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General Hftar addresses a letter to us:
Free LIBYA !
THE TRUTH CONCERNING CHAD and GENERAL HFTAR*:
DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT WAS WIDELY PUBLISHED AND PUBLICISED BY “THE NEW YORKER” SPREAD by JON LEE ANDERSON (23 FEBR. 2015).*2
THE FOLLOWING IS THE REAL TRUTH:
–Most of the interest centers on a piece of land in Northern Chad called the Aouzou Strip which is rich in uranium and other rare minerals. the GREAT JAMAHIRIYA formed an alliance with the government of Goukouni Wedeye who allowed some Libyans to occupy the strip; but in 1982 Wedeye was overthrown by Hissene Habre who was backed by the CIA and by French troops.
Hebre’s was a extremely brutal regime. During the eight years of his leadership some 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or executed. Human Rights Watch observed:
“Under President Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help install Habre in order, according to secretary of state, Alexander Haig, to ‘bloody Gadafi’s nose’”.
Bob Woodward wrote in Veil that the Chadian coup was William Casey’s first covert operation as head of the CIA.
During the years following Habre’s coup, the People’s Army of the Great Jamahiriya (seeing what was happening just below their border) decided they could not just stand-by and watch the slaughter continue by the forces of the Chad government, the Yankees’ intervention and support of Habre, the evil CIA and French intelligence.
Repeated clashes with Chad/American Forces were inevitable.
In March 1987, a volunteer force of some 600-700 Libyan soldiers, under the command of General Khalifa Hftar was captured and imprisoned.
In 1990 French troops helped to oust Habre and installed Idriss Debry to replace him, after François Mitterend had Mu’ammar al-Qathafi negotiate a treaty with Chad. According to one account, the French had grown weary of Habre’s genocidal policies while the new resident in the White House, George H W Bush did not have the same interest as Reagan had in using Chad as a proxy to damage Mu’ammar al-Qathafi (even though the Libyan leader formed an alliance and sound treaty with Debry).
Following the fall of Habre, Mu’ammar al-Qathafi, in his treaty, firmly demanded that the new government hand over Hftar’s men… But, instead Debry allowed the Americans to fly them to Zaire. There Libyan officials were given access to the men and about half agreed to return to Libya.
When US financial aid offered to Zaire for giving ‘the rebels’ refuge failed to materialise, they were expelled and sent to Kenya.
Eventually the Kenyans said the men were no longer welcome and the United States agreed to bring them to America where they were admitted to the US refugee programme.
A State Department spokesman said the men would have “access to normal resettlement assistance, including English-language and vocational training and, if necessary, financial and medical assistance.” According to one report the remnants of Hftar’s Army were dispersed to all fifty states.
These remaining ‘Libyans’ were ‘conditioned’ by American personel (brainwashed) and bribed into working for the USA, where they would be trained to overthrow the GREAT JAMHIRIYA.
Details of what happened are scant; but, the Washington Post reported from Egypt on 26 March 1991, that travelers from Libya had spoken of “unrest today in Jabal Akhdar mountains of eastern Libya and said armed rebels may have joined escaped prisoners in an uprising against the government….and that its leader is Col. Khalifa Hftar, of a contra-style group based in the United States called the Libyan National Army, the travelers said.”
The report continued: “The travelers, whose accounts could not be confirmed independently, said they heard that the death toll had risen to 23 in five days of fighting between security forces and rebels, including men who escaped from Benghazi prison thursday and then fled into the eastern mountains.”
What part the CIA played in the failed uprising and whether the then US president, Bill Clinton had given the operation his approval are not known. By coincidence or not, three months later, the lie was spread that ‘al-Qathafi’s forces killed some 1200 political prisoners being held in Tripoli’s Abu Salim jail.’
It was the arrest of the lawyer representing many of the prisoners’ families that the CIA used to spark the ’17 February /CIA / NATO uprising against the GREAT JAMAHIRIYA, and in particular, AGAINST Mu’ammar al-Qathafi, and with it, the return of Khalifa Hftar, [whom the CIA did not know, had already reconciled with Mu’ammar al-Qathafi…and who was happy to work (undercover) with General al-Fateh Younis, to help stop the West’s immoral plans against the Great Jamahiriya].
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*2: the following is heavily edited from JON LEE ANDERSON (23 FEBR. 2015).
