Ambush Slows Libyan Militia’s Drive to Take Capital

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/world/middleeast/libya-militias-hifter.html

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Gen. Khalifa Hifter, the Libyan militia leader now threatening to capture the capital, thought he had a deal.

His troops had reached an agreement with local militia leaders on Thursday to roll into the coastal city of Zawiya without firing a shot, putting his forces just west of the capital, Tripoli.

But another Zawiya faction evidently had other ideas, and early Friday morning they surrounded and captured more than 100 of General Hifter’s fighters along with their weapons — again, without firing a shot, according to local residents and video footage.

A day after his surprise advance to the outskirts of Tripoli, General Hifter’s drive on Friday slowed nearly to a halt, suggesting that a prolonged and murky battle may lie ahead.

A coalition of rival militias dug in to stop him, and the reversal at Zawiya offered a stark reminder of the mercurial nature of alliances among the armed groups that have overrun Libya since the Arab Spring in 2011 — including both those lined up behind General Hifter and those standing against him.

Secretary General António Guterres of the United Nations had arrived in Libya this week expecting to help convene peace talks among those rival militias. Instead, he met on Friday with General Hifter and announced afterward that he was leaving with “a deep concern and a heavy heart.”

“I still hope it will be possible to avoid a bloody confrontation in and around Tripoli,” Mr. Guterres said in an unusually plaintive statement. “Whatever happens, the U.N. will remain committed, and I will remain committed, to support the Libyan people.”

General Hifter — a 75-year-old former officer in the army of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi who broke with him to become a C.I.A. client — announced in 2014 that he intended to restore order as a new strongman.

It took him three years to defeat a coalition of Islamist militias for control of just the eastern city of Benghazi. But he received heavy support from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and later from Russia and France. After taking Benghazi he relied on a combination of superior resources and local deal-making to establish loose control over much of the eastern part of Libya.

General Hifter initially portrayed himself as battling against political Islam in all its forms. But he has also struck alliances with certain Saudi-style ultraconservative Islamist militias as well, muddying any sense of a battle between secular and religious forces.

Now, beginning on Thursday, his forces have launched a similar campaign aimed at capturing Tripoli. The city has been under the ostensible rule of a powerless United Nations-sponsored unity government and under the practical control of various autonomous militias. Many are also engaged in extortion, migrant smuggling and other criminal activities, and some have had ties to powerful regional militias in the cities of Zintan and Misrata.

With those forces now forming a loose alliance to stop General Hifter, Tripoli residents raced to stock up on food and fuel in anticipation of a prolonged struggle. Lines outside fuel stations stretched for 100 yards, and drivers often waited more than an hour and a half to fill up their tanks.

There were reports of scattered fighting in several places outside the city on Friday. But unusually heavy rain on Friday afternoon flooded streets and slowed troop movements.

In the most significant shift in the battle lines, General Hifter’s forces announced that they had occupied Tripoli’s defunct international airport, destroyed by fighting in 2014. One resident confirmed in a telephone interview that General Hifter’s troops had taken the area, which is less than 30 miles from the central square of the city.

But some local militia members appeared to be massing for an attempt to recapture the area. By the end of the night the interior minister of the United Nations-backed government said on television that it had been retaken already. Flat and open terrain makes it difficult to defend, and the airport changed hands often in battles over the past eight years.

“This is going to be slow,” said Emad Badi, a London-based Libya scholar who is tracking the fighting. “We are going to see more shifting alliances, and any location you control, you might not control it for more than day,” he said, recalling the capture of General Hifter’s forces at Zawiya.