Militants inspect damage to a Libyan army camp. Yahoo/Reuters
Human Rights Watch claims that militias fighting in Tripoli, Libya may have committed war crimes. Yahoo/Reuters. The various armed factions are accused of attacks on civilians and the destruction of property. People have disappeared and it is unclear what has happened to them. Militias from the western city of Misrata took over Tripoli a couple of weeks ago, pushing out both the government and other rival militias. The militias are leftover from the conflict that overthrew Libya's former dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Officials are worried that Libya is going to become a failed state.
My Comment:
The NATO operation to support these militias was successful to a point. Unfortunately, they won the war but lost the peace. Gaddafi's death left a huge power vacuum and every aspiring warlord or jihadist in Libya is trying to fill it. Considering that some of these militias are affiliated with Al-Qaeda and other terror groups, I am not surprised at all that there probably war crimes happening.
My question is was it was really worth getting rid of Gaddafi. I won't defend the man, he was a brutal dictator that surely deserved his undignified end. But despite his evil, he at least provided stability to a part of the world that desperately needed it. And let's not forget that he had chemical weapons but freely gave them up. I guess my criticism isn't that we got rid of him, but the fact that we didn't follow through with it. Libya is a failed state now, and it's a major hub for the international arms trade. There is no stable government and it looks like war for the foreseeable future. I can't help to think that more could have been done to prevent this outcome by the U.S. government but after the Benghazi attack, our current administration desperately wanted Libya to be out of the minds of the American public. So far it has worked.
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