The Guardian reports: Libya’s most senior religious authority, the grand mufti Sheikh Sadik al-Ghariani, is believed to have fled Britain after it emerged that he was helping to direct the Islamist takeover of Tripoli from the UK.

Ghariani left the UK for Qatar as Home Office officials began examining broadcasts he had made to Islamist groups using an internet television station owned by a relative in Devon.

The radical cleric used the website Tanasuh to celebrate the violent capture of Tripoli by an Islamist militia force, Libya Dawn, and to call for a widening of the rebellion.

The Arabic-language website, which is viewed thousands of times a day in Libya, is registered to a close relative at a white-washed terraced house near Exeter city centre.

The Foreign Office confirmed on Friday that Ghariani was in Britain. They said he had come in a private capacity and was not invited by ministers or officials. The cleric is understood to have left the country of his own volition rather than being excluded by the Home Office on the grounds of national security or “unacceptable behaviour”. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: For weeks, rival Libyan militias had been pounding one another’s positions with artillery, mortar rounds and rockets in a desperate fight to control the international airport in the capital, Tripoli. Then suddenly, early Saturday morning, the fighting just stopped.

The pause came as United States military warplanes circled overhead, providing air cover for a predawn evacuation of the American Embassy’s staff. Apparently fearing the planes, the militias held their fire just long enough for the ambassador and her staff to reach the Tunisian border — a reminder to Libyans of how even their most powerful allies were incapable of putting out their incendiary feuds.

American officials said the evacuation was a temporary measure after fighting drew too close to the embassy. But, coming so soon after the withdrawal of other diplomatic missions, including the United Nations, the moment appeared to signal a defeat — for Libyans who had convinced themselves that the country would band together to save the revolution, and for the country’s Western allies, who sometimes acted as if Libya’s stability would take care of itself.

“No one in Libya can win,” said Mahmoud Okok, 33, a civil engineer who lived near the airport and the United States Embassy, and who abandoned his apartment because of the shelling. A cousin who also lived near the airport was killed when a rocket landed on his home. Now Mr. Okok was moving, with his wife and young son, overseas.

“Enough is enough,” he said. “I have lost hope in Libyans.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Rival militias in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, fought for control of the city’s main airport on Sunday, leaving at least six people dead and causing the cancellation of international flights, officials said.

The fighting, with rockets, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, was some of the fiercest in the capital in months and an urgent reminder of the chaos prevailing in the country: Nearly three years after the death of Libya’s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the fighters who rebelled against him remained locked in a struggle for control of territory, resources and critical facilities, sidelining the central government.

The United Nations mission in Libya, which began to withdraw staff members last week because of security concerns, accelerated that withdrawal on Sunday, said a staff member who was not authorized to speak to the news media. A United Nations spokesman did not immediately return a call.

The deadliest of Libya’s recent fighting has occurred in the eastern city of Benghazi, where troops loyal to an army general named Khalifa Hifter are battling other armed militias, as part of what Mr. Hifter says is a national campaign to eradicate Libya’s powerful Islamist politicians and fighters. The clashes have opened new divisions across the country and aggravated Libya’s violence. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Powerful militias aligned with the Islamist-dominated parliament deployed in the Libyan capital Thursday, raising the specter of an all-out war with forces loyal to a renegade former general who wants the legislative body disbanded.

Known collectively as the Libya Central Shield, the militias from the western city of Misurata were heeding a call by the head of parliament, Nouri Abu Sahmein, to protect Tripoli after gunmen loyal to the ex-general, Khalifa Hifter, stormed it Sunday.

It marked the first time the Libya Central Shield has deployed to Tripoli since November, when its fighters opened fire on peaceful protesters outside their base, sparking clashes that left more than 40 dead and hundreds wounded.

The group’s main rivals, the Qaqa and Sawaiq brigades from the western city of Zintan, have allied with Hifter, threatening a confrontation in Tripoli between two of the country’s most powerful militia forces.

