minister Najla el-Mangoush met with her Israeli counterpart in Rome last week.

As a precaution, el-Mangoush apparently fled to Turkey, but protests continued in Tripoli and elsewhere throughout the country.

The combat in Tripoli raised questions about the degree to which instability is affecting – and is affected by – broader conflict, instability, and poor governance in the countries bordering Libya.

In his Security Council briefing, Bathily added that Libya’s stability is being placed at even greater risk by the fighting between rival armed forces chiefs in Sudan and the military coup in Niger that overthrew elected President Mohamed Bazoum.

Contrary to U.N. expectations, Chad, as well as Sudan and Niger, have not withdrawn their fighters and mercenaries from southern Libya. And Niger, Bathily argued, like other countries in Africa’s Sahel region, has been impacted by the crisis in Libya.

Some Nigeriens have joined with mercenaries in Libya, and armed elements in Niger are also active along the border. He added that, were the Niger army to fracture, “the destabilization of Niger will undoubtedly have consequences on Libya, and vice versa.”

He also assessed that there are escalating risks to regional stability associated with recent fighting between “armed elements” in southern Libya and government troops in Chad’s neighboring Tibesti region.

The movement of armed groups across regional boundaries also threatens to leave “ungoverned spaces” that global terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) typically use to train and expand their capabilities.

With respect to the interrelationships between conflict in Libya and Sudan, experts have noted linkages between Haftar and the Rapid Security Forces (RSF) – the paramilitary organization that, since April, has fought the Sudanese regular army for control of the country.

Haftar, as well as his outside backers in Russia and the UAE, depend on RSF commander General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) to protect their lucrative trade, smuggling routes, and investments in Sudan’s mines and other industries. Special Representative Bathily did not mention Haftar specifically in his August 22 Security Council briefing, but he stated that Libya’s border with Sudan (which runs along Libyan territory controlled by Haftar’s forces) has been open to “armed groups,” mercenaries and gang leaders dealing in illegal migration, illegal mining, drug trafficking, and other criminal activities.

Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. Representative to the United Nations, echoed those comments by asserting that instability in Sudan and Niger could spiral into wider violence and insisting that the Libyan people are ready for compromise and stability.

Although the continuing instability in Libya might help shape the context for the eruption of the civil conflict in Sudan and the Niger coup, it can be argued that the violence and conflict in both Sudan and Niger have their own historical, political, economic, and international dimensions – separate and distinct from the causes of instability in Libya.

In Niger, in particular, the presence of Sunni jihadist group affiliates and branches – and the involvement of U.S., French, and other global coalition partners to combat those fighters – appears to have fueled public support for the military coup.

Another major question that flows from the combat in Tripoli, as well as from the other regional conflicts, is whether Russia, or more precisely its mercenary organization the Wagner Group, will benefit strategically and economically from the instability.

In his Council briefing, Bathily confirmed that Wagner is in Libya, but that the U.N. “has no information on the size of its presence or equipment.” Yet, it has been widely reported that both Russia and Wagner supported Haftar’s attempts to conquer western Libya in 2019 and continue to support his LNA forces.

Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield stated at the Council meeting that the United States will continue to “shine a spotlight on the Wagner Group’s pernicious impact in Libya and across Africa,” adding that Wagner operates in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sudan, and its leadership “has made no secret of its ambition to gain a further foothold in Africa, [including] its disregard for Libya’s territorial integrity.”

The U.N. meeting was held one day before a plane crash, which U.S. officials believe was likely caused by deliberate sabotage, killed Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin – two months after his units led an abortive mutiny against Russia’s defense leadership.

Some U.S. and international officials believe that Wagner’s operations in Africa will survive the death of its founder – based on the attraction of many regional elites to Moscow’s denunciations of perceived Western hegemony.

A wide range of experts assesses that Moscow’s popularity in Francophone Africa has come at the expense of France, whose counterterrorism and other military operations in Africa, often in partnership with the U.S., have resulted in civilian casualties and property damage and angered much of the population of several African countries, including Niger.

Russia has also fashioned itself as an anti-colonial power across the continent, positioning itself in Francophone countries as a liberating anecdote to their former French colonizers. Russia’s popularity in the region comes despite the fact that Moscow, particularly while it is under extensive Western sanctions because of its invasion of Ukraine, has little to offer Africa in trade or investment.

______________

Elis Gjevori

The country’s politicians have all sought the fruits of a diplomatic relationship with Israel, say analysts.

