It’s been more than three and a half years since the brutal Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi met his end in a drainage pipe outside his native city of Sirte.
But things in that nation have become so bad since then that there must be many Libyans who miss him. Rival coalitions backed by militias are now battling for control over Libya and its vast resources, in what has become a lawless and failed state.
Some 3,000 people have been killed by fighting in the past year, and nearly a third of the country’s population has fled across the border to Tunisia.
Libya’s parliament, the House of Representatives, elected in June 2014, and its government, led by Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni, have only limited authority. The government currently operates out of the eastern city of Bayda, while parliament meets in the eastern city of Tobruk.
The Libya Dawn movement, a coalition of militias and political factions formed from the blocs that lost the elections, has gained control of the capital, Tripoli, and established a rival government, the so-called New General National Congress.
It includes extremist groups such as Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, and has endorsed Sharia law as the source of all legislation.
The two rival factions denounce each other as traitors, terrorists or war criminals. Extremists have taken advantage of this political vacuum, and the Islamic State (ISIS) has now established a beachhead.
This came to the world’s attention in the most appalling way recently, when 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians were beheaded. The killers identified themselves as followers of ISIS.
Last October, the Islamic Youth Shura Council in the eastern city of Derna, a hotbed of Islamism, pledged allegiance to ISIS. In turn, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has recognized the Libyan “provinces” of Barqa (Cyrenaica), Tripolitania, and Fezzan as belonging to his “caliphate.”
ISIS seeks to eliminate the Tunisian, Libyan, and Egyptian borders to form a province similar to the one they are building in Syria and Iraq.
Libya has already suffered many atrocities, including an attack this past January on the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli, frequented by westerners, which killed 10 people. Last summer, Libya Dawn’s Islamists seized the international airport in Tripoli, in the process destroying one and a half billion dollars’ worth of aircraft.
In November, they were involved in the bombings of the Egyptian and United Arab Emirates embassies.
Egypt is a key backer of al-Thinni’s internationally recognized government, and Egypt and the UAE support an anti-Islamist militia led by Khalifa Haftar.
Both countries have mounted air strikes against the Islamists, and Egypt has also called for a UN-backed military intervention in Libya. On the other hand, Libya Dawn is backed by Qatar and Turkey.
Haftar has emerged as the most high profile individual fighting Libya Dawn’s Islamist militias. A former general who fell out with Gadhafi and went into exile, he returned to Libya during the civil war in 2011, and he now heads the self-declared Libyan National Army.
Haftar’s force has taken much of the eastern half of the country, in an offensive known as Operation Dignity, which has been endorsed by the House of Representatives. He was the target of a suicide bomber outside his home near Benghazi last June that killed four of his guards.
Both sides have vast amounts of weaponry left over from the Gadhafi years, including some military aircraft.
Economically, too, the situation in Libya is disastrous. Oil revenues are virtually the country’s only source of income. Prior to 2011, oil output stood around 1.6 million barrels per day. Now, production hovers around 200,000 to 300,000 barrels per day.
Last year, Libya depleted $27 billion of its reserves, which now stand around $81 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund.
“Libya has the same features of potentially becoming as bad as what we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria,” Bernardino Leon, the United Nations envoy to Libya, said in an interview with the New York Times. “The difference is that Libya is just a few miles away from Europe.”
Libya, once an Italian colony, has never had any real sense of national identity and is fast becoming, as British diplomat Jonathan Powell stated, a “Somalia on the Mediterranean.”
Perhaps a tyrant such as Gadhafi provided the only glue that held it together.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