The deployment is the latest development in a long-brewing crisis that ignited Friday when Hifter led a fierce assault on Islamist militias in the eastern city of Benghazi. More than 70 were killed in the fighting, the heaviest in the country since the 2011 revolt that deposed autocrat Moammar Gaddafi. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post also reports: Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tripoli, Benghazi and other cities across Libya on Friday in support of a renegade general’s campaign against Islamist militias and his calls to suspend parliament.

The protest, dubbed the “Friday of Dignity,” took its name from the offensive launched by the former general, Khalifa Hifter, one week ago in the eastern city of Benghazi. Hifter has since garnered support from current and former military officers, political figures, civil society groups and the militias that dominate many Libyan cities.

The Associated Press reports: Libya’s Interior Ministry, along with the country’s the U.N. ambassador and the commander of the air force, backed a renegade general’s offensive against Islamist lawmakers and extremist militias, further building support Wednesday for a campaign the government has described as a coup.

The show of support for Gen. Khalifa Hifter appears to have triggered a heavy backlash.

Libya’s navy chief Brig. Gen. Hassan Abu-Shanaq, some of whose units have allied with Hifter, was wounded in an assassination attempt in the capital, Tripoli, early Wednesday, along with his driver and a guard, the official news agency LANA said. The night before, the air forces headquarters in Tripoli came under a rocket attack but no casualties were reported.

Hifter has been leading an armed revolt in perhaps the biggest challenge yet to the country’s weak central government and fledgling security forces. He says his campaign, dubbed “Operation Dignity,” aims to break the power of Islamists who lead parliament and whom he accuses of opening the door to extremism and fueling Libya’s chaos.

Scores of Libyan military units and commanders have made already made loyalty pledges to Hifter’s “Libyan National Army” and his offensive, which began Friday, first against Islamist militias in the eastern city of Benghazi. A number of powerful militias also back Hifter, including ones from the western city of Zintan and Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: [Ahmed Matiq, named prime minister two weeks ago in a disputed vote,] said at a news conference Wednesday that he wouldn’t step aside. Libyans “don’t want to return to having a military body rule them,” he said, presumably referring to Hifter.

A leader of one of the most powerful Islamist militias in Benghazi warned the ex-general not to try to take over the city.

“If he ever thinks of coming into Benghazi it will be his grave, like it was Gaddafi’s grave,” said Ismail Salabi, a leader of the Rafallah al-Sahati Brigade. He also echoed a common criticism by Hifter’s opponents — that he was trying to carry out a coup. “If he is looking for power he should remove his military uniform and go into politics,” he said. [Continue reading…]

Barbara Slavin reports: US Ambassador to Libya Deborah Jones said Wednesday that she would not condemn the actions of Gen. Khalifa Hifter, a former officer in Moammar Gadhafi’s army who has declared war on Islamic “terrorists” in Libya and forced the country to call new parliamentary elections for June 25.

Speaking at the Stimson Center in Washington, Jones repeated US State Department assertions that the Barack Obama administration did not support and had no advance knowledge of Hifter’s actions — which included sending forces to kill scores of Islamist fighters in eastern Libya last week and storming Libya’s parliament in Tripoli over the weekend. But she added that “it’s very difficult to step up and condemn” Hifter given that his forces are “going after very specific groups … on our list of terrorists.”

“I am not going to come out and condemn blanketly what he did,” she said.

Hifter defected from Gadhafi’s military two decades ago after a failed war in Chad and moved to northern Virginia where he acquired US citizenship. He has claimed that the US government backed him in the 1990s in unsuccessful efforts to overturn the Gadhafi regime.

Karim Mezran, an expert on Libya at the Atlantic Council, told Al-Monitor that there are “widespread rumors that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates” are backing Hifter in hopes that he will expunge the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist elements from the Libyan government and even take power as Abdel Fattah al-Sisi did in Egypt after ousting President Mohammed Morsi. “If they can conquer the east, the military balance will be in their favor,” Mezran said of Hifter’s forces.

