former rebel fighters who helped to oust Gaddafi are now jostling among themselves for power
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ISIS Uses Intelligence to Purge Opponents - US News - 2 views
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An Islamic State group flag flies near the front line of fighting between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Islamist militants in Rashad, Iraq. By: Ali Mamouri, Columnist for Al-MonitorAl-Monitor NAJAF, Iraq - The Islamic State (IS) differs from its predecessors and similar groups by running a powerful intelligence apparatus that is strong and has plenty of security experience acquired by intelligence officers from the previous regime.
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New ISIS Propaganda Video May Feature Latest American Recruit - 1 views
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Is Libya on the brink of a new civil war? - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
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In the past year alone, more than 80 people, many of them high-ranking military and police figures, have been killed in eastern Libya.
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The country's prime minister recently called on western powers to help him stop the spread of what he calls 'militancy' in his country.
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There are more than 225,000 Libyans registered in militias. They receive state salaries but often act outisde of government control, taking orders from local or political commanders.
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Groups in Libya's eastern Cyrenaica region and in the southern Fezzan region have called for independence
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In Cyrenaica, former rebel leader Ibrahim al-Jathran and his 20,000 men strong militia say they now run local affairs, with Jathran and his men controlling facilities that account for 60 percent of Libya's oil wealth.
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Strife in Libya Could Presage Long Civil War - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Mr. Badi’s assault on Libya’s main international airport has now drawn the country’s fractious militias, tribes and towns into a single national conflagration that threatens to become a prolonged civil war. Both sides see the fight as part of a larger regional struggle, fraught with the risks of a return to repressive authoritarianism or a slide toward Islamist extremism.
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the violence threatens to turn Libya into a pocket of chaos destabilizing North Africa for years to come.
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Ansar al-Shariah, the hard-line Islamist group involved in the assault on the American diplomatic Mission in Benghazi in 2012
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The ideological differences are blurry at best: both sides publicly profess a similar conservative but democratic vision.
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Motorists wait in lines stretching more than three miles at shuttered gas stations, waiting for them to open. Food prices are soaring, uncollected garbage is piling up in the streets and bicycles, once unheard-of, are increasingly common.
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In Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, the fighting has closed both its airport and seaport, strangling the city.
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the rush toward war is also lifting the fortunes of the Islamist extremists of Ansar al-Shariah, the Benghazi militant group.
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The United Nations, the United States and the other Western powers have withdrawn their diplomats and closed their missions
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Until now, a rough balance of power among local brigades had preserved a kind of equilibrium, if not stability
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the transitional government scarcely existed outside of the luxury hotels where its officials gathered, no other force was strong enough to dominate. No single interest divided the competing cities and factions.
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But that semblance of unity is now in tatters, and with it the hope that nonviolent negotiations might settle the competition for power and, implicitly, Libya’s oil.
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In May, a renegade former general, Khalifa Hifter, declared that he would seize power by force to purge Libya of Islamists, beginning in Benghazi. He vowed to eradicate the hard-line Islamists of Ansar al-Shariah, blamed for a long series of bombings and assassinations.
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he has mustered a small fleet of helicopters and warplanes that have bombed rival bases around Benghazi, a steep escalation of the violence.
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moderate Islamists and other brigades who had distanced themselves from Ansar al-Shariah began closing ranks, welcoming the group into a newly formed council of “revolutionary” militias
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a broad alliance of Benghazi militias that now includes Ansar al-Shariah issued a defiant statement denouncing relative moderates like the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. “We will not accept the project of democracy, secular parties, nor the parties that falsely claim the Islamic cause,”
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the general’s blitz has now stalled, it polarized the country, drawing alarms from some cities and tribes but applause from others.
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the loudest applause came from the western mountain town of Zintan, where local militia leaders had recruited hundreds of former Qaddafi soldiers into special brigades
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the rival coastal city of Misurata, where militias have allied with the Islamists in political battles and jostled with the Zintanis for influence in the capital
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the Misurata and Islamist militias developed a reputation for besieging government buildings and kidnapping high officials to try to pressure the Parliament. But in recent months the Zintanis and their anti-Islamist allies have stormed the Parliament and kidnapped senior lawmakers as well.
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the newly elected Parliament, led at first, on a seniority basis, by a member supportive of Mr. Hifter, announced plans to convene in Tobruk, an eastern city under the general’s control.
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Tripoli’s backup airport, under the control of an Islamist militia, has cut off flights to Tobruk, even blocking a trip by the prime minister.
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a spokesman for the old disbanded Parliament, favored by the Islamists and Misuratans, declared that it would reconvene in Tripoli
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In Tobruk, a spokesman for the new Parliament declared that the Islamist- and Misuratan-allied militias were terrorists, suggesting that Libya might soon have two legislatures with competing armies
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Each side has the support of competing satellite television networks financed and, often, broadcast from abroad, typically from Qatar for the Islamists and from the United Arab Emirates for their foes.
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Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan-born business mogul who owns one of the anti-Islamist satellite networks, speaking in an interview from an office in the Emirates. “We are in a state of war and this is no time for compromise.”
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Fighters and tribes who fought one another during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi are now coming together on the same side of the new fight, especially with the Zintanis against the Islamists. Some former Qaddafi officers who had fled Libya are even coming back to take up arms again.
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“It is not pro- or anti-Qaddafi any more — it is about Libya,” said a former Qaddafi officer in a military uniform
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Beneath the battle against “extremists,” he said, was an even deeper, ethnic struggle: the tribes of Arab descent, like the Zintanis, against those of Berber, Circassian or Turkish ancestry, like the Misuratis. “The victory will be for the Arab tribes,”
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Article explains the civil war that is erupting in Libya. Islamist extremists are trying to take over the country and towns and tribes of Libya are choosing sides. Tripoli has been the biggest battle ground and its airport was destroyed.
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This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
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This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
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