JIHADIST IN LIBYA May 2014

JIHADIST IN LIBYA  May 2014

Leaders from at least three of al Qaeda’s most virulent affiliates are now in Libya. What are they planning there?

In the nearly 20 months since the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks, al Qaeda operatives and allied terrorists have flocked to Libya, making the fragile North African country a hub for those seeking to wage jihad from north Africa, current and former U.S. counterterrorism official says.

Not only does al Qaeda host Ansar al-Sharia, one of the militias responsible for the Benghazi attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But U.S. intelligence now assesses that leaders from at least three regional al Qaeda affiliates—al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and members of the organization of Al-Mulathameen Brigade loyal to Algerian terrorist, Mokhtar BelMokhtar—have all established havens in the lawless regions of Libya outside the control of the central government.

One U.S. military contractor working on counter-terrorism in Africa summed up the situation in Libya today as simply, “Scumbag Woodstock.” The country has attracted that star-studded roster of notorious terrorists and fanatics seeking to wage war on the West.

An American counter-terrorism official used a different metaphor to describe the situation. “Libya today plays host to members and associates of several AQ-allied groups, in some ways becoming a jihadist melting pot,” this official said. “These groups haven’t united under the same banner, but the ad hoc links and intermittent cooperation among them are worrisome, especially as some of these groups have made no secret of their desire to conduct attacks beyond Libya’s borders.”

The collapse of security in Libya comes as the House of Representatives forms a special committee to investigate the 9/11 anniversary attacks in Benghazi. Those strikes, according to an investigation from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, were the work of individuals with clear links to al Qaeda (PDF). The report says that already in the summer before the Benghazi attacks the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had produced reports on how al Qaeda affiliates were establishing havens in Libya.

Libya does not pose as immediate a problem for U.S. counter-terrorism efforts as the threat posed from Syria’s civil war, where Islamic extremists are attracting recruits from around the globe. FBI Director James Comey told The Washington Post on Friday that he sees the threat of Westerners joining al Qaeda today in Syria coming home to wage attacks as a threat comparable to when jihadists joined the fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, setting the stage for 9/11.

“Libya today plays host to members and associates of several al Qaeda-allied groups, in some ways becoming a jihadist melting pot.”

But Libya is nonetheless intricately involved in funneling fighters into Syria, and its lawless regions provide an ideal haven for al Qaeda affiliates and fellow travelers.

“Al Qaeda and a number of other Salafi jihadist groups are increasingly using Libya as a sanctuary for training, cooperation, propaganda, fundraising and other activities,” said Seth Jones, the associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation. “To be blunt, they are taking advantage of a government that has very limited control of areas of some major cities.”

Jones said those areas include the city of Derna, which became infamous in the last decade as a transit point for fighters seeking to join al Qaeda in Iraq. As Emaco ThinkTank reported,  U.S. officials in Libya today consider Derna to be a “denied area,” meaning U.S. forces would have to fight their way into the territory.

The State Department’s annual report on counter-terrorism was also particularly blunt about why Libya was such an attractive destination for terrorists. The many factors listed in the report that contributed to Libya’s permissive environment for terrorists included: “a central government with weak institutions and only tenuous control over its expansive territory; the ubiquity of uncontrolled weapons and ammunition; porous and inaccessible borders; heavily armed militias and tribes with varying loyalties and agendas; high unemployment among young males along with slow-moving economic improvement; divisions between the country’s regions, towns, and tribes; political paralysis due to infighting and distrust among and between Libya’s political actors; and the absence of a functioning police force or national army.”

A reminder of the failure of Libya’s government to exert control over wide swaths of territory came last week when gunmen stormed Libya’s parliament building.

One factor that has led to Libya’s worsening security situation is the fact that some of its neighbors have intensified their counterterrorism efforts, leading jihadists and al Qaeda affiliates to seek out new havens. “Egypt has become a little less friendly, there has been a crackdown over the last several months in targeting the Mohammed Jamal network and other Sinai groups,” Jones said. “So Libya is emerging as an attractive location.”

