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U.S. Airstrikes on ISIS Camp in Libya Kill More Than 40 U.S. Airstrikes on ISIS Camp in Libya Kill More Than 40
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — American warplanes struck an Islamic State camp in Libya early Friday, targeting a senior Tunisian operative linked to two major terrorist attacks in Tunisia last year. The operative, Noureddine Chouchane, was most likely killed in the strike, according to the Pentagon. CAIRO — American warplanes bombed an Islamic State training camp in Libya early Friday, killing at least 41 people, most likely including a militant commander linked to attacks on Western tourists, in a strike that highlighted the widening gap between American military and diplomatic efforts in the region.
The airstrikes, on a camp outside Sabratha, about 50 miles west of Tripoli, killed at least 30 Islamic State recruits at the site, many of whom were believed to be from Tunisia, according to a Western official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military operations. The airstrikes in Sabratha, a seaside town 50 miles west of Tripoli, targeted Noureddine Chouchane, a Tunisian militant linked to two major attacks on Western tourists in Tunisia last year. He had also facilitated the arrival of Islamic State recruits in Libya, the Pentagon said in a statement confirming the strikes.
The mayor of Sabratha, Hussain al-Dawadi, put the death toll at 41, and he said that six others had been wounded. He said the airstrikes occurred around 3:30 a.m. Mr. Chouchane was probably killed in the strike, the Pentagon said.
The airstrikes come as the Obama administration and its allies are considering increased military action against a growing threat in Libya by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. In November, the Americans killed Abu Nabil, also known as Wissam Najm Abd Zayd al Zubaydi, an Iraqi who led the Islamic State’s arm in Libya, in an airstrike on the town of Darnah, in eastern Libya. Since June the United States has carried out at least three air attacks against Islamist commanders in Libya, usually with a view to preventing the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from using its expanding territory in the country as a springboard for attacks in the region, or on the West. The Sunni extremist group has been spreading into Libya from its bases in Syria and Iraq.
Mr. Chouchane was suspected of being a major Islamic State operative who helped organize an attack on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis that killed 22 people in March and another in June that killed 38 people at a beach in the coastal resort in Sousse. Mr. Chouchane was one of five fugitives for whom the Tunisian Interior Ministry issued arrest warrants after the museum attack. As elsewhere in the Middle East, the focus on fighting the jihadists with military force has been far more successful than American diplomatic efforts to end the tumult in each country that allowed the jihadists to prosper in the first place.
The Western official said that the airstrikes on Friday morning were focused on Mr. Chouchane and did not represent the start of major new American war in a Muslim country. They were carried out by Air Force F-15E jets that took off from a base in Lakenheath, England. In Libya, the West has thrown its weight behind a troubled United Nations-led initiative to bring the country’s warring factions into a unity government. In Syria, a combination of airstrikes by the United States and its allies as well as military support for fighters on the ground has weakened the jihadists, undermined their finances and caused them to lose territory.
Special Operations forces, using reconnaissance drones, satellite imagery and other surveillance equipment, began monitoring the site, a walled compound, several weeks ago as Mr. Chouchane gathered several dozen recruits from Tunisia and other countries in the region for what appeared to be a training program intended to strike one or more targets, according to a second Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, to discuss military operations. But those gains come at a time of escalation in the wider Syrian war that American diplomacy has failed to restrain.
“The number of foreign fighters conducting the type of training they were doing under Chouchane’s direction led us to believe they were preparing for a major attack outside of Libya, either in the region or possibly Europe,” the official said. Intensive Russian airstrikes have allowed forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad to advance, nearly surrounding the city of Aleppo, weakening the opposition and creating a wave of new refugees. At the same time, the Kurdish-led force the United States has heavily backed to fight the jihadists has begun seizing territory from rebel groups, some of whom are also supported by the United States.
American fighter-bombers attacked buildings the recruits were using as barracks while the fighters were asleep, the official said. The gap between the reality on the ground and diplomatic efforts to end the war were highlighted in recent talks in Geneva, which failed within days because of the battle for Aleppo.
Jamal Naji Zubia, the head of the foreign news media office in Tripoli, said the airstrikes targeted a farmhouse that had been seized by Islamic State militants. Most of those killed were Tunisian, he said, although one man, who died from his wounds at a hospital, appeared to be Jordanian. Last week, the United States, Russia and other countries agreed to work toward a “cessation of hostilities” to begin in one week. But the target date came and went, with closed-door consultations on how to implement the agreement continuing on Friday in Geneva.
Fighters had been arriving at the house for some time, Mr. Zubia said, although the exact affiliation of the group was a mystery to neighbors. “They came individually to the house from different places,” he said. Some officials in the area said they believed the Tunisians had gathered at the house to hear a speech by a Muslim religious leader, he said. Friday’s airstrikes come at a time of Western alarm at the dramatic expansion of the Islamic State in Libya, where the group has snatched control of 150 miles of coastline and mounted attacks on the oil facilities that account for most of the country’s wealth.
Mr. Dawadi, the mayor, said the airstrikes had occurred in Qasr al-Allagh, a farming district about five miles outside the town. The bodies of 41 people were brought to the town, along with six seriously wounded people, he said. “The last thing in the world you want is a false caliphate with access to billions of dollars of oil revenue,” the American secretary of state, John Kerry, warned in a meeting of the 23-nation coalition against the Islamic State in Rome on Feb. 2.
