It is split between a government in Beida, in the east of the country, which is aligned with the military; and another in Tripoli, in the west, which is dominated by Islamists and militias from western coastal cities
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Chief of Libya's new UN-backed government arrives in Tripoli | World news | The Guardian - 0 views
Tory campaign chief tells Cameron to 'ignore Muslims' - 0 views
www.politics.co.uk/...ells-cameron-to-ignore-muslims
tory campaign chief tells cameron ignore muslims
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Libya's civil war: That it should come to this | The Economist - 3 views
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the revolutionaries cobbled together a National Transitional Council (NTC) claiming to represent all of Libya
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Volunteers from students to bank managers took up arms, joining popular militias and only sometimes obeying the orders of defecting army commanders trying to take control
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In August Western bombing of government bases surrounding Tripoli cleared an avenue for the revolutionaries to take the capital.
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Recognised abroad, popular at home and enjoying the benefits of healthy oil revenues—97% of the government’s income—the NTC was well placed to lay the foundations for a new Libya
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he judges, academics and lawyers who filled its ranks worried about their own legitimacy and feared confrontation with the militias which, in toppling Qaddafi, had taken his arsenals for their own.
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The NTC presided over Libya’s first democratic elections in July 2012, and the smooth subsequent handover of power to the General National Congress (GNC) revived popular support for the revolution.
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Islamist parties won only 19 of 80 seats assigned to parties in the new legislature, and the process left the militias on the outside
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tried to advertise its moderation by putting an unveiled woman at the head of its party list in Benghazi
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The incumbent prime minister, Abdurrahim al-Keib, a university professor who had spent decades in exile, fretted and dithered
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He bowed to militia demands for their leaders to be appointed to senior ministries, and failed to revive public-works programmes
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Many received handouts without being required to hand in weapons or disband, an incentive which served to swell their ranks
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the number of revolutionaries registered with the Warriors Affairs Commission set up by the NTC was about 60,000; a year later there were over 200,000. Of some 500 registered militias, almost half came from one city, Misrata.
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In May 2013 the militias forced parliament to pass a law barring from office anyone who had held a senior position in Qaddafi’s regime after laying siege to government ministries.
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In the spring of 2014, Khalifa Haftar, a retired general who had earlier returned from two decades of exile in America, forcibly tried to dissolve the GNC and re-establish himself as the armed forces’ commander-in-chief in an operation he called Dignity
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The elections which followed were a far cry from the happy experience of 2012. In some parts of the country it was too dangerous to go out and vote
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Such retrenchment has been particularly noticeable among women. In 2011 they created a flurry of new civil associations; now many are back indoors.
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Turnout in the June 2014 elections was 18%, down from 60% in 2012, and the Islamists fared even worse than before
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Dismissing the results, an alliance of Islamist, Misratan and Berber militias called Libya Dawn launched a six-week assault on Tripoli. The newly elected parliament decamped to Tobruk, some 1,300km east
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Grasping for a figleaf of legitimacy, Libya Dawn reconstituted the pre-election GNC and appointed a new government
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So today Libya is split between two parliaments—both boycotted by their own oppositions and inquorate—two governments, and two central-bank governors.
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The army—which has two chiefs of staff—is largely split along ethnic lines, with Arab soldiers in Arab tribes rallying around Dignity and the far fewer Misratan and Berber ones around Libya Dawn.
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General Haftar’s Dignity, which has based its government in Beida, has air power and, probably, better weaponry
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the Dignity movement proclaims itself America’s natural ally in the war on terror and the scourge of jihadist Islam
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Libya Dawn’s commanders present themselves as standard-bearers of the revolution against Qaddafi now continuing the struggle against his former officers
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Ministers in the east vow to liberate Tripoli from its “occupation” by Islamists, all of whom they denounce as terrorists
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threatens to take the war to Egypt if Mr Sisi continues to arm the east. Sleeping cells could strike, he warns, drawn from the 2m tribesmen of Libyan origin in Egypt.
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The struggle over the Gulf of Sirte area, which holds Libya’s main oil terminals and most of its oil reserves, threatens to devastate the country’s primary asset
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And in the Sahara, where the largest oilfields are, both sides have enlisted ethnic minorities as proxies
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ibya Dawn has drafted in the brown-skinned Tuareg, southern cousins of the Berbers; Dignity has recruited the black-skinned Toubou. As a result a fresh brawl is brewing in the Saharan oasis of Ubari, which sits at the gates of the al-Sharara oilfield, largest of them all.