Libya today is a far more attractive locale for al Qaeda that it was under the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. Obama in 2011 decided to enter Libya’s civil war after Qaddafi threatened to destroy Benghazi. At the time, Obama said his decision was guided by humanitarian considerations.

While Qaddafi himself funded and supported terrorist attacks against the United States in the 1980s, after 9/11 he emerged as an ally on counterterrorism. Following Qaddafi’s decision at the end of 2003 to turn over his nuclear program to the United States, even many U.S. politicians who supported Qaddafi’s ouster in 2011 credited him with cracking down on al Qaeda.

A 2010 State Department cable first disclosed by Wikileaks summarized a meeting with Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman and Qaddafi’s national security adviser when Lieberman “called Libya an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

Now Qaddafi is gone. But in Libya, those common enemies increase.

The Obama administration and its NATO allies bear responsibility for this mess because, having intervened to help rebels overthrow Gaddafi, they then swiftly exited without making a serious effort to help Libyans establish security and build a new political order. Congress might usefully probe why the administration allowed a country in which it initiated military operations to slide into chaos.
Anyone that paid attention to the Libyan war three years ago knows exactly why this happened. There was absolutely no support for a post-war stabilization force in Western countries or in the new Libyan government. Libya hawks were among the first to insist that the U.S. wouldn’t have to take on this responsibility, because they wanted to make an intervention seem as low-risk and easy as possible. Intervention was sold to a very skeptical public with the promise that it would not become a prolonged mission involving ground forces. Indeed, this was the only good thing about the Libyan war. Unlike some other missions advertised as short and easy, this one didn’t morph into an open-ended commitment. The political appeal of this sort of “good” intervention is that it is supposed to be relatively brief and free of Western casualties, but the trade-off is that the intervening governments write off the country and its neighbors once the operation is over. That makes the intervention “good” for those governments, but much less so for the people in the affected countries. That was more or less explicitly what U.S. and NATO said they would do while the war was still going on, so it should come as no surprise that this is what they did.
Assuming responsibility for establishing security and building a new political order out of the chaos that was always going to follow overthrowing the government is precisely what advocates for Libyan intervention said that the U.S. wouldn’t have to do. The administration gave the interventionists the war they wanted while trying to avoid the political and military headache that would come from being actively involved in stabilizing the country that the U.S. and its allies had just finished destabilizing. What interventionists can’t bring themselves to acknowledge is that the U.S. and its allies should never have attacked Libya if they weren’t prepared to take responsibility for the disorder they were helping to create. The U.S. and its allies obviously never had any intention to do this, and so it was irresponsible and wrong of them to intervene in the conflict, especially when they had no compelling reason to do so. More to the point, the U.S. and its allies would have been extremely foolish if they had compounded the original error of intervention by taking on a long-term stabilization role.

Indirect result is that reopening of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf oil ports in eastern Libya remains in limbo as the government appears to be backing away from a deal with rebels negotiated by ousted Prime Minister Ali Zidan, the US ambassador to Libya said Tuesday.

"We have no way of knowing" if the ports would reopen, Ambassador Deborah Jones said in a conference call with US businesses considering investing in Libya. "I'm not terribly optimistic in large part because there was not a lot of buy-in in the General National Council, their parliament, for the terms of the deal."

Ras Lanuf and Es Sider, which have a combined capacity of 560,000 b/d, have been closed since rebels seeking more autonomy took over the ports last August.
Jones said a deal struck between Zidan and rebel leader Ibrahim Jathran to reopen four ports, including Ras Lanuf and Es Sider, included compensation payments to the former oil guards in Jathran's forces, payments that many Libyan officials have called tantamount to extortion.

The other two ports, Zuetina and Marsa al-Hariga, recently reopened.

Jones said she spoke Tuesday morning with newly named Prime Minister Ahmed Maiteeq about whether the deal would go through.