Hftar, who is a mild-looking man in his early seventies, has fought with and against nearly every significant faction in the country’s conflicts, leading to a reputation for unrivalled military experience and for a highly flexible sense of personal allegiance. In the Green Mountains of Cyrenaica, the country’s traditional hideout for ‘rebels’ (extremist Wahhabi factions) and insurgents, he established a military headquarters, inside an old airbase surrounded by red-earth farmland and groves of hazelnut and olive trees. Hftar’s force, which is the Libyan National Army, has successfully taken much of the eastern half of the country, in a defensive move, as well as an ‘offensive’, known as ‘Operation Dignity’. Hftar’s army is composed mainly of ‘Great Jamahiriya’-era soldiers and federalists seeking greater autonomy for the eastern region of Cyrenaica, mixed with tribal fighters from the west and the south.
… Much as (Egypt’s President) General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has boasted of doing in Egypt, General Hftar proposes to destroy the Islamist forces and bring peace and stability—enforced by the new Libyan Army and its supporters.
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When I visited Hftar’s base, earlier this winter, I passed a Russian-made helicopter gunship and was greeted by a group of fighters unloading ammo. The base was in a state of constant alert. Hftar is a top-priority assassination target for ‘Dawn Libya’s militias’.
‘Dawn Libya’, is a loose coalition of the MISURATA ‘Brotherhood’ militias, many of them working in a tactical alliance with Wahhabi extremists.
The USA has boasted a price upon his head, and last June, a suicide bomber exploded a Jeep outside his home near Benghazi, killing four guards but missing the primary target. Now there is heavy security around Haftar at all times. At his base, soldiers frisk visitors and confiscate weapons. A few months ago, someone reportedly attempted to kill him with an explosive device concealed in a phone, and so his men collect phones, too.
Hftar greeted me in a spotless office with a set of beige sofas and a matching carpet. Wearing an old-fashioned regimental mustache and a crisp khaki uniform, he looks more like a retired schoolteacher…
In a deliberate voice, he told me why he had gone back to war. Hftar tried to find a place for himself in the ‘new’ Libya. All the while, he watched as Libya floundered under a succession of weak governments, and the country’s militias grew more powerful. Last summer, Wahhabi extremists moved to seize Benghazi; in a merciless campaign aimed at the remains of civil society, assassins killed some two hundred and seventy lawyers, judges, activists, military officers, and policemen—including some of Hftar’s old friends and military colleagues.
“There was no justice and no protection,” he said. “People no longer left their houses at night. All of this upset me greatly….”
Hftar reached out to contacts in what remained of Libya’s old Jamahiriya armed forces, in civil society, in tribal groups, and, finally, in Tripoli. “Everyone told me the same thing,” he said. “ ‘We are looking for a savior. Where are you?’ I told them, ‘If I have the approval of the people, I will act.’ After popular demonstrations took place all over Libya asking me to step in, I knew I was being pushed toward death, but I willingly accepted.”
Like many self-appointed saviors, Hftar spoke with a certain self-admiring fatalism. But his history is much more complex than he cares to acknowledge. As an Army cadet in 1969, he participated in the ‘al-Fateh 1969 Revolution’ against the Western puppet-Libyan monarchy, and eventually became one of the Glorious Revolution of Light‘s top officers. “He was my son,” al-Qathafi once told an interviewer, “and I was like his spiritual father.”
*:(READ THE ABOVE CHAD REPORT)
…By 2003, the C.I.A. had evidently broke, released, and totally loosened its ties with Hftar, and, when he returned to Libya (for the love of his native land), in March, 2011, he was on his own. Nevertheless, Hftar’s enemies accuse him of being a C.I.A. plant, a traitor, and a vicious killer, and of seeking to install himself as a ‘latter-day al-Qathafi’. (NOTHING AN BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH !)
There is no overstating the chaos of post-GREAT JAMAHITRIYA Libya. Two competing governments claim ‘legitimacy’. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill; revenues from oil, the country’s greatest asset, have dwindled by more than ninety per cent. Some three thousand 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. The downfall was encouraged by NATO air strikes—and has become a tyranny of ‘a dangerous and pervasive instability’.
