Reported Strikes by France, Egypt and the UAE

France officially recognizes the United Nations-mandated Government of National Accord, led by Fayez al-Sarraj. Despite this support, it has also reportedly developed a strong relationship with and provided military support to Gen. Haftar’s rival LNA forces.¹ French President Emmanuel Macron has called for a unified national army, combining the two main claimants to government, in order to target jihadists in Libya.² French support for the U.N.-backed government and Haftar has been driven in large part by France’s desire to disrupt terrorist organizing in southern Libya that might threaten its own interests in the Sahel.³ The region is of particular importance for France. In January 2014, 3,565 of the 8,150 French military personnel posted overseas were deployed in the Sahel.⁴

In January 2016, then-President Francois Hollande explained: “We are making sure to contain the terrorism that took refuge there, in southern Libya. But France will not intervene in Libya because it’s up to the international community to take its responsibility.”⁵

Despite claims that France would not intervene, it has conducted operations in Libya targeting ISIS and jihadists while maintaining secrecy about its actions. In February 2016, the French newspaper Le Monde revealed that France had conducted airstrikes in Libya and had used Special Forces on the ground.⁶ The Defense Ministry did not comment when the story broke, but reportedly launched an investigation into the leak.⁷

Despite claims that France would not intervene, it has conducted operations in Libya targeting ISIS and jihadists while maintaining secrecy about its actions.

In July 2016, the French government acknowledged it was conducting at least some operations in Libya when it confirmed that three French soldiers had died there after their helicopter crashed during what it called an intelligence-gathering operation.⁸ That confirmation sparked a rebuke from the U.N.-backed Libyan government and triggered protests in Tripoli and other Libyan cities against the French intervention, which may help to explain why France has sought to keep its operations covert.⁹

France’s operations in Libya are part of its broader counterterrorism strategy. Following the 2016 helicopter crash, Stéphane Le Foll, a government spokesman, justified the presence of the French solders within Libya as part of an effort to “ensure that France is present everywhere in the fight against terrorism.”¹⁰ However, French actions are not without cost to local civilians—while adding to a prevailing sense of lawlessness when it comes to belligerents declaring their actions in Libya.

On August 12, 2016, for example, an apartment building housing mostly Sudanese residents was bombed in Benghazi’s Ganfouda district. Al Jazeera Arabic, the Libya Observer and other foreign-language media sites implicated “foreign” warplanes in the attack, acting on behalf of Haftar’s LNA. Local media website Al-Nabaa alleged that France was the perpetrator of the strike, which also hit a local prison, reporting (in Arabic) that “Al-Saraya Center, the media wing of the rebel council of Benghazi announced the death toll of the French air strikes that targeted the former regime prisoners yesterday.”¹¹ The report also stated, “Foreign aircraft supporting Haftar continue to bombard the Qanfouda area,” hitting civilians in several cases.¹² Whether France was responsible for this and other events in which civilians were harmed remains unclear.

We have documented 15 total airstrikes that were attributed to France in local media reports; altogether, they were reported to have resulted in a minimum of 44 and as many as 55 civilian fatalities. For the dates and locations of these strikes, see Appendix E.

Egypt’s participation in the Libyan air war began not with strikes, but by providing bases in Egypt from which Emirati planes took off and struck Islamist-aligned militias in Tripoli in late August 2014.¹³ Egypt at the time denied direct involvement, while the UAE remained silent.

Egypt’s decision to play a role in Libya was motivated by a number of factors, including the porous 700-mile Libyan-Egyptian border through which illicit arms and Islamist militants have flowed and, more importantly, the Islamist groups inside Libya which the Egyptian government believed posed a direct and immediate threat to Egypt’s stability. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who seized power in 2013 from the Muslim Brotherhood, sees all Islamist groups as a threat to his power.

According to Egyptian security officials, there was a clear web of connections among Islamist groups in Egypt, the most notable of which was Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, and those outside the country. An Egyptian intelligence official told Reuters in October 2014: “There’s a relationship between Libya’s militants, Islamic State, and Sinai militants. They have ideological ties and say they’re together.”¹⁴

Egypt bombed Islamist militant groups in Benghazi on October 15, 2014. The Associated Press quoted Libyan lawmaker Tareq al-Jorushi, who confirmed that while the planes carrying the bombs were Egyptian, they were flown by Libyans. A leader of one of the groups hit by the Egyptian planes confirmed the same, though an Egyptian presidential spokesman later denied that Egyptian planes were used.¹⁵

As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nathaniel Barr wrote in February 2015, Egypt had cause to be concerned with ISIS’s rise in Libya. “There is growing evidence,” they noted at the time, “that Libyan jihadist groups have developed relationships with the Sinai-based jihadist group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM), which renamed itself Wilayat Sinai after pledging an oath of bayat (allegiance) to IS [ISIS].”¹⁶

The Egyptian government first publicly acknowledged conducting airstrikes in Libya in February 2015, as retribution for the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by a Libyan ISIS branch—Tripolitania Province of the Islamic State.¹⁷ On February 15, 2015, various sources reported that Egyptian airstrikes hit two locations, the Bab Shiha neighborhood and the Jabal al-Akhdar Industrial Co.’s former headquarters, in east Derna, in the process killing at least seven civilians, including three or four children.