Israeli ties with Libyan political actors are not a secret, in fact they go back at least a decade. But the public and official disclosure by Israel’s foreign minister on Sunday that he had met his Libyan counterpart in Italy was the first of its kind, and has caused a diplomatic firestorm. 

Various Libyan political actors condemned the meeting that took place last week between Najla al-Mangoush, a member of the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU), and Eli Cohen.

Mangoush was fired from her post by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, and subsequently fled the country to Turkey. 

Cohen’s public disclosure has been condemned by Israeli politicians and analysts as jeopardising the forging of a tentative diplomatic relationship. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has berated the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for publicising the talks that should have remained secret and warned that it had “killed” the prospect of normalisation between the two countries. 

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Tripoli’s outreach to Israel

Yet despite the outrage by Libyan politicians across the political divide, one thing that unites them all is they have also had direct contact with Israeli officials and intelligence services at some point.  

“Mossad has been developing contacts with both rival governments in Libya and they are irate that Cohen has damaged their discreet work, at least with one of the two sides,” Yonatan Touval, an analyst at the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies (Mitvim), told Middle East Eye. 

In 2022, Dbeibah was reported to have met the head of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad director David Barnea in Jordan. 

The meeting, reported by several credible Arab and Israeli media outlets, was officially denied by Dbeibah.

The contacts between them concerned the normalisation of the relations and security cooperation between the two countries.

According to reports, the prospect of normalisation between Libya and Israel was also discussed in a meeting between Dbeibah and CIA Director William Burns, who visited the country in January of this year.  

Burns had encouraged Dbeibah’s government to join the four other Arab countries who normalised relations with Israel in 2020.

While Dbeibah gave initial approval to the idea, he was worried about the public backlash in a country that has long shown strong support for Palestinians. 

Israel in eastern Libya

To the east of Libya, controlled by eastern commander Khalifa Haftar, authorities have sought to carve out their own relationship with Israel.

Media outlets close to the commander of the Libyan National Army have condemned Mangoush’s meeting with Israeli officials.

However, between 2017 and 2019, Mossad envoys met Haftar in Cairo on numerous occasions, and have facilitated the training of some of his key officers in war tactics, intelligence gathering and analysis, as well as control and command measures.

Additionally, the Mossad also helped his forces purchase night-vision equipment and sniper rifles.

In 2021, Israeli media reported that Haftar’s son, Saddam Haftar, had met intelligence officials in Israel looking to secure support in return for eventual recognition should they prevail.  

Israel is just another player, amongst equals in Libya, said Touval, alongside the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Turkey and the United States – looking to maximise their own national interests.  

“You never know which side will ultimately emerge as the dominant one, so it would make sense for it to cultivate ties with both sides with a view that in due course to cooperate on a host of issues, intelligence and perhaps also do the work of preparing for an eventual political diplomatic relationship,” said Touval. 

‘Israeli compatible’

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the late deposed leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, who now seeks a political role in the country, managed the Israeli relationship during his father’s reign.

Although there were no official ties between the two countries and Gaddafi was publicly a staunch supporter of Palestine, Saif sought to maintain contacts with Israel over “diplomatic and humanitarian issues”.

Most of Libya’s current political actors are already “Israeli compatible from a security perspective,” said Libya expert Jalel Harchaoui and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. 

All the main foreign players in Libya have long-standing relationships with Israel. Libyan political actors are now thinking “can we also reap the benefits of having a relationship in the diplomatic sphere,” Harchaoui told MEE. 

Libya’s main political actors are all engaged in a diplomatic race to not only win greater international recognition, but are also incentivised to build contacts with countries that they believe could further their political goals, like Israel, said Harchaoui. 

“This is why Saddam Haftar allegedly visited Israel. It means basically that Haftar said, you know, it’s too bad we are not in Tripoli because we are the right people. We have the right vision in terms of security, but also in terms of diplomacy,” he added. 

The Abraham Accords have also created a regional perception in the Middle East that “good actors” have a relationship with Israel while bad ones don’t, said Harchaoui. 

Since 2020, Israel has normalised ties with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in a series of deals brokered by the United States. Saudi Arabia is also reported to be considering normalising ties with Israel.

“The entirety of the atmosphere that has prevailed since August 2020 with the beginning of the Abraham Accords has resulted in Arab actors actually looking and zealously seeking the recognition and diplomatic dividends that would basically be yielded by the United States if they show a willingness to have a relationship with Israel,” added Harchaoui.

“I wouldn’t say that Israel has gone to great lengths to go up to and beg these actors, it was more the other way around,” he said. 

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

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