For Hftar, the east was the obvious place to begin his offensive. “Benghazi was the main stronghold of terrorism in Libya, so we started there,” he said. An old Libyan maxim holds that everything of importance happens in Benghazi. In 1937, Benito Mussolini came there to solidify his colonial power. In 1951, the newly crowned Western puppet-King Idris I, broadcast a radio address from the city to proclaim ‘Libya independent’ (HOW HYPOCRITICAL !!). When the ‘Young Libyan Officer’s Movement’ began their REVOLUTION against the monarchy, he was a young officer based in Benghazi.
America’s allies in Europe, particularly the British and the French, were already convinced to destroy the ‘GREAT JAMAHIRIYA’. In March, 2011, the well-connected radical Algerian born philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy arrived in the city and took it upon himself to make sure that the (so-termed) ‘rebels’ (WAHHABI extremists) got aid. In Paris recently, I asked Lévy why he’d adopted the Libyan cause. “Why? I don’t know!” he said. “Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah—but I also wanted them to see a Jew defending ‘the liberators against a dictatorship’ (you mean the world’s sole ‘DIRECT DEMOCRACY’), to show fraternity. I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman—a Westerner and a Jew—could be on their side.”
Lévy said that he returned to Paris and told President Nicolas Sarkozy that (so-called) ‘humanitarian intervention’ wasn’t enough. “The real objective had to be to topple Qaddafi,” he told me. Sarkozy agreed, and Lévy became his emissary. Lévy accompanied a Libyan opposition leader to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to lobby for U.S. involvement.* “It was hard to convince the Americans,” he said. “Robert Gates was totally opposed…. But Hillary got it,” [as she was pressing for a Western-Zionist Bank controlled North African corridor, of which (she) pre-conceived the success of such, with the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood ruling the region, through a CIA-MI6 sponsored ‘Arab Spring’].
French warplanes began bombing. The U.K. and the U.S. followed, in an arm’s-length operation that the Obama Administration described as “leading from behind.” From warships in the Mediterranean, they launched a withering strike of a hundred and twelve Tomahawk missiles, but within days Gates had announced that the French and the British would take the lead. The coalition kept fighting for seven months, with American forces in a lower-profile role. In the end, Lévy was pleased with the intervention. “The NATO mission, as far as I am concerned, was as it had to be.”
A senior U.S. Administration official told me, “We had a pilot training program, for instance,” he said. “Suddenly, we were being accused of supporting terrorism.”
….
On 20 October 2011, after nine months of fighting, a group of ‘thuwar—battle-hardened ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood Wahhabi ‘militiamen’—from the port city of Misurata, and another group of Misurati militiamen, massacred sixty-six of The Great Jamahirya‘s last military loyalists in the garden of a Sirte hotel, after they video-taped themselves tormenting their green captives.
It had been clear from the start that the militias were going to be a deeply troublesome feature of post-Great Jamahiriya Libya. The ‘rebel alliance’ was hastily thrown together from many disparate groups—some friendly to Western ideals and others driven by Wahhabi dreams of a new caliphate. Even as Western governments deliberated over whether to support the (so-termed) ‘rebels’, Wahhabi from the eastern city of Derna emerged as a force on the battlefield. In an ugly episode in July, 2011, the (so-called) ‘rebel coalition’ ’s military commander, General Abdel Fattah Younes, was abducted, tortured and grizzley-murdered, through the orders of the infiltrated CIA-agent (who was the Great Jamhiriya’s last chief Justice), Mustafa Abdel Jalil, seeking revenge for Younes’s persecution of them when Younes was the Great Jamahiriya’s interior minister, and also the revelation that Younes was a double-Agent, working for the Great Jamahiriya with a secret contract with Mu’ammar al-Qathafi.
READ:
YOUNIS is cleared of treason:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=572058689575809&set=a.157905070991175.32493.100003150495041&type=1&theater
…
The MISURATA militias raced to occupy key positions in Tripoli. The militias ransacked the Great Jamahiriya’s well-stocked armories, and the Misurati made off with hundreds of Russian-made tanks. The Zintani, who always were the Security force for the TRIPOLI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, re-took over the international airport, under supervision and blessings of General Khamis Gaddafi. But other armed WAHHABI groups also seized positions for themselves.
The profusion of young men with guns alarmed Rory Stewart, a British M.P. who had come to Libya to gather information for Parliament. I was in Libya at the time, and Stewart joined me for a couple of days in Tripoli; after one confrontation with armed men at a roadblock, he asked, “What I want to know is, who is going to disarm these militias?”
