As the fighting ramps up, civilians have become trapped in the crossfire of Libya’s messy proxy war

With no choice over their own destiny, Bel Trew writes, the people are increasingly struggling amid the shifting tectonic plates of a fraught political landscape and reports of rampant rights abuses

People shop at a vegetable market in the eastern Libyan port city of Benghazi (AFP/Getty)

Khalifa Haftar’s plan to march on Tripoli sounded somewhat fantastical given we were sitting over 1000km along the coast from Libya’s capital city in his Marj base, east of Benghazi.

It was 2014. It had taken weeks of negotiations to get the tight-lipped renegade general to agree to meet. The summons eventually came in the middle of the night. We drove for hours through kidnappers’ territory with a revolver in the front seat. The septuagenarian former resident of Virginia, US, held court like a monarch. Behind him a TV screen glowed with images of his offensive in Benghazi.

Back then, Libya was really a domestic turf war between squabbling local militias. Just a few days after the interview with Haftar, Islamist brigades in Tripoli would begin their own “Libya Dawn” offensive that propped up a short-lived administration.

There was, of course, foreign interference in Libya – there had been since the start of the 2011 uprising.

But it was largely arm’s length: funnelling in ammunition and some weapons, or conducting the occasional airstrike, often hitting Isis positions in the country.

Haftar at that point certainly had the support of Cairo. While waiting for my second interview with him, which took place later that same year, I remember watching the arrival of a shipment of what looked like ammunition in boxes from Egypt. (Cairo later vehemently denied this was the case.)

Lacking serious hardware, factions like Haftar’s army and the militias in the west were busy making their own makeshift weapons, cannibalising Gaddafi-era military scrap left behind after the 2011 civil war.

In one infamous incident caught on camera, I remember west Libya forces had soldered a battered naval ship turret on to a truck that promptly keeled over under the huge weight.

The battlefield was terrifyingly chaotic. With anti-aircraft weapons they had bolted on to the back of pick-up trucks, poorly trained militias fired directly at each other as if they were shooting with Kalashnikovs. Grad missiles landed with the haphazard inaccuracy of rain.

Fast-forward six years, and both sides of the latest iteration of Libya’s civil war are using some of the world’s most sophisticated weaponry thanks to the intervention of global superpowers – including Turkey and allegedly Russia – who have also sent in thousands of mercenaries.

A months-long investigation by The Independent into the murky mercenary underworld in Libya, which will be published this week, reveals just how much foreign soldiers-of-fortune have determined the direction of the conflict in Libya.

It also shows that, increasingly, the Libyans themselves will not be authoring their destiny; it will likely be steered by the countries that are backing each side.

Early this year, Turkey formally intervened on behalf of the internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli against Haftar’s offensive on the capital, which had finally kicked off in April last year.

Ankara has deployed thousands of Syrian mercenaries and reportedly TB2 drones, top air-defence systems and frigates.

The other side is a little murkier. United Nations investigators say the UAE has furnished Haftar’s forces with aircraft and air-defence systems. UN investigators also said that Russian private military companies had sent thousands of troops to his side, while the US’s Africa command meanwhile said Russia flew advanced aircraft, including MiG-29s, to Haftar’s airbases.

Both countries vehemently deny any involvement in Haftar’s war on the capital.

However, it is telling that this week Libya will be at the top of the agenda of an expected meeting in Istanbul between the Russian foreign and defence ministers and their Turkish counterparts. The meeting follows a Cairo initiative to host Haftar and declare a unilateral ceasefire.

Haftar’s ill-fated offensive to take Tripoli failed amid rumours that the Turks and the Russians struck a deal to allow Russian mercenaries fighting on Haftar’s side to escape the frontline unscathed, prompting a domino of defeats.

And so experts say the results of the conflict will not be determined by a Libyan military victory but what the likes of Turkey, Russia, the UAE and Egypt decide will happen.

“Continued fighting is not going to lead to a clear outcome,” said Tim Eaton, senior research fellow with Chatham House's Mena (Middle East and North Africa) programme.

“The UAE and other external backers of Haftar have to decide whether they will be willing to give more. It hasn’t seemed that they are willing to do enough to enable him to reverse the tide.”

Trapped in the middle are Libyan civilians who have struggled to survive amid the shifting tectonic plates of Libya’s fraught political landscape and reports of rampant rights abuses.

The United Nations said this week that it is deeply concerned about reports in Tarhuna, one of Haftar’s former west Libya strongholds, of the discovery of as many as eight mass graves.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International said that retreating forces affiliated with Haftar had booby-trapped multiple areas south of Tripoli, including Tarhuna, with anti-personnel landmines.

The international rights group said it had also found videos posted to personal pages of Haftar’s fighters showing combatants threatening to kill women and babies.

On the GNA side, Amnesty said government forces had looted and set on fire several homes and public buildings, including the main hospital in the western coastal city of Sabratha.

Caught in an increasingly complex proxy war – in the time of the coronavirus – there is little hope left for a speedy resolution to the crisis.

And so, for the time being, as Amnesty’s Diana Eltahawy says, “Civilians in Libya are once again paying the price.”