Libya's Fragmentation

Structure and Process in Violent Conflict

Wolfram Lacher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780755600830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Shortlisted for the Conflict Research Society's 2021 Book of the Year Prize
Shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society 2021 Book Prize After the overthrow of the Qadhafi regime in 2011, Libya witnessed a dramatic breakdown of centralized power. Countless local factions carved up the country into a patchwork of spheres of influence. Almost no nationwide or even regional organizations emerged, and no national institutions survived the turbulent descent into renewed civil war. Only the leader of one armed coalition, Khalifa Haftar, managed to overcome competitors and centralize authority over eastern Libya. But tenacious resistance from armed groups in western Libya blocked Haftar's attempt to seize power in the capital Tripoli.
Rarely does political fragmentation occur as radically as in Libya, where it has been the primary obstacle to the re-establishment of central authority. This book analyzes the forces that have shaped the country's trajectory since 2011. Confounding widely held assumptions about the role of Libya's tribes in the revolution, Wolfram Lacher shows how war transformed local communities and explains why Khalifa Haftar has been able to consolidate his sway over the northeast. Based on hundreds of interviews with key actors in the conflict, Lacher advances an approach to the study of civil wars that places the transformation of social ties at the centre of analysis.

1

Libya’s unravelling (2011–19)

Libya’s fragmentation was not a linear process. Recent comment frequently draws a direct line between the 2011 NATO-led intervention and the chaos engulfing Libya since 2014. But the collapse of the post-Qadhafi transition was by no means inevitable. The dynamics and turning points that prevented the re-establishment of state institutions and the formation of cohesive national political forces deserve careful analysis.

This chapter draws the big picture of Libya’s evolution during 2011–19, providing the context for subsequent chapters, which delve into the details of local struggles. It introduces the key political actors and traces changes in the political landscape. It identifies the events and dynamics that defined Libya’s path towards fragmentation, and failed efforts that could have altered that path – such as attempts to form broader, more cohesive or more centralized institutions and political forces. It examines the nature of fragmentation, and underlines its central importance for Libya’s overall trajectory during the period under investigation.

Revolution (February–October 2011)

The Libyan revolution erupted as a dramatic chain reaction that was sparked by spontaneous protests and regime violence. Within ten days of the first protest on 15 February, events had reached a revolutionary situation: a state of split sovereignty, with rebels taking over major cities and regions, contesting the Qadhafi regime’s claim to legitimacy, and establishing their own leadership.¹ Local revolts had snowballed into a revolution and become militarized long before the NATO-led intervention began on 19 March.

The first protests were spontaneous and unorganized, erupting under the impact of the toppling of Ben Ali and Mubarak in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, which suddenly made the overthrow of Qadhafi seem equally possible. They preceded the ‘day of rage’ scheduled for 17 February, which exiled opposition groups had called for. The first instance of unrest erupted in Benghazi on the evening of 15 February, in reaction to the pre-emptive arrest of a lawyer representing families of victims of a 1996 massacre in a Tripoli prison. The families had staged periodic sit-ins in Benghazi over the preceding years. Though the lawyer was released after several hours, a small protest that included family members of the victims ballooned into a crowd of several hundred people at the courthouse in downtown Benghazi that was dispersed by tear gas and hot water cannons, with some protesters clashing with regime supporters in stone-throwing battles.²

The very next day, protests erupted in several cities, and were met with violence by security forces. In the eastern city of al-Bayda, security forces killed two protesters on 16 February. The following day, the funerals led to large protests in which fifteen people were killed.³ Their funerals on 18 February, in turn, exploded into rioting. Protesters looted and torched the facilities of the internal security service and the Revolutionary Committees, seized weapons and lynched a member of the security forces.⁴ The following day, people from al-Bayda and neighbouring Shahat attacked and seized the base of an army brigade that informally carried the name of al-Jareh Farkash, a relative of Qadhafi’s wife who had long led the unit. They subsequently fought to gain control of nearby al-Abraq airport, through which reinforcements had been arriving, eventually seizing the airport on 21 February.⁵

In town after town, the pattern of regime violence provoking the rapid escalation of initially small protests repeated itself. In the eastern city of Darna, three protesters were killed on 17 February, triggering large protests and clashes after the funerals the following day, during which buildings of the security services were attacked and set on fire. During the night, Darna rebels had already taken over the nearby army base at Bombah, seizing weapons. On 23 February, fighters from Darna captured and later executed twenty-two soldiers.⁶

In Benghazi itself, security forces adopted a shoot-to-kill policy in their attempt to quell protests on 17 February, killing twenty-eight people and injuring scores.⁷ The following day, regime forces opened fire on a funeral procession, causing protests to escalate further; thirty-five people were killed.⁸ On 19 February, protesters attacked facilities of the security services and prisons, seizing weapons, and began attacking the base of the city’s key praetorian unit, the Fadhil Bu Omar Brigade, initially armed mostly with stones. The decisive moment for the uprising in Benghazi – and in Cyrenaica as a whole – came on 20 February, when rebels seized the base. Interior minister Abdelfattah Younes, who also commanded the Benghazi-based Saeqa Special Forces, negotiated the evacuation of Qadhafi’s son Saadi, his intelligence chief Abdallah Senoussi, and the bulk of the forces in the base, before it fell to the rebels. Younes officially defected to the rebels two days later; the same day, lawyers and academics at the courthouse formed a local council for Benghazi.