Jones, asked by Al-Monitor if Egypt and the UAE were behind Hifter, who staged a failed coup in February, said, “I have nothing for you on than that” — the diplomatic equivalent of a non-denial — but that “Libyans who reside in the UAE and Egypt support him.” She added, “I hear a lot of support of his actions against these groups but less for him as an individual. The jury is still out because it’s not clear what the agenda is behind this.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The commander of Libyan army special forces said on Monday he had allied with renegade general Khalifa Haftar in his campaign against militant Islamists, highlighting the failure of central government in Tripoli to assert its authority.

The announcement gives a major boost to a campaign by Haftar, who has been denounced by the Tripoli government as attempting to stage a coup in the oil producer.

It remains unclear how many troops support Haftar, whose forces launched an attack on Islamist militants in Benghazi on Friday in which more than 70 people died. Militiamen apparently allied to Haftar also stormed parliament in Tripoli on Sunday.

The violence has compounded government’s apparent weakness in combating militias which helped oust Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 but now defy state authority. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Militias allied with a former Libyan general staged a brazen attack on Libya’s parliament on Sunday and declared it dissolved, in some of the worst fighting the capital has seen since the 2011 revolution.

By Sunday night, those forces announced that the elected General National Congress was being replaced by an existing constitutional drafting committee. It was far from certain that the order would be observed. But the power grab threatened to send Libya hurtling into a full-blown civil war.

Tripoli residents and journalists reported heavy fighting, including rocket attacks and gunfights, in several central neighborhoods. Dozens of vehicles mounted with antiaircraft guns could be seen speeding toward the center of the capital from a southeastern suburb. Plumes of black smoke rose over the city.

It was unclear whether ex-general Khalifa Haftar commanded sufficient force to prevail in the showdown in Tripoli — the latest chapter in a struggle for power, land and resources that has raged in this oil-rich country since the fall of longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi. The central government has struggled unsuccessfully to rein in scores of militias that emerged from the anti-Gaddafi uprising. [Continue reading…]

Alaa al-Ameri reports: Haftar served as a high-ranking military officer under Muammar Qaddafi and was a prominent commander during Libya’s war with Chad in the 1980s. Following his capture by Chadian forces, he went into exile in the US in 1987, where he joined the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, a group of Libyan exiles who spent much of the 1980s and 1990s trying to kill Qaddafi. Haftar returned to Libya in 2011 in support of the revolution, and was appointed chief of staff to Colonel Abdul Fatah Younis, the National Transitional Council’s commander of revolutionary forces.

The Libya to which Haftar returned had seen the rise and fall of armed Islamist opposition to Qaddafi in the form of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) during the 1990s, and yesterday’s fighting was the latest chapter of a power struggle between Islamist and secularist strands of the 2011 revolution that has been playing itself out since the early days of the uprising against Qaddafi.

Islamist militias began consolidating their power over eastern Libya through targeted assassinations before the revolution was even over — and Younis was arguably their first victim. He was a former close Qaddafi ally, seen by some as Qaddafi’s second in command. He had taken part in the coup that brought Qaddafi to power in 1969, but he defected to the fledgling revolutionary government in February 2011 after he was sent to crush the rebellion in his native Benghazi. Unlike many of Qaddafi’s close circle, Younis was not known for ostentatious living or sadistic violence.

He had, however, coordinated counterinsurgency operations in eastern Libya against the LIFG in the 1990s.

One unique aspect of the LIFG is that it combined figures from a wide swathe of the Islamist spectrum. Some, like Abu Anas al Libi, who was captured in Tripoli by US Special Forces last year, gravitated toward al Qaeda. Others, like Abdelhakim Belhadj, a key military commander during the Libyan revolution and now a politician with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked al-Watan party, maintained a view of armed Islamism that opposes the targeting of civilians per se, but legitimizes military and government targets. The upshot is that the remnants of the LIFG in Libya represent a rare nexus of Muslim Brotherhood and more violent Islamist tendencies.

