The Jihadist Environment in Libya Today

On March 6, 2018, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee on the subject of worldwide threats, remarking: “The inability of rival Libyan governments to unify, coupled with a reduced but still active terrorist presence, poses the greatest security challenge to the North African region.”¹ Ashley’s testimony echoes statements from France, which has suffered a number of ISIS-directed or -inspired terrorist attacks in the past three years, and Algeria, Libya’s neighbor to the west, which is vulnerable to spillover from the conflict. “The main objective remains the fight against terrorism in this area of turbulence, where the presence of terrorists is reinforced because of the chaotic situation in Libya,” Algerian Foreign Minister Abdelkader Messahel said in 2017 after talks with France’s Foreign Ministry.²

Messahel’s observation, that Libya’s chaos has created a vacuum which terrorists have exploited, is underlined by ISIS’s rapid surge there after 2014. Libya also has a long history of militancy that reaches back further than the revolution and is tangled up in old proxy conflicts such as the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s. Veterans of that conflict from Libya, known as the “Libyan-Afghans,” founded the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in 1995.³ These militants had long conspired against the Gaddafi regime as a part of a secret movement in the 1990s. They had fighting experience, and some had links to al-Qaeda. Though the LIFG clashed with the regime in Benghazi and Derna on several occasions, its fighters were no match for Gaddafi’s superior army, and the group was largely expunged by the turn of the century. Nevertheless, in 2001, the LIFG was formally designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department in an effort to crack down on al-Qaeda and its offshoots.⁴

As the LIFG dissipated, the al-Qaeda links developed in Afghanistan’s rebel camps enabled some members to leave Libya and join al-Qaeda’s core group. Three LIFG members, Abu Yahya al-Libi, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman and Abu Laith al-Libi, would go on to become senior members of al-Qaeda. All were killed in U.S. Predator drone attacks in Pakistan—Abu Laith in January 2008,⁵ Atiyah on August 22, 2011,⁶ and Abu Yahya on June 4, 2012.⁷

Other LIFG members who remained in Libya would later recant their extremism as a part of a deradicalization program directed by Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, modeled after a similar Egyptian effort.⁸ Many of these former jihadists would go on to join Islamist militias during the 2011 uprising in Libya, and some led brigades of their own. Two former mujahideen and LIFG members, Libyan rebel leader Abdel Hakil al-Hasady and his field commander, Salah al-Barrani, were responsible for training and deploying anti-Gaddafi fighters on the contentious Derna front in 2011.⁹ Abdulhakim Belhadj, who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, was the final leader of the LIFG before it disbanded in 2010 and is now a powerful politician in Libya.¹⁰

The structure of the Libyan revolution—Gaddafi against everyone else—didn’t allow for easy parsing of friends of the West versus foes of the West. A consequence was that, in their effort to tip the scales of power into the hands of the rebels, the French, British, and Americans provided support to broad coalitions of Islamist rebels whose ranks included militants. A New York Times investigation of the Benghazi attack that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in 2012 determined that those responsible were “fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”¹¹

As the LIFG dissipated, the al-Qaeda links developed in Afghanistan’s rebel camps enabled some members to leave Libya and join al-Qaeda’s core group.

Ansar al-Sharia, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization behind the 2012 Benghazi consulate attack, was founded in Libya by Mohammad al-Zahawi, emerging from the rubble of the 2011 Libyan revolution. (A group of the same name exists in Tunisia.¹²) The chaotic aftermath of Libya’s uprising created an environment that enabled groups like Ansar al-Sharia—and later ISIS—to recruit young members, who faced low employment prospects.¹³ On November 19, 2014, the U.N. Security Council approved sanctions on the militant group under a resolution targeting al-Qaeda and affiliates, noting that Ansar al-Sharia was responsible for terrorist attacks in Benghazi between 2011 and 2014 and “runs training camps for foreign terrorist fighters travelling to Syria and Iraq.”¹⁴ Weakened by significant losses in its ranks, Ansar al-Sharia announced its formal dissolution on May 27, 2017.¹⁵ The group, which received support from sympathetic members in the General National Congress and Libya Dawn, had been warring with Gen. Haftar’s Libyan National Army. As a result of Haftar’s war in Benghazi, radicals within Ansar al-Sharia and other Islamist militias rose to the fore, eventually forming a tacit battlefield alliance with ISIS. Elsewhere in the east, Haftar battled a broad spectrum of local and Islamist militias, such as the Derna Mujahideen Shura Council and the Benghazi Defense Brigades, who counted in their ranks al-Qaeda members or supporters.

ISIS, which was trying to establish a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, also took advantage of the deteriorating security conditions in Libya. ISIS fighters began to trickle into Derna in 2014, shortly after the outbreak of civil war.¹⁶ A trove of leaked ISIS files suggest that the terrorist network had already gained the allegiance of many Libyan jihadists who had flocked to Syria to fight alongside ISIS in 2013 and early 2014, indicating that there was an existing architecture in Libya for ISIS to exploit.¹⁷ Libyan returnees, with help from senior ISIS members, began to form a new affiliate. ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dispatched Abu Nabil al-Anbari, an Iraqi ISIS aide, to take the ISIS blueprint to Derna. In November 2014 Baghdadi declared the establishment of the Islamic State in Libya, which purported to span three provincial areas: Barqa (east), Tripolitania (west) and Fezzan (the south).¹⁸

In their effort to tip the scales of power into the hands of the rebels, the French, British, and Americans provided support to broad coalitions of Islamist rebels whose ranks included militants.

The group declared allegiance to Baghdadi, who then issued a call urging supporters to join the new Libyan emirate.¹⁹ ISIS spread to other areas in Libya, most notably to the western border city of Sabratha, a smuggling hub and transit point for Tunisian jihadists, and to Sirte, where the Islamic State co-opted the existing branch of Ansar al-Sharia and exploited tribal grievances—including among the now-marginalized, pro-Gaddafi tribes—to gain support. Evidence of coordination between ISIS-Libya and ISIS core, which came foremost from the release of a slick propaganda video depicting Egyptian Christians clad in orange jumpsuits being beheaded, stirred officials in Washington who had previously believed the Libya satellite to be somewhat detached from the core group.²⁰ On March 18, 2015, several gunmen—eventually determined to have been trained by the ISIS unit in Libya—opened fire in the historic Bardo National Museum in Tunisia, killing 22 people, 20 of them foreign tourists, signaling the growing capacity of Libyan ISIS members to launch attacks abroad.²¹ Just over three months later, ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on tourists in Sousse, Tunisia, which killed 38 people at a beach resort and was also linked to the Libyan unit.²² In 2016, militias mounted an organized campaign against the group, supported by a U.S. military operation that consisted of 495 self-reported airstrikes and drone strikes. The offensive forced the group back underground, into cells that remain scattered across the south and central regions.²³

Support for anti-Gaddafi rebels has inadvertently undercut Libya’s current internationally recognized government, leading to the creation of several highly organized and well-armed militias with the capacity to hold on to territory and an environment where terror networks can exist amid militias. This has contributed to the chaos in Libya today. In northern Libya, even after U.S. military operations, ISIS can’t quite be uprooted, and now there are flickers of al-Qaeda in pockets of the south. This has had the paradoxical effect of providing the militias raison d’être. Many militias, led by ex-jihadists themselves, have at times successfully beaten back ISIS and other jihadist groups, generating a demand for rival states to continue to supply and support them—as Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates have done. Countries like France and the United States are pursuing their own counterterrorism agendas unilaterally.