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On January 3rd, IS claimed to have extended its reach to Libya’s Sahara too, killing a dozen soldiers at a checkpoint
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have since been conspicuous by their absence. Chastened by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have watched from the sidelines
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Dignity is supported not just by Mr Sisi but also by the United Arab Emirates, which has sent its own fighter jets into the fray as well as providing arms
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If oil revenues were to be put into an escrow account, overseas assets frozen and the arms embargo honoured he thinks it might be possible to deprive fighters of the finance that keeps them fighting and force them to the table
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Until 1963 Libya was governed as three federal provinces—Cyrenaica in the east, Fezzan in the south and Tripolitania in the west
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the marginalised Cyrenaicans harked back to the time when their king split his time between the courts of Tobruk and Beida and when Arabs from the Bedouin tribes of the Green Mountains ran his army
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July 2011 jihadists keen to settle scores with officers who had crushed their revolt in the late 1990s killed the NTC’s commander-in-chief, Abdel Fattah Younis, who came from a powerful Arab tribe in the Green Mountains. In June 2013 the Transitional Council of Barqa (the Arab name for Cyrenaica), a body primarily comprised of Arab tribes, declared the east a separate federal region, and soon after allied tribal militias around the Gulf of Sirte took control of the oilfields.
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In the west, indigenous Berbers, who make up about a tenth of the population, formed a council of their own and called on larger Berber communities in the Maghreb and Europe for support
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Derna—a small port in the east famed for having sent more jihadists per person to fight in Iraq than anywhere else in the world
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opposed NATO intervention and insisted that the NTC was a pagan (wadani) not national (watani) council
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Some in Derna have now declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
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In December the head of America’s Africa command told reporters that IS was training some 200 fighters in the town.
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Hezbollah sent fighters to Iraq in secret to fight ISIS: Nasrallah | News , Lebanon New... - 0 views
UN chief flags rights abuses during meeting with Sisi in New York | Mada Masr - 0 views
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Russia's Putin, Egypt's Sisi say committed to fighting terrorism | Reuters - 0 views
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United by a deep hostility toward Islamists, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Russia's Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday they were both committed to fighting the threat of terrorism.
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Sisi, who is fighting a raging Islamist insurgency in the Sinai region, said Putin had agreed with him that "the challenge of terrorism that faces Egypt, and which Russia also faces, does not stop at any borders
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utin, making his first state visit to Egypt in a decade, said they agreed on "reinforcing our efforts in combating terrorism
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The Kremlin chief was the first leader of a major power to visit Egypt since former army chief Sisi became president in 2014
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Sisi has repeatedly called for concerted counter-terrorism efforts in the Middle East and the West. Egypt has fought Islamist militancy for decades, mostly through security crackdowns that have weakened, but failed to eliminate, radical group
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Putin has also resorted to force against Islamists, sending troops to quell a separatist rebellion in Chechnya, but still confronts insurgents in parts of the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region
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Egypt and the Soviet Union were close allies until the 1970s when Cairo moved closer to the United States, which brokered its 1979 peace deal with Israel.
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Putin, facing Western isolation and sanctions over his support for pro-Russian separatists in neighboring Ukraine, received a grand welcome in Cair
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Putin said he expected a new round of talks on the Syrian conflict, following on from a meeting of some opposition figures and the Damascus government in Moscow last month
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The Moscow talks, which ended on Jan. 29, were not seen as yielding a breakthrough as they were shunned by the key political opposition in Syria and did not involve the main insurgent groups fighting on the ground
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SNC chief reassures minorities on post-Assad Syria - Your Middle East - 0 views
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"A future Syria will be pluralist, middle-class and democratic," Abdel Basset Sayda told German radio and television network Deutsche Welle.
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Syrian forces launched an all-out assault on opposition strongholds in Damascus Friday, a day after rebels seized crossings on the Iraqi and Turkish borders on the 16-month conflict's deadliest day so far.
