Let’s talk about what’s happening with the war in Libya.
They’ve been fighting over the capital Tripoli since last April.
And now, world leaders in Berlin have promised to observe
an existing arms embargo that was being ignored.
But the permanent ceasefire deal they had hoped for went nowhere.
After Berlin, people will be watching what this renegade general does next.
But who is Khalifa Haftar?
And what’s the battle for Tripoli all about?
The fighting in Libya has been on and off
ever since the Arab Spring uprising in 2011.
Part of the problem was the killing of Muammar Gaddafi that year.
Libya is a country full of different tribes
and Gaddafi’s strategy towards governing Libya for 40 years
was to play those tribes off against one another.
Once Gaddafi was out of the picture the place became lawless.
Tribes and militias that had fought together to overthrow Gaddafi
turned against each other to fill the power vacuum created by his death.
Fighting hasn’t really stopped since and if it did it didn’t for long.
And right now there’s a battle for Libya’s capital.
The man who wants to take over is Khalifa Haftar.
In the late 1960s Haftar was Gaddafi’s friend and helped put him in power.
He became one of Libya’s top military leaders.
But in the late ’80s one of Haftar’s missions in Chad went wrong
and long story short he fell out with Gaddafi
and ended up living in the US for 20 years.
He even became an American citizen.
Haftar only came back to Libya once the Arab Spring hit.
He eventually set himself up in the east and started consolidating power.
With help from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates
he built what he called the Libyan National Army.
It’s estimated the LNA has at least 25,000 fighters.
Khalifa Haftar's career as we know him today really began in July 2013.
And his premise was quite simple:
what Sisi was for Egypt he was going to try and be in Libya.
He realised that there was a need for a classical, conventional
Arab-Sunni military figure with of course
it goes without saying, an autocratic slant to it all.
One thing that’s important in understanding Libya
is that it has two rival administrations.
Haftar and his forces back one of them:
the House of Representatives based in the east in the city of Tobruk.
The other is known as the Government of National Accord.
The GNA works out of Tripoli and is recognised by the UN.
It relies on what’s left of Libya’s formal military
as well as militias to keep control.
But some of Haftar’s allies like Egypt and the UAE
have a problem with the GNA, mainly its links to political Islam links
including the Muslim Brotherhood.
Because those ideological currents are seen as a threat
to the regimes that decided to support Haftar in 2014.
The problem that Haftar has with any government, whether it's above him
or opposed to him or one that has been appointed by him
is that he doesn't want to share power.
Here’s something else about Haftar: he’s unpredictable.
A year ago it looked like peace talks
were going somewhere and the UN and other world
powers thought Haftar was on board.
But in April 2019, just days before a UN peace conference on Libya
Haftar surprised everyone with an assault on Tripoli.
“Haftar’s forces have been trying to seize the capital Tripoli
from the UN-backed government.”
Since then Haftar has been fighting militias loyal to the GNA.
And now he’s got new help from mercenaries
some of them from Russia.
The battle has displaced thousands of people
and more than 200 civilians have been killed.
He promised at the time that he was going to be able to, in three days
enter Tripoli to eradicate corruption, dismantle all the militias
and topple the GNA. So it was a crazy adventure
in the sense that it was remarkably ambitious.
Right now world powers are trying to get the rival sides to agree
to a ceasefire but there are more countries involved in Libya than ever.
On the GNA’s side you’ve got the UN, Italy, Qatar and Turkey
whose parliament recently approved sending ground forces to Tripoli.
But Haftar has important friends, too.
Like Egypt, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
A lot of states have supported him, mainly the United Arab Emirates
who have run a full-blown fleet of combat drones out of Libya
with daily air strikes, which have turned out
to be very destructive but not very effective.
And what are some of the things that world powers want?
Well countries like Turkey want the GNA to survive because among other
things it wants drilling rights for oil and gas in the Mediterranean.
Libya also has a lot of oil and countries like Italy
have oil companies in there that they want to protect.
Others say they’re serious about stabilising a country
that’s not had peace in far too long.
And if you’re wondering how bad it could get
Germany says Libya could become a “second Syria”.