Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni warned Friday that “Italy is under threat from the situation in Libya, 200 nautical miles away”.

In a television interview, he said it was a grave concern that Islamic State (ISIS) militants may be as closed as Sirte in Libya.

Earlier, the Italian government urged citizens to “temporarily leave” Libya as ISIS appeared to be making headway.

Foreign ministry officials have said security there is deteriorating.

Gentiloni said that if dialogue fails, Italy will fight – so long as any military action is conducted under a legal framework established by the United Nations.

The radical Muslim group ISIS is actively using children in its war effort, and viewing them as the future generation of a “Caliphate” that occupies parts of Iraq and Syria. This systematic violation of international laws does not receive enough attention by far, although it is a dangerous precedent for the future.
Kids play a role in guarding and looking after wounded ISIS fighters and are actively involved in the fighting. In Mosul, they guard checkpoints and busy crossroads. In Raqqa they are used as cooks or guards and also to spy in their own neighbourhoods, reporting on anti-ISIS sentiments. According to reports of UN organizations and others, dozens of them have been used as suicide bombers.
In preparation, children are indoctrinated and trained. Yezidi boys as young as 10, who escaped from ISIS, have said they were starved and beaten to force them to repeat verses of the Quran. Those who eventually succeeded were transferred to special training camps, where they are turned into fighters.
ISIS has adapted the school system in the areas under its control to fit its ambitions. “The boys study at school not to learn, but to become mujahideen,” a father from Fallujah complained to The Associated Press. He left the city with his family once he understood how his son was being indoctrinated at school.
Around Raqqa there are at least five camps for youths. In the Osama Bin Laden Camp and Sharia Camp, boys under 16 are taught Arabic and how to read the Quran, but also receive physical and military training.
ISIS is said to seek the agreement of parents, but there are reports of pressure — sometimes even death threats and of payments. Many parents have fled in a bid to prevent ISIS from changing their children into fighters.
Kids that Western volunteers for the jihad bring along to Syria also join the lessons and training. One of them, a six-year-old from Belgium, is seen in a report of Vice News from Raqqa, pledging to become a jihadi. “To kill the unbelievers, for they kill the Muslims,” he states.
In videos on the Internet ISIS shows how it trains the new generation. A group of boys aged around 10 take part in some kind of drill to toughen them. The boys are all dressed in long black shirts over black trousers and are kicked in the stomach and sides by their young teacher. Afterwards, they run into a field with their Kalashnikovs, to shoot and hide.
More recent are images of a boy of around 12, who shoots two Russian spies in the head, execution style, without even flinching. Even though experts do not agree whether the video is authentic, the boy also features in another ISIS video with young recruits from Kazakhstan. “We will kill you, oh unbelievers. God willing, we will slaughter you,” one of his young comrades chants.
Experts say children can be indoctrinated much faster than grownups. They can be fooled easier, as they cannot make comparisons. That is true for the Syrian Kurdish teenager, Mariwan, who was captured together with 150 other students, but released after four months. They were locked in a school, where they were taught ISIS ideology and were shown videos of beheadings.
After returning to his family, Mariwan said in an interview with CNN that ISIS “is right” and that “Kurds are infidels.” In the beginning he was scared to be killed, “but then we found they don’t just kill without checking if someone is an infidel,” he said.
Children are also sent to the fronts. Other rebels in Syria report that they “regularly” see them there, or find their dead bodies. A UN children’s rights group reported recently that ISIS uses children as suicide bombers — amongst them mentally impaired kids who probably don’t realize what is happening.
Once they have become soldiers, children can add their names to lists of volunteers for suicide attacks, as 17-year-old Amr told Human Rights Watch (HRW) after he left ISIS. Because the children around him signed on, he felt obliged to do so too, he said, “with reluctance and way down the list, so there were hundreds of names above mine.”
Recruiting and using children for a war is against international laws. A special research team of the United Nations concluded that ISIS is thus “in a systematic and organized manner” committing war crimes. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