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shared by mharcour on 11 Apr 15
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King Bibi Says No State - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...nyahu-campaign-settlement.html
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Netanyahu says UN chief Ban Ki-moon \'encouraging terror\' - BBC News - 0 views
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Ankara blast: At least 28 dead in Turkish capital explosion - BBC News - 0 views
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ISIS Barber "Pardon me, chief… has my head rolled... - Oum Cartoon أم كرتون - 3 views
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Efua Dorkenoo fought against female genital cutting - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
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Dorkenoo started organizations to battle genital cutting and co-ordinated the effort more broadly as acting director of women’s health at the World Health Organization in the late 1990s.
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“She inspired a generation of feminists across the world to take up the cause of banning the procedure,
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Last year, the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to recognize female genital cutting as a human-rights violation.
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African-led organization she helped found, The Girl Generation: Together to End FGM, began work this month.
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teenage girls were less likely to have been cut than older women in half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated.
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In Egypt, where more women have been cut than in any other country, surveys showed that 81 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 per cent of women in their late 40s.
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Female genital cutting involves pricking, piercing or amputating some or all of the external genitalia
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The World Health Organization says female genital cutting has no health benefits and can cause severe bleeding, problems urinating and, later in life, cysts, infections and infertility.
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125 million women living today in the countries where it is concentrated have experienced such cutting.
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The mother was so badly scarred, she said, that she could not deliver her baby through natural childbirth.
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Foundation for Women’s Health and Development to promote the health of African women and girls, with a focus on abolishing female genital cutting
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co-ordinated national action plans against female genital cutting in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan.
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In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II named Ms. Dorkenoo an honorary officer in the Order of the British Empire.
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Egyptian graffiti artists protest Sisi - 1 views
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His face is on posters, shirts, cupcakes and now campaign banners and billboards across the country. The image of Egypt's next likely president, ex-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, was iconized well before he declared his candidacy by propagandists, opportunists and supporters soon after he led the military ouster of President Mohammed Morsi last summer amid the nationalist fervor sweeping the country.
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Timeline: What's Happened Since Egypt's Revolution? | Egypt in Crisis | FRONTLINE | PBS - 0 views
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This article lays out what has happened in Egypt since the 2001 revolution. Starting from when Mubarak stepped down, the article gives a timeline of significant events up until September 12th of 2013. It highlights events such as Morsi being voted into presidency in 2012, The first draft of the constitution on Nov. 29th 2012, when protestors return to Tahrir Square on Jan. 25 2013, to when Sisi warns Mubarak of military intervention, to when Morsi is removed from office, to when Supreme Court Chief Justice Adly Mansour is chosen by Sisi to step in as Egypt's interim president, etc.
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Egypt chief editors pledge support for state institutions - Politics - Egypt - Ahram On... - 0 views
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ejection of attempts to doubt state institutions or insult the army or police or judiciary in a way that would reflect negatively on these institutions' performance,"
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no longer publish statements "supportive of terrorism or that undermine state institutions directly or indirectly."
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Egypt's 1984 - Sada - 1 views
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military tribunals to try civilians accused of offenses such as blocking roads or attacking public property,
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llows the military to assist police in guarding public facilities, including power stations, gas pipelines, railway stations, roads, and bridges.
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ew powers to expel students or fire professors suspected of “crimes that disturb the educational process”
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hauled before state security prosecutors and interrogated for fourteen hours after the paper declared it would publish investigation records into alleged fraud in the 2012 presidential election.
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veto their board decisions, and it imposes harsher penalties of up to three years in prison for such infractions as operating
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privately owned daily newspapers signed a statement supporting the government in its war on terror and pledging not to criticize state institutions.
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shared by alarsso on 16 Feb 15
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Syria after Assad: Heading toward a Hard Fall? - The Washington Institute for Near East... - 0 views
www.washingtoninstitute.org/...sad-heading-toward-a-hard-fall
syria post-assad heading institute outcome
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new opportunities for external actors, especially Iran and Hizballah, both of which would seek allies among the former regime's Alawite security elite
Syria conflict: Islamist rebel named opposition chief negotiator - BBC News - 1 views
www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-35364114
conflict rebel named opposition news Egypt ISIS Syria politics revolution iraq war
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Iran awards medals to team that clinched nuclear deal | The Times of Israel - 0 views
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President Hassan Rouhani awarded the “Medal of Merit” to Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the “Medal of Courage” to Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan and Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also the country’s nuclear chief.