By 22 February, the eastern region from Benghazi to the Egyptian border therefore largely escaped government control. In the west, too, the uprising was in full swing. In the Nafusa Mountains, protesters on 16 February torched the seats of the Revolutionary Committees and Internal Security services in Zintan and neighbouring Rujban. In Rujban, a brigade sent to re-establish control that evening killed a young protester. Both towns were in open rebellion as early as 17 February. Zintani rebels formed a committee to organize the town’s defences on 19 February, and seized a weapons depot several hundred kilometres away on 20 February. In Amazigh towns across the mountains, small protests erupted on 18 February; in Jadu, rebels seized their first weapons the next day. By 24 February, most towns in the mountains from the Tunisian border to Kikla had joined the rebellion.⁹

In the coastal city of Misrata, the first instance of unrest on 19 February led to the death of a young man at the hands of the security forces; his funeral the following day triggered larger protests and attacks on the security forces, which then temporarily withdrew from the city. Misratans formed their first local committee on 22 February. In Tripoli, the first major protests erupted on 20 February; as in Benghazi, regime forces followed a shoot-to-kill policy that claimed around 200 victims in the capital that night.¹⁰ Large protests once again erupted on 25 February, whose repression caused dozens of casualties.¹¹ The western coastal cities of Zawiya and Zuwara escaped state control from 24 February onwards.

A spate of high-level defections accompanied the breathtaking dynamic of cities erupting in rebellion. Suleiman Mahmoud, commander of Tobruk military region and a longtime Qadhafi companion, publicly declared on 20 February that he had ‘joined the people’.¹² Qadhafi’s justice minister Mustafa Abdeljalil, from al-Bayda, resigned on 21 February in protest against the violent clampdown, and presided over the newly formed local council in his home city. The same day Libya’s deputy ambassador to the UN and the ambassador to India both resigned. On 22 February, after Qadhafi’s infamous speech, in which he called protesters ‘rats’ and ‘cockroaches’ that would be hunted down ‘house by house’, interior minister Abdelfattah Younes defected, as did Libya’s ambassador to the United States. Many other senior diplomats and officials joined them over the next days, not least UN ambassador and long-standing senior regime figure Abdelrahman Shalgham, on 25 February. Rumours disseminated through the international media – most prominently by al-Jazeera – significantly contributed to this momentum. Allegations relayed on 21 February that the regime’s air force was strafing protesters in Tripoli later turned out to have been false; so was the UK foreign minister’s statement the same day that Qadhafi had fled the country.¹³

The defection of senior officials provided the spontaneous rebellion with a political leadership and channels to foreign governments. The lawyers and academics of Benghazi’s local council reached out to these officials, as well as to the councils that were forming in other eastern cities. On 26 February, they established a national council headed by Abdeljalil. The National Transitional Council (NTC) was officially announced on 5 March, with the aim of representing all Libyan regions – though the only names they made public were those of eleven members from eastern cities. Rebels in several western and southern cities had designated representatives whose names were withheld to protect their security, and the council stated that some of its thirty-one seats were yet to be filled by representatives for Tripoli and other cities.¹⁴ Even so, the council was clearly dominated by eastern figures.

The nascent revolutionary leadership was a diverse group. It included officials who had defected, like Mahmoud Jibril, who had been a prominent figure among the reformists promoted by Qadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam, and who oversaw the NTC’s foreign relations before becoming head of the council’s Executive Office. They also included long-standing regime figures like Shalgham and Younes, the latter named chief of staff of the council’s (largely imaginary) army. Members of the Benghazi intelligentsia and respected figures from other eastern cities formed a third constituency; a fourth were exiled opposition activists, many of them representatives of historically prominent families that had been sidelined under Qadhafi.¹⁵ Who was really in charge remained unclear, and initial shortcomings in clarifying competencies led to recurrent quarrels between factions within the NTC.

The elite figures in and around the NTC quickly lost control over the revolutionary forces as they emerged on the ground. The groups of young revolutionary fighters that formed in Benghazi, al-Bayda and Darna to fight Qadhafi’s forces on the eastern front had seized weapons in the initial chaos; they escaped central oversight, and many were deeply suspicious of Younes and other senior army defectors. Eastern dominance in the council and the isolation of the embattled western revolutionary strongholds from the NTC in Benghazi further compounded the problem. In Misrata and the Nafusa Mountains, highly localized armed groups developed as rebels defended individual towns or neighbourhoods. Gradually, civilian fighters and defected officers who had shown particular charisma or skills emerged as leaders of local factions and established local military councils. The NTC and its military leadership had few connections with these groups, and little to offer them.

