Libya’s militias
Political, geographic and tribal allegiances divide the country
Libya is a divided country with two prime ministers, two parliaments and two armies that rule from opposite ends of the country. Along with the patchwork of militias that emerged during and after the 2011 uprising, the uniformed armed forces that defected that year have coalesced into two broad camps loyal to two rival governments. One, the internationally recognised product of a parliament elected in a national ballot in June, is based in the eastern town of Baida. There it is supported by a breakaway faction of the Libyan army led by retired general Khalifa Haftar and forces under the command of Abdelrazaq al-Nadhuri, the government’s recently appointed chief of staff and an ally of Mr Haftar. The government in Baida is also aligned with armed groups from the western mountain town of Zintan who were routed from Tripoli following a weeks-long battle in July and August 2014 with rival militias collectively known as Libya Dawn.
The other is a self-declared government in Tripoli, formed in the wake of the fighting that changed the balance of power in the capital in August. Buttressed by the Dawn coalition of fighters from the port city of Misrata and other western towns, along with Islamists, the Tripoli-based administration is also backed by army units that have united around Jadallah Obaidi, Mr al-Nadhuri’s predecessor, as chief of staff. Contrary to what is often assumed, Libya’s crisis has little to do with ideology. It is too often reduced to a misleading narrative of Islamist versus non-Islamist, or secularist/ liberal—two words that have little meaning in the broadly conservative Libyan context. The current conflict is less an ideological struggle than a multi-faceted scramble for power and resources rooted in overlapping regional, economic and social dynamics. While ideology inspires a minority, it is not the primary driver.
Of more significance is the rivalry between regions, particularly between Misrata and Zintan, and the contest between those who benefited under the old regime and what can be described as the revolutionary elites that emerged after 2011. Although in recent months Libya’s fractured political and armed currents have pooled into two loose sides, each comprised of shifting alliances, no single faction is capable of prevailing over all others. The country now contains all the ingredients for a protracted civil war, with backing from regional actors including Qatar and Turkey on one side and Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on the other. According to the US, the latter collaborated to carry out air strikes on Misrata allied locations during the battle for Tripoli in August 2014. The seeds for the security fragmentation were sown during the Qaddafi regime. Fearful of a military coup, Mr Qaddafi had neglected the army and police for decades, preferring instead to build elite battalions commanded by his sons.
Those from the hollowed-out military that joined the uprising were too weak and disjointed to keep order after the dictator’s fall. The revolutionaries, particularly Islamists, often viewed them with suspicion due to their association with the former regime. Then a series of fateful decisions by the National Transitional Council, the feeble interim authority set up in the first months of the uprising, led to the current unravelling. To plug the former regime’s security gap, the council reorganised the revolutionary groups into larger paramilitary formations and put them on its payroll. As a result, nearly all of Libya’s armed groups today claim legitimacy due to their ostensible affiliation with ministries and other institutions, which are themselves riven by internal tensions arising from competing regional, tribal and political loyalties. Several of these groups became entwined with political and criminal elements as they consolidated power and impeded efforts to form a regular army.
Today Libya is a curious security landscape where an array of formal and informal armed forces operate under the nominal auspices of disputed—and now duplicated— state institutions. The relationship between the officially sanctioned irregular forces and the remnants of Mr Qaddafi’s military units has been uneasy, particularly in the eastern city of Benghazi where a series of assassinations of security officials from 2012 sharpened divisions. Mr Haftar exploited this when he launched an air and ground offensive against Islamist-leaning militias in the city in May 2014, just three months after the government accused him of attempting a coup. Backed by disgruntled former army and police officers and militias linked to powerful eastern tribes and regional separatists, the former general also secured the support of Benghazi’s special forces for the operation he dubbed karama (“dignity” in Arabic).
His targets included state-affiliated armed groups like the Libyan Shield One and February 17 Revolutionary Martyrs’ Brigade, as well as the hardline Ansar al-Sharia, which was designated a terrorist group by the US State Department in January 2014. The rhetoric employed by Mr Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) tapped into popular demands for a proper army and police, despite the large component of the LNA that is comprised of irregular tribal forces and militia linked to a federalist movement seeking greater autonomy for eastern Libya. Mr Haftar had been stalling until mid-October when a renewed offensive, boosted by Egyptian-supported airstrikes and the emergence of local armed civilian allies known as sahawat (“awakening” in Arabic) brought him some territorial gains. The government in Baida has since given its imprimatur, as has its appointed chief of staff, whose son died fighting for Mr Haftar in Benghazi.
As the two duelling military-political camps of Dignity and Dawn become more entrenched in Libya’s eastern and western flanks, the prospect of building a unified and broadly representative military architecture for the country grows even more remote. Plans by Britain, Italy, Turkey and the US to train and equip some 19,000 members of the nascent Libyan army overseas, including former revolutionaries, had already run into problems before the current escalation. Some programmes were delayed due to funding issues. In October 2014 Britain halted its training of Libyan recruits after some of them were accused of committing sexual offences and others displayed disciplinary problems. There were also concerns that trainees would simply return to the local commanders who had led them against Mr Qaddafi. With deepening political polarisation comes the risk that existing alliances will buckle, further splintering the security sector.
There are no easy answers to Libya’s dense tangle of security challenges. Disarming and disbanding the militias before a proper army and police are formed will leave a vacuum. But the very existence of the militias hampers the building of such forces. The best Libyans can hope for is that international actors remain committed to helping create a functioning military and police, even if it includes former revolutionaries. But as Libya’s fractures multiply, those allies have grown wary. For now, Libya remains destined to be a country of many armies and none.