"He gave a nuanced answer suggesting he's going to seek a way to finesse the terms and conditions of the deal," Jones said. "Many people believe, whether fairly or not, that [Zidan's administration] botched the situation."

Libya produced 200,000 b/d in April 2014, according to data released earlier Tuesday by the US Energy Information Administration. That's down from 1.6 million b/d Libya was producing before the current spate of unrest which began in May 2013.

El Houni said that Maiteeg is not himself an Islamist, but that he is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, to which he owes his rise to power.
Islamist militants in Libya now feel free to act, and lead the country into becoming a safe haven for Muslim Brotherhood members from Egypt, and to becoming an Islamist emirate.
Libya's interim Congress on May 5 confirmed the appointment of new Prime Minister, Ahmed Maiteeg, a young businessman backed by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Maiteeg's election was controversial. As described by the Libyan Herald, Maiteeg was elected after Congress members persuaded the deputy President to re-run a vote of confidence in him. In the earlier vote of confidence, Maiteeg gained 113 votes, seven short of the figure needed to make him Prime Minister. The Libyan Herald explains that the second vote took place after a number of absent Congress members were summoned by colleagues to come and vote. At that point, apparently, members of Congress started shouting at each other. As a consequence, First Deputy President and independent Congressman from Cyrenaica, Ezzidden Al-Awami, who had chaired the session, decided to close proceedings and departed.
It was at this point that Muslim Brotherhood congressmen took advantage of the chaotic situation. Muslim Brotherhood member and Deputy President Saleh Makhzoum decided that it was wrong to end the session, so he continued with the election. Maiteeg passed the 120-vote threshold by one vote. The next day, Makhzoum administered the oath of office to Maiteeg.
The day of the PM's swearing in, Libyan writer Mohammed El-Houni gave an interview, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), to the Saudi-owned satellite channel Al-Arabiya, on the political situation in Libya.
In the interview, El-Houni stated that the Muslim Brotherhood is striving to establish a Libyan Islamic emirate. "I believe that they are on their way there," he said. In a second part of the interview, El-Houni said that Maiteeg is not himself an Islamist, but that he is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, to which he owes his rise to power.
Islamist militants in Libya now feel free to act. The new government about to be formed and the religious institutions in Libya seem willing to lead the country into becoming an Islamist emirate. In the meantime, the jihadist movement Ansar Al-Sharia is becoming stronger, under the blessing of Libya's religious highest authority.
A few days before Maiteeg's appointment, Ansar Al-Sharia stormed the Benghazi security service headquarters before dawn, and slaughtered nine soldiers. Despite the attack, the Libyan grand mufti, Sheikh Sadiq Ghiryani, defended Ansar Al-Sharia. He stated that to condemn the movement is unacceptable; according to him, there is no proof of their responsibility for the attack.
Ghiryani, however, is known for his extremist positions. In 2012, Ghiryani also asked the Ministry of Education to remove passages related to democracy and freedom of religion from school textbooks. Recently, he urged Libya's government to stop importing overly racy lingerie and undergarments, as they contradict the virtue of Islamic modesty.
According to Mohammed El-Houni, "Libya cannot possibly see the light at the end of this dark tunnel unless hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets, and say to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Al-Qaeda: 'enough'. The simple people must take to the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people must take to the streets, demanding an end to this foolishness, and calling for the international community to protect them, and to help them establish their state."
The future of Libya looks grim now that the Muslim Brotherhood managed to put in power a man loyal to it. In neighboring Egypt, the ex-military chief and presidential candidate Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has said that there would be no future for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood if he wins in the upcoming presidential elections. In a recent interview, Sisi also declared that the Muslim Brotherhood was finished. "I want to tell you that it is not me that finished (the Brotherhood). You, the Egyptians, are the ones who finished it." However, Muslim Brotherhood members from Egypt now have just to cross the Libyan border to find a safe haven and from there build a new base, to threaten the whole of North Africa and the Middle East.