In July, 2012, the Western ‘Friends of Libya’ met in Paris and created for Libya, a national assembly called the General National Congress: A loose consortium of (so-termed) ‘liberal and centrist parties’ affiliated with the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood. The GNC backed the militias. Indeed, Libya’s tens of thousands of thuwar became increasingly powerful: rather than finding the fighters jobs and forcing them to disarm, the government put them on the state payroll.
Frederic Wehrey, a Libya analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me, “Probably only about a third of the militiamen actually fought in the war. The problem is that when the government started funding them it created more and more of them. No records were ever kept, so people were double- and triple-dipping.” Westerners started to come under attack with troubling frequency. In January, 2013, gunmen in Benghazi fired on an Italian diplomat’s car, but he emerged unharmed. In April, a car bomb, claimed by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, severely damaged the French Embassy in Tripoli.
Although the Wahhabi-Brotherhood had lost at the polls, they found a way to assert political power. In May, they urged the G.N.C. to pass a law banning virtually everyone who had participated in The Great Jamahiriya from holding public office. During the vote, armed militiamen stormed government ministries to demand the law’s passage. The immediate effect was to neutralize several of the Wahhabiis’ key rivals, mostly political ‘moderates and technocrats’ who had served at the end of the final years of the GREAT JAMAHIRIYA. The speaker of the G.N.C. was obliged to resign. In December, 2013, the G.N.C. endorsed a Wahhabi corrupted version of ‘Sharia law’ as the source of all legislation and voted to extend its mandate for an additional year.
(This act was highly illegal, and the Zintani battalions moved against it.)
(above showing Zintani martyrs, JAMAL NOAH, and the Lightning /Civil 32 Xantan Brigades declaring the GNC illegal)
Hftar watched the country’s decline with growing anger. On 14 February 2014, he appeared on television to announce the unilateral dissolution of their (so-called) ‘parliament’ and the creation of a “Presidential committee” and cabinet, which would govern until new elections could be held. His move had the hallmarks of a coup, yet Hftar had no apparent way to enforce it, and he was publicly taunted for his hubris.
But Hftar had a strategy. He had embarked on a series of “town hall” meetings around the country, while he secretly built-up an army, with the support of old Great Jamahiriya comrades from the military and the Xanthan forces of Zintan.. In May, he launched ‘Operation Dignity’, with attacks against the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood Wahhabi militias in Benghazi, which he said were intended to “eliminate extremist terrorist groups” in Libya. Not long afterward, his forces in alliance with Zintan, occupied and smothered the Allaotunai Conference (of the GNC)‘s al-RIXOS building in Tripoli.
Hftar’s offensive resonated with many Libyans, who had grown frustrated with the G.N.C. and thecorruption, thievery and violence that had flourished during its rule.
Then came a minority election, and there appeared a new legislative body, the ‘MAJLIS al-Nuwaab’ (‘COUNCIL of DEPUTIES’) who rejected the Misurata ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood rule. Te ‘Misurata ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood performed poorly in the elections, in June, but, before the new parliament could take office, the Wahhabi, strengthened by militiamen from Misurata (inder Salah Badi), attacked and destroyed a good portion of the residences in Tripoli, and to boot, Tripoli’s international airport was taken by trickery (of a false agreement, immediately broken by ‘Dawn Libya’), in their horrendous attempt to seize it from the Zintani Security who backed General Hftar. The airport, including one and a half billion dollars’ worth of aircraft, was destroyed, and hundreds of Zintani fighters were killed. With Tripoli a battlefield, the U.S. pulled out of Libya entirely, moving its Embassy to Malta, separated from the besieged capital by two hundred miles of water.
Libyans gradually learned to navigate the violence. A young Tripoli businessman who asked to be called Mohamed told me of getting a call last July, telling him that two militias were fighting on the road to the airport. “The morning it started, my partner tried to drive to our office and got turned back,” he said. Mohamed headed to the office anyway; their employees’ payroll money was held in a safe there, and he wanted to retrieve it before it was destroyed or looted. “There were literally bullets flying right overhead,” he said. He managed to get the money and leave the city, negotiating the militia roadblocks using a credential that a highly placed friend had given him. “All along the airport road, there were no-go zones, with separate battles going on, and the Misurati ransacking people’s houses.”