The problems caused by the absence of strong central leadership would gradually come to the fore as the rapid momentum of the uprising’s first two weeks gave way to a stalemated civil war. After regime forces re-established control in Tripoli in late February, the spate of defections shrank to a trickle. During the first two weeks of March, Qadhafi’s forces violently suppressed rebels in Gharyan, Zawiya and Zuwara, established a foothold in Misrata, and laid siege to rebellious Nafusa Mountains towns. On the eastern front, regime forces drove the disorganized rebels from their positions at Ras Lanuf, and by 19 March appeared on the outskirts of Benghazi, when the onset of the French-led (later NATO-led) intervention annihilated the advancing column. Thereafter, the front lines would remain largely static until early June, when rebels in Misrata and the Nafusa Mountains began making steady progress.

In the six months between the eruption of the uprising and the fall of Tripoli in August 2011, the diverse factions that joined the revolution for the most part deferred internal conflicts that could be exploited by the regime – though there were many sources of tension, and several moments in which the coalition could have fallen apart. Within the NTC, Jibril was criticized for spending most of his time abroad and inaccurately presenting himself as the revolutionaries’ prime minister.¹⁶ Leading figures in the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements attacked the NTC for what they saw as its excessive reliance on secularist intellectuals; the absorption of several Muslim Brothers into the NTC from May onwards introduced a new political divide within the council.¹⁷

Frictions between the NTC leadership and the Islamist-leaning commanders of revolutionary armed groups in Benghazi also appeared early. In late March, Ismail Sallabi, one of the leading commanders in Benghazi, prepared a petition to alter the composition of the NTC. Sheikhs and armed men seeking to stop him confronted Sallabi at his house, and shots were fired before the situation de-escalated. Younes failed to assert his authority over the civilian fighters who were risking their lives on the front line, and harboured doubts over his competence, as well as suspicions that he retained ties with Qadhafi. He also faced a rival contender for the army leadership in Khalifa Haftar, a former army officer and Qadhafi protégé who had joined the exiled opposition after being captured by enemy forces during the 1980s Libya-Chad war, and arrived in Benghazi in early March. Crisis struck when Younes was assassinated in late July, in circumstances that remain murky. Under intense pressure from Younes’ tribe, the Obeidat, the NTC dismissed its Executive Office, several members of which were alleged to have played a role in the events leading up to You nes’ killing.¹⁸

Rivalries over weapons supplies to the revolutionary forces exacerbated such tensions. At first, Qatar channelled its weapons shipments to Younes, under NTC oversight. But from April onwards, competing networks emerged through which rival factions in the NTC and its Executive Office connected local revolutionary forces to regional governments. The prominent Doha-based religious scholar Ali Sallabi used his connections to route subsequent shipments to a coalition of Islamist-leaning revolutionary battalions in Benghazi in which his brother Ismail was a leading figure. Ali Sallabi was also instrumental in brokering Qatari and Sudanese weapons shipments to two groups that had established themselves in the Nafusa towns of Nalut and Rujban, and were led by former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). In turn, Jibril and the Sufi scholar-cum-businessman Aref al-Nayed successfully lobbied the UAE for weapons shipments to their contacts in Zintan, and brokered their own Sudanese supplies to groups in Misrata and Benghazi. Misratan businessmen and military leaders gradually established their own links to Qatar and Sudan.¹⁹

The emergence of competing factions, each with its own local and international connections, thwarted all efforts by the NTC and its Executive Office to direct the capture of Tripoli, and ensure its stabilization under a central authority. The fall of Tripoli in August was chaotic, as forces from Nafusa Mountains towns, Misrata, and clandestine networks in Tripoli itself failed to coordinate, and almost instantly began to vie for control of the capital. Dozens of armed groups began competing for military and security facilities, government buildings and files of Qadhafi’s intelligence services. They also began looting the assets of state-owned companies and the private property of senior regime figures. Zintani units seized the international airport. Predation and the seizure of strategic sites vastly increased the power of revolutionary commanders.

The security landscape in Tripoli evolved into an anarchic patchwork. Former LIFG commander Abdelhakim Belhaj, relying on the Qatar-backed units that had fought in Nalut and Rujban, declared himself the head of a ‘Tripoli Military Council’, though he had consulted only a fraction of the forces now scrambling for control in Tripoli, and had not received formal NTC approval. Zintani commanders, nascent armed groups from Tripoli, and many others immediately contested Belhaj’s move.

In an attempt to establish a single command structure under the NTC and contain Belhaj, Jibril and another senior figure in the NTC’s Executive Of...