Amnesty International, which investigated the case, concluded that Egypt did not take proper precautions to protect civilians in its execution of the strikes. “According to eyewitnesses,” Amnesty International reported, “Egyptian fighter jets carried out airstrikes on several locations in and around Derna between 5:45am and 7:30am on 16 February. Most were on military targets, but eyewitnesses say two missiles were fired into a heavily populated residential area called Sheiha al-Gharbiya, close to the city’s university.”¹⁸ Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, a Middle East and North Africa deputy director at Amnesty International, said in the report, “Even if the Egyptian military believed that fighters were present in the house or in the vicinity, they should have taken the necessary precaution to identify who else was in the house and in the neighbourhood to avoid or at least minimize civilian casualties.”¹⁹ The strike also hit its targets, killing 64 ISIS militants, according to The Guardian.²⁰

Amnesty International, which investigated the case, concluded that Egypt did not take proper precautions to protect civilians in its execution of the strikes.

Egypt’s next reported airstrikes in Libya were in May 2017, retaliating for the deaths of 29 Coptic Christians who were traveling to a monastery 85 miles south of Cairo when they were attacked by 10 gunmen. ISIS claimed responsibility for that attack. The Egyptian strikes, carried out with the Libyan National Army, hit ISIS targets in Derna.²¹

On May 15, 2018, a car in Kufra, Libya, bound for the Egyptian border and carrying eight African asylum seekers, was struck by a warplane, killing three Eritrean citizens.²² A local freelance journalist, Jamal Adel, attributed the strike to the Egyptian Air Force (EAF) on his Twitter.²³ Adel said that the EAF also targeted human traffickers in a November 2017 strike.²⁴ The surviving passengers of the Kufra strike were taken to the Atiya al-Lassah General Hospital for treatment.²⁵

We documented 93 total airstrikes attributed to Egypt in media reports; altogether, they resulted in a minimum of 25 and as many as 32 civilian fatalities. For the dates and locations of these known strikes, see Appendix F.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) began its own intervention in Libya in March 2011 to help topple the regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi. Joining an international coalition that consisted of NATO countries and Arab nations, including Jordan and Qatar, and under the authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (also passed in March 2011), the UAE and these partner nations were successful in helping to establish the Transitional National Council (NTC), which was set up as an alternative to Gaddafi.

As Bruce R. Nardulli observed in the RAND Corporation’s 2016 publication Precision and Purpose: Airpower in the Libyan Civil War, “Qatari and UAE political, diplomatic, and financial support to the NTC was instrumental in providing breathing space for the NTC to form and survive, and to lend legitimacy to it as a governing alternative.”²⁶ Cooperation between the UAE and Qatar would not endure, as Libya became the site of one of the most complex post-Arab Spring proxy wars between the two countries and their allies.

Emirati airstrikes in Libya began, as previously noted, from an Egyptian air base in August 2014.²⁷ By this point, the UAE, joined by Egypt and Saudi Arabia in particular, and Qatar, allied with Turkey and Sudan, had put their support behind different Libyan groups. The strikes conducted by the UAE in August 2014 were primarily to undermine Misratan and Libya Dawn militias in Tripoli, which were supported by Qatar. Though Egypt denied being actively involved in these strikes and the UAE did not comment on them, four American officials confirmed both countries’ involvement.²⁸

Of the militias about which the Emiratis were particularly concerned, the Operation Dawn coalition based in Tripoli, which included both Islamists and non-Islamists,²⁹ was at the top of the list.³⁰ Like the Egyptians, Emirati leaders were deeply concerned with the potential, as they saw it, of Islamist-led instability in Libya to threaten stability at home. To prevent this, the Emiratis threw their support behind Gen. Haftar, who led the Operation Dignity (and the Libyan National Army) campaign against the Qatari-backed Islamist militias, which were then waging Operation Dawn.³¹

On January 5, 2017, Libya Alahrar TV reported on the news agency’s Facebook page that four children were killed in an airstrike conducted by the UAE in support of the LNA, which hit a two-family housing unit in the Ganfouda area of Benghazi.³² Al-Nabaa news agency reported on its Twitter account that the strikes, which it said numbered four, were conducted by an unmanned aircraft.³³

Despite the fact that relations between the UAE and Qatar remain at an all-time low, both countries are members of the anti-ISIS coalition.³⁴ As recently as December 2017, the UAE was expanding its footprint at Al Khadim air base—roughly 65 miles east of Benghazi³⁵—in an effort to combat ISIS and other non-ISIS Islamist groups in Libya, but the primary focus of the UAE’s air campaign in Libya continues to be its opposition to Qatari-backed Islamist groups.

We found 163 total airstrikes that were attributed to the UAE, including contested strikes; altogether they resulted in a minimum of 38 and as many as 58 civilian deaths. For the dates and locations of these strikes, see Appendix G.