With the fighting in Tripoli, two opposing armies took shape. The group aligned against Hftar, under Salah Badi, called themselves ‘Dawn Libya’. ‘Dawn Libya’ is an uneasy coalition; it includes former al-Qaeda terrorists who fought against the Great Jamahiriya in the nineties, Amazigh ethnic militias, members of Libya’s branch of the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood, and a network of Zionist merchants from Misurata, whose fighters make up the largest block of Dawn Libya’s forces, and were reponsible for the November 2013 Massacre at Gharghour (TRIPOLI).
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Finally, in late last August 2014,’Dawn Libya’ took control of Tripoli, effectively dividing the country into east and west. The Wahhabi-Brotherhood who had lost power to the newly created ‘MAJLIS al-Nuwaab’ (Council of Deputies) insisted that the G.N.C. was the country’s only legitimate government. With the country increasingly unstable, the H.O.R. established itself in the city of Tobruk, eight hundred miles to the east. There, the ‘elected’ members proclaimed themselves Libya’s “true government”—even as they retreated for a time to a Greek car ferry moored offshore.
As the standoff worsens, regional powers have stepped in. Hftar’s ‘Libyan Army and airforce’ (recognised by the offiial state ‘Majlis al-Nuwaab’) reportedly receives weapons and financing from Egypt, led by the vehemently anti-Wahhabi / Brotherhood, president General Sisi and from Russia. ‘Dawn Libya’ is backed by Qatar, Sudan and Turkey, which support the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood. Their involvement has given the conflict the dimensions of a proxy war.
The regional implications of Libya’s breakdown are vast. The southern desert offers unguarded crossings into Algeria, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, where armed bands—including human traffickers and (so-called) ‘jihadists’ from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—roam freely in four-wheel-drive convoys.
Huge numbers of migrants, mostly Africans but also some Middle Easterners, are being smuggled through Libya. At the Mediterranean coast, they are placed in overcrowded boats and pointed toward Italy, where the fortunate ones are picked up by the coast guard or by passing cargo ships. Last year, the number of migrants reaching Italy in this fashion rose to a hundred and seventy thousand; more than three thousand are believed to have drowned at sea. In early February, another three hundred died.
Many of the young Libyans I met during the revolution are now in Tunisia, Egypt, Bulgaria, London—anywhere but Libya. The exiles who came back to build a new country have largely left. The people who have remained are those who can’t get out, and they mostly stay close to home. In any case, there’s little to do. Many shops are closed during the day, opening for a few hours after evening prayers; there are no women to be seen on the streets. There are sporadic bursts of gunfire and explosions, and it is impossible to tell whether someone is being shot or someone is cleaning a gun on a rooftop. Nobody asks; Libyans have become inured to war, and, in any case, decades of secret-police surveillance have conditioned them not to inquire into the causes of violence.
The ‘rebel’ Wahhabi extremists have bulldozed al-Qathafi home at Bab Azizaya, and smashed many icons of his regime, and extremists are despoiling the rest. In Tripoli, there was a statue of a bare-breasted woman nuzzling a gazelle; extremists blew a hole through her belly and hauled the statue away. At the Greco-Roman ruins of Cyrene, almost all the statues of gods have been disfigured. Under a line of vandalized bas-reliefs, I saw a spray-painted message in Arabic script: “Destroy the stone idols, no to restoration.”
The ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and the Misratan leaders support the growing extremist elements which remains active on the battlefield. They send bulldozers to Benghazi loaded with weaponry and ammunition and mercenaries. In Benghazi, where Hftar’s soldiers have been fighting the Wahhabi groups for control, the combat has caused widespread destruction and a steady stream of casualties. Hftar claims to hold most of the city, though he says that snipers have slowed his advance. The main enemy is ‘Ansar al-Sharia’, the group implicated in Stevens’s death and widely suspected of leading the assassination campaign that devastated civil society in Benghazi. In late January, Mohamed al-Zahawi, the leader of Ansar, died from wounds suffered in battle, but his forces have kept fighting.