The legacy of the battle against the LIFG came home to roost at the height of the revolution in July 2011, when Younis was abducted by members of the February 17th Martyrs Brigade — one of the Islamist militias now under attack by Haftar’s forces — and was then reportedly shot dead for his role in the suppression of the LIFG 15 years earlier. His burned body, along with those of two of his officers, was later dumped on the outskirts of Benghazi.

After the revolution, attacks against military personnel continued, though they were initially dismissed as either the settling of old scores dating back to the conflict in the 1990s, or the work of Qaddafi loyalists seeking revenge on colleagues who had defected to the revolutionary forces. From 2012 onward, however, the attacks in eastern Libya seamlessly transitioned from targeting foreigners and Libyans connected to the old regime, to targeting anyone from the Army, police, or judiciary who challenged the dominance of Islamist militias. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: Libya’s army chief ordered the deployment of militias to the capital Monday, a day after the storming of the parliament building in Tripoli apparently by a renegade general’s forces which also staged an attack in Benghazi on Friday.

Monday’s development paves the way for a possible showdown between the militias — which hail from Libya’s western and central regions — and the troops allied with Gen. Khalifa Haftar, whose forces said they also suspended parliament and demanded a hand over of power, blaming the house for empowering militias loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to a statement posted on the official Facebook page of the media officer for the President of the General National Congress, Nouri Abu Sahmain signed an order for “Libya’s Central Shield,” an umbrella group of powerful militias which answer to parliament, to confront “attempts to take over power” in Tripoli, apparently referring to Haftar’s forces. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: Dragging deeply on a cigarette and swirling his espresso dregs, the curly-haired young militiaman offered up a vivid account of the battles he and fellow rebels waged to bring down dictator Moammar Kadafi — days of blazing bombardment, thirsty desert nights.

Then he voiced his dismay at the chokehold those same armed groups now maintain on Libya.

“We fought so hard to make a new country,” said the 28-year-old of Libyan extraction who left Britain to join the revolution that swept this North African nation in 2011. “Now it’s all about money. Money and guns.”

The rebel groups that worked together to oust Kadafi have fragmented into rivalrous factions whose outsized collective power has sapped Libya’s oil wealth, turned a nascent government structure to tatters and ushered in a grim cycle of assassinations, abductions and firefights in the streets. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: At the heart of the Libyan capital, the open-air Fish Market was once a place where residents went to buy everything from meat and seafood to clothes and pets. Now it’s Tripoli’s biggest arms market, with tables displaying pistols and assault rifles. Ask a vendor, and he can pull out bigger machine guns to sell for thousands of dollars.

Libya, where hundreds of militias hold sway and the central government is virtually powerless, is awash in millions of weapons with no control over their trafficking. The arms free-for-all fuels not only Libya’s instability but also stokes conflicts around the region as guns are smuggled through the country’s wide-open borders to militants fighting in insurgencies and wars stretching from Syria to West Africa.

The lack of control is at times stunning. Last month, militia fighters stole a planeload of weapons sent by Russia for Libya’s military when it stopped to refuel at Tripoli International Airport on route to a base in the south. The fighters surrounded the plane on the tarmac and looted the shipment of automatic weapons and ammunition, Hashim Bishr, an official with a Tripoli security body under the Interior Ministry, told The Associated Press.

In a further indignity, the fighters belonged to a militia officially assigned by the government to protect the airport, since regular forces are too weak to do it.

Only a few weeks earlier, another militia seized a weapons’ shipment that landed at Tripoli’s Mitiga Airport meant for the military’s 1st Battalion, Bishr said. Among the weapons were heavy anti-aircraft guns, which are a pervasive weapon among the militias and are usually mounted on the back of pickup trucks. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: A bomb exploded on the runway of Libya’s main airport on Friday, the transport minister said, highlighting the deteriorating security situation in the north African country almost three years after Muammar Gaddafi was ousted.

Supposedly one of the best guarded places in Libya, unknown people managed to get onto the runway at Tripoli International Airport, plant an explosive device at dawn and detonate it using a timer, Transport Minister Abdelqader Mohammed Ahmed said.