Libyan fighters firing mortars. Reuters.
Libya is falling further and further into factional fighting and is close to a full scale civil war. Reuters. Efforts to bring a cease fire have failed completely. The government has been unstable and was forced to flee when rebel groups took the capital of Tripoli. The government is too weak to control the various militias that who helped overthrow Qaddafi. In Benghazi the situation is even more complex with pro-government militias fighting Islamist rebels.
My Comment:
Once again, Libya is going to hell in a hand-basket. The U.S. led intervention to remove Qaddafi succeeded but as always nobody had a plan to win the peace. I'm not saying we should have kept Qaddafi, but we should have thought of a way to bring these militias under the control of the government. At this point it is probably too late, there are far too many competing factions in Libya right now for them to all work together.
Of course the fact that some of these factions are radical Islamist in nature is extremely worrying. I have heard that some of these groups have sworn fealty to ISIS. If that is true then we could see a 2nd Syria/Iraq situation in North Africa as well. That is a horrible possibility and every day it seems more and more likely. The thing is that there are so many factions working against each other in Libya that it seems likely that any one group could gain supremacy. Still, anytime that Islamic extremists gain power it is bad news.
No comments:
Post a Comment