After the overthrow of the ‘Great Jamahiriya’, hundreds of fighters from Derna, a city long associated with Wahhabi extremism, travelled to Syria to join the war against President Bashar al-Assad. Many fought alongside ‘Jabhat al-Nusra’, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda, and some joined DAASH. In recent months, a sizable number have reportedly returned ‘home’ (along with many world mercenaries) in order to fight against Hftar’s forces. In October, a Derna-based (so-called9 ‘jihadist group’ declared its allegiance to DAASH, and, a few months later, another DAASH unit claimed responsibility for the execution of a dozen Libyan soldiers. In an audacious daylight assault in late January, a third group of DAASH gunmen raided the Corinthia, a five-star hotel in downtown Tripoli, killing at least eight people. A few weeks later, DAASH took over a village near the coastal town of ‘Bin Jawad’.
Hftar says that he intends to take on Derna’s extremists once he has conquered Benghazi. “We will use all the means at our disposal to exterminate them,” he assured me. Hftar’s Libyan Army possesses a small air force—an advantage he holds over ‘Dawn Libya’, which has only a few Sudanese and Turkish aircraft—and every few days his fleet of vintage MIGs carries out bombing sorties over Benghazi, or, farther afield, in Ajdabiya, Misurata, Sirte, and Tripoli.
Hftar said that he planned to bring the war to Tripoli, and to Misurata, but dismissed the possibility of widespread carnage.
“Tripoli will be overrun quickly, because the people will rise up, and we have forces inside the city,” he said.
“What about dialogue?” I asked.
“There will be no dialogue with terrorism,” Hftar replied. “The only thing to say about terrorism is that we will fight it until it’s defeated, and we have purified the country.”
…
In Washington (USA), Hftar’s absolutist tactics have caused discomfort to the point of putting a bounty upon his head! The senior Administration official told me emphatically, “The U.S. government has nothing to do with General Khalifa Hftar. Hftar is killing people (RIGHT, the USA’s ground-troops of al-Qaeda & DAASH), and he says he is targeting terrorists, but his definition is way too broad. Hftar is a vigilante. And the predictable result of his vigilantism is to unite the others”—giving common cause to extremists and non-extremists within ‘Dawn Libya’. “It is almost as if one part of Libya were controlled by White Russians—that’s Hftar—and another part were controlled by Bolsheviks.” (REALLY? )
Benjamin Rhodes, the U.S. deputy national-security adviser and a close confidant of Obama, noted that there has also been occasional military action. Last June, Delta Force operatives abducted Ahmed Abu Khattala, an ‘Ansar’ member who is suspected of leading the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens. Khattala is now (deceased) was awaiting trial in the U.S.
Rhodes was one of the aides who, along with Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, helped persuade Obama to join the intervention. In spite of the chaos that followed, Obama stands by that decision.
Vast numbers of people came to Libya to look for contracts, but nobody got any money, so they went away.NATO tried to design a national-defense system, but the Libyans refused to engage with them (after they bombed all the infrastructure and schools, and killed or mamed almost a million citizens). The French were going to train three thousand police. Instead, they trained thirty. Then some GNC cadets were sent to Jordan for training, but the Jordanians kicked them out after they burned down a sports facility, because they were angry about a flight delay.” In November, the official noted, three hundred GNC-Allaotunai affiliated young soldiers being trained in the U.K. were expelled after half a dozen of them ran amok in an English village, sexually assaulting several women and raping a man. “The Libyans defeated everyone,” he said. “It didn’t matter whether you were Gandhi or Stalin. It didn’t matter how hard we tried, they defeated us all.”
I spent two weeks in Libya, crossing it from east to west, and the only other Westerners I encountered were a few British security consultants and two German journalists. Everywhere I went, Libyans stared at me. Occasionally, young men asked where I was from. When I said that I was American, some joked about jihadists and the possibility of my being abducted and beheaded. At the entrance to the town of Sousa, near Derna, officials admonished my Libyan companions for bringing a Westerner there, asking, “What if something happens to him?”
Unlike many other cities and towns in Libya, Tripoli presented an image of normality. Traffic flowed, and groups of young men wearing Italian sportswear hung out drinking coffee from paper cups. Here and there, at government ministry compounds, I saw groups of bearded men with guns, but none of the tanks and battlewagons that had traversed the capital after Tripoli’s 23 August 2011 ‘fall’. Yet Tripoli’s air of calm belied an underlying tension that was evident as soon as I came into contact with the men who were running things.