After Islamic State fighters made a show of force in the center of Sabratha in December, Mr. Dawadi invited journalists from Tripoli to visit, denying that the group had a significant foothold in the town. For weeks, America and allied Western officials have mulled a possible air campaign against the Islamic State in Libya, particularly around the town of Surt.
“A number of them living in a secluded area like this is, of course, suspicious,” he said on Friday. “It must have been a sleeper cell, not a training camp.” Libyan officials and news media outlets have reported the presence of American, French, British and Italian Special Forces units in the country in recent weeks, apparently usually on reconnaissance missions and to liaise with local militias.
Tunisian and Libyan officials have in recent months warned that jihadists operating around Sabratha represented an even greater threat than the Islamic State’s Libyan stronghold in Surt, about 220 miles southeast of Tripoli, because Sabratha is a strategic point on routes for smuggling men and matériel among Algeria, Libya and Tunisia. For now, the Obama administration has said that it will limit its military operations in Libya to narrow counterterrorism strikes, such as the one on Friday, that aim to degrade the Islamic State’s ability to use Libya as a base for attacks in other countries.
Sabratha has been the base and training camp of the militant group Ansar al-Shariah in Tunisia, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, since its leader, Seifallah bin Hussein, fled Tunisia in 2013. In June, an American airstrike targeted the Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, while another in November killed Abu Nabil, also known as Wissam Najm Abd Zayd al Zubaydi, an Iraqi who led the Islamic State’s arm in Libya.
Tunisian officials have frequently expressed alarm about Sabratha’s emergence as a base for Ansar al-Shariah, which recruited thousands of followers in the years after the Tunisian revolution of 2011. Numerous volunteers have gone on to fight in Syria and Iraq; last year, one report put the number of Tunisian fighters in Syria at 7,000. At the end of 2014, some of those fighters publicly vowed to bring jihad to Tunisia, where a fragile democracy has been one of the few hopeful legacies of the Arab Spring. Mr. Chouchane, the commander targeted on Friday, was accused of helping to organize an attack on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis that killed 22 people in March and another in June that killed 38 people at a beach in the coastal resort in Sousse. He was one of five fugitives for whom the Tunisian Interior Ministry issued arrest warrants after the museum attack.
Ansar al-Shariah in Tunisia has not declared allegiance to the Islamic State, but Tunisians from both networks share close ties. The Islamic State in Libya absorbed many Ansar al-Shariah fighters in Surt, its stronghold since 2014. Surt is part of a 150-mile strip of coastline where the Islamic State has imposed a draconian form of rule including beheadings, stonings and amputations. Yet the Islamic State has continued to expand across Libya, underscoring what diplomats say is the importance of pushing Libya toward a political settlement of its multifaceted civil war. The country’s political leaders are currently divided between two loose political alliances centered on rival parliaments in the capital, Tripoli, and the eastern city of Tobruk.
Mr. Bin Hussein, also known as Abu Iyadh, was a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. He has maintained his loyalty to the core Qaeda headquarters in Pakistan and, as a fierce rivalry between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State for leadership of the global jihadist movement has emerged, he has sought to be a bridge between the two. But the United Nations effort to form a unity government has been stymied by the factional differences — based on town, tribe, personality or religious persuasion — that helped trigger Libya’s civil war in 2014 and have persistently dogged efforts to resolve it since.
Mr. Bin Hussein was released from prison after the 2011 democratic uprising toppled the country’s longtime dictator. An agreement to form a unity government, signed in December, has been loudly opposed by the Western grouping that controls Tripoli, which has refused to allow the plane of the United Nations envoy, Martin Kobler, to even land in the capital since early January. There are tensions over any future role for Gen. Khalifa Hifter, a commander who dominates in the east.
Accused of orchestrating the assassinations of two left-wing politicians and a violent protest against the United States Embassy in Tunis, he escaped to Libya in 2013, from where he has been training and recruiting fighters. He was reported killed last June in an American airstrike on Ajdabiya. For now at least, the United States seems set on continuing to attack targets of opportunity in Libya while supporting the troubled process led by the United Nations. “We will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind,” President Obama told reporters on Tuesday. “At the same time, we’re working diligently with the United Nations to try to get a government in place in Libya. And that’s been a problem.”
In recent months, American and British Special Operations teams have increased clandestine reconnaissance missions in Libya to identify the militant leaders and to map out their networks for possible strikes. All sides to the Libyan conflict, however, agree that the slow-moving political talks are in danger of being overtaken by the pace of Islamic State expansion on the ground.
This week, President Obama said at a news conference, “With respect to Libya, I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after Al Qaeda wherever they appeared.” During an interview in Cairo this week Mr. Kobler, the United Nations envoy, pulled out maps that contrasted the Islamic State relatively modest presence in Libya’s at the beginning of 2015 with its explosive growth 12 months later.
“We will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind,” Mr. Obama also said, adding, “As we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them.” “This is something that can only flourish in a political and security vacuum,” he said. “That’s why something must be done.”
Other than limited deliveries of humanitarian aid, civilians inside Syria have seen few benefits from the diplomacy.
Analysts warn that the United States cannot hope to defeat the Islamic State without addressing the wider issues that have allowed the group to thrive.
“It is clear that the priority in Washington now is taking whatever steps are convenient to tactically weaken ISIL over the course of the next year,” said Noah Bonsey, a Syria analyst with the International Crisis Group.
The political process to end the war is a lower priority, he said, and has made much less progress.
“If that political track doesn’t go anywhere, it is pretty clear that there is no backup plan,” he said.