How Trump's embrace of a rogue Libyan warlord sparked a humanitarian catastrophe by nickturse
TRIPOLI, Libya — It’s early morning in the Ain Zara suburb of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, and what was once a bustling business district is now silent. The 77 Cafe is locked tight behind steel security doors, a children’s clothing shop lies in ruins, and a storefront has been peppered by machine gun fire, rendering its sign partially unreadable. What remains is a yellow M&M beckoning you to a “Center for Shopping.
On April 4, after seizing the town of Gharyan, about 30 miles from Tripoli, Haftar ordered his forces to march on the capital. “Use your weapons only against those who prefer to confront and fight you,” he commanded in an audio recording posted online, promising: “Anyone who stays at home will be safe.” But civilians all across the southern edge of the capital — like Muammar Omar, 48 — felt anything but safe when, a day later, bombardment by Haftar’s forces began shaking the ground in Ain Zara.
For weeks, Haftar’s forces have launched attacks on neighborhoods ringing the south of Tripoli — unleashing artillery, rockets, and air strikes, while the militias opposing them also use indiscriminate weapons. Omar believes that America can end this war and the suffering it has brought to hundreds of thousands of civilians, a common opinion among Libyans of all stripes.
They echo U.S. foreign policy experts and former government officials who say that, with one phone call last month, President Trump gave Khalifa Haftar the go-ahead to carry out a military campaign marked by atrocities. It’s a battle that may transform Libya from a near-failed state into a humanitarian catastrophe on the level of Yemen or Syria.
This is a reputation Haftar’s LNA has cultivated. A previously undisclosed letter sent by Haftar’s government to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed that the warlord’s force has long “waged war against terrorist groups, militias, and criminal insurgents, including Al Qaida, ISIS, and the like.”
Finally, early one morning, with little more than the clothes they were wearing, Isaid, his wife and two children managed to drive out of their ravaged neighborhood to safety on the coastal edge of the capital, joining tens of thousands of Libyans made homeless by Haftar’s offensive. Libya watchers say that this public praise emboldened Haftar to unleash heavier firepower on Tripoli and signaled to his backers, including the UAE and Egypt, that they had a green light to continue or even increase their support. “It opens the floodgates to the type of financial and military assistance — from the Saudis, Egyptians and others — for a battle for Tripoli instead of on some kind of political approach,” says Feltman, the former State Department official.
Death and displacement represent, however, just a fraction of the war’s impacts. An already overtaxed health care system has, for example, been pushed to the brink. “The current conflict overloaded the weak health facilities with heavy casualties on a daily basis. Since the beginning of the crisis, an average of 70 casualties were reported per day,” says Hussein Hassan, the World Health Organization’s health emergencies team leader for Libya.
“The use of indiscriminate, explosive weapons in civilian areas constitutes a war crime,” said Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Libya Ghassan Salamé in the wake of attacks on heavily populated neighborhoods on April 16. “Liability for such actions lies not only with the individuals who committed the indiscriminate attacks, but also potentially with those who ordered them.”
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