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THE FOLLOWING ARE the ‘al-JAZEERA’ – ‘ANSAR al-SHARIA’ / ‘MUSLIM’ BROTHERHOOD / ‘DAWN LIBYA‘ PROPAGANDA LIES:
Just as Haftar insists, all his opponents are terrorists, the leaders of ‘Dawn Libya’ insist that there isn’t a single extremist in their ranks. Jamal Zubia, the director of the foreign-media department, assured me that, ‘until Hftar began attacking, “Ansar al-Sharia” was closer to a mutual-aid society than to a terrorist organization (HAH, HAH ! remember all the Thunderbolt SF and benghazi citizenry who died through their hands.) A large, white-bearded man who returned to Libya after sixteen years in England, Zubia speaks excellent English, with a Manchester accent. “If you ask the people of Benghazi about Ansar al-Sharia, they will tell you it always does charity, it secures the hospitals, the roads,” he said. “If they want a place to be secure, they will ask Ansar al-Sharia to be there.”…
Zubia said, “If Hftar says he wants to fight terrorism, logic says he should go to Derna, not Benghazi. In Benghazi, they have never belonged to Al Qaeda, while in Derna, anyway, there are fifty people who say they are with ISIS.” Zubia wore a derisory expression. “As for the hundreds of people Hftar says were killed in Benghazi, where is the proof? You will find that Hftar is responsible for all those killings.”
Until 2005, he claimed, Hftar’s family had received an annual stipend of two hundred thousand dollars from the GREAT JAMAHIRIYA—“You can go on YouTube.” (Hftar has acknowledged that, as a former P.O.W., he got a stipend from the GREAT JAMAHIRIYA, but says that it ended in 1993.) More recently, Zubia said, Hftar had “come to Tripoli and tried to form a Brigade, but failed.” And, he added, one of Haftar’s sons had been wounded. (In fact, Hftar’s son, Saddam, was said to have been shot by a Zintani Bank Security Forceman.) Zubia described Hftar and his family as a kind of criminal enterprise. [all propaganda LIES] “I ask you to use your intelligence,” he said.
Indisputable information is difficult to come by in Libya. Everyone feverishly monitors Web sites where pictures are posted and things proclaimed and discussed, but most of what passes for news is political propaganda, pure and simple. ‘Dignity’ has a TV station, which broadcasts footage of Hftar on inspection tours of the Benghazi battlefield, set to martial music, along with gruesome clips showing the victims of the other side’s violence.
‘Dawn Libya’ has a similar channel, presenting the opposite view of the conflict. Each side discounts the other’s reporting, and, in the absence of news, outrageous gossip is quickly accepted as fact. In a meeting near Benghazi, an economist soberly relayed to me the preposterous claim that Bernard-Henri Lévy had been paid forty million dollars to lobby for the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood’s interests in Libya.
Most of Hftar’s supporters in eastern Libya believe that the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood is engaged in an international conspiracy, backed by the U.S., to take over the Middle East; when I asked for evidence, the answers tended to start with Obama’s June, 2009, speech in Cairo, in which he announced a “new beginning” for relations between America and the Muslim world. Hftar, in his office, speculated that this was the real reason that the U.S. was not supporting him. “Maybe it’s because of the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood,” he said. “They have a lot of clout, and a factory for producing lies.”
Perhaps the only point of agreement between ‘Dignity’ and ‘Dawn Libya’ is the primacy of oil in the country’s future.
A couple of days before I met Hftar, his jets had bombed an armored column from Misurata as it advanced on facilities held by his proxies, and he described the advance as a kind of moral affront. “You will hear of our response in a few days,” he promised. Two weeks later, his MIGs carried out air strikes against Misurata’s airport. Of the Misrati, he added, “If they do anything more than they have already done, they will pay a heavy price.” …Afterward, I spoke with General Mohamed al-Ashtar, a high-ranking ‘Dawn Libya’ commander, who told me that his men were advancing on the oil terminal of Ras Lanuf when they were hit by Hftar’s jets. In order to avoid damage to the facilities, he claimed, he had ordered his troops to withdraw, but now they had Hftar’s men surrounded. “We are waiting for them to answer our conditions so they can withdraw and hand over the facilities,” he said.
In the following weeks, according to the analyst Frederic Wehrey, the fight devolved into a stalemate: “fixed lines of static warfare, with both sides lobbing rockets.”
When I asked Ashtar how Libya’s conflict would end, he suggested that there was no choice but total victory. “There is no chance the country will split,” he said. “The country is one.”
“What about Hftar?” I asked.
“He will suffer the same fate as al-Qathafi.”
Ashtar smiled, and so did his men.
As the fighting goes on, the country’s remaining oil money flows through the Central Bank now stationed in MISURATA headquarters, where it is disbursed without discrimination to the MISURATA militias and criminal gangs.
ALI TARHOUNI:
Tarhouni spoke matter-of-factly about the events that were reshaping the country, but he smiled rapturously as he told of visiting his home town of Marj (PRAIRIE CITY), not far from Hftar’s base. He had forgotten how ‘green’ it was, he said.
When I visited Tarhouni at his al-Beyda apartment one evening, he reflected on what had happened in Libya. “I still can’t figure out what brought us to this,” he said. “We thought with this (so-called) (CIA-led) ‘revolution’ we had brought about new green spring shoots, but what we came up with is thorns.” Like Hftar, when things started falling apart, he felt that he “had to do something,”
After seeing the appalling-results of the puppet-GNC, Ali Tarhouni RESIGNED from his appointment as ‘head of the Assembly’.
As the U.N. diplomat, Bernardino León’s ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood-sided talks stalled, Léon announced a round in Geneva, but neither Hftar nor his foes agreed to take part. At the ‘MAJLIS al-Nuwaab’, Abubakr Buera, a senior parliamentarian, ticked off a list of unacceptable interlocutors: the Tripoli government, the G.N.C., and anyone from the terrorist group of ‘Dawn Libya’. “If any of them come, we won’t go,” he said. “We don’t want the international community to intervene,” he added. “Now is not the right time to stop fighting. It’s the solution.”
Even the level-headed Ali Tarhouni reluctantly favored a resolution through combat. “A lot of people are waiting for Hftar,” he said. “The only moderates in this country are the ones who are forced to be. The military situation has to mature more before the conditions are ripe for a dialogue.”
In early February 2015, representatives of the G.N.C. and the U.N. began new talks in Libya, but Hftar and his military opponents didn’t join them. Many of Hftar’s men welcome the chance for more fighting. I spoke to Colonel Abdul Raziq al-Nadzawi, Haftar’s rough-hewn chief of staff, at a sprawling base outside Tobruk.
“Dignity started because our soldiers were being slaughtered and beheaded,” he said. “We had no intention of fighting our brother revolutionaries, but they joined those terrorists, so we had no choice.” Like Hftar, Nadzawi believed that the war would have to be won in Tripoli, but he hoped that civilian casualties could be kept to a minimum, if people fled the city.
“…But the U.S. sees the ‘Muslim’ Brotherhood as a moderate force. We see them as snakes with smooth skin.” Nadzawi had been trying, without success, to schedule a meeting with David Rodriguez, the head of the U.S. Army’s Africa command. “There are DAASH training camps here in Libya—Rodriguez himself has said so,” he told me. “So what are you waiting for? We’re not asking you to bomb them. We’ll do it. Just give us the military equipment and backup support we need to do the job, like you’re doing in Iraq.”
In a country full of militias and increasingly hospitable to Wahhabi extremists, the LIBYAN ARMY’s offensive may yet provide a small hope for stability.
Many Libyans told me, if Hftar does not prevail over the (so-termed) ‘jihadists’ in Benghazi and Derna, the country will lurch closer to being what the British special envoy Jonathan Powell described to me as a “Somalia on the Mediterranean.”
On 22 January 2015, Hftar’s men made a sudden advance in Benghazi, taking over the city’s central-bank branch and most of the port from the Wahhabi insurgents. When I saw Hftar at his base, he had spoken confidently about his plan to “purify the country.” But there was more fighting ahead.
The aid from Egypt and Russia has been modest, and, as the LIBYAN ARMY grows, its demands are outstripping supplies. “We are a very rich country,” he reminded me. “We want our people to have good homes, good schools. We had hoped for Libya to be God’s heaven on earth. But we need infrastructure, new buildings, factories. We have oil, gold, uranium, and seas of sand….
It is impossible for Libya to stay on this planet alone,” Hftar added, pointedly, “There are great benefits to those who stand by us in our time of need.”
When I asked about his personal ambitions, he said, “My ambitions are the people’s needs.”
“Once you’ve purified the country and it’s at peace, if the people asked you to run for President would you agree?”
“I would have no problem with that,” Hftar said, and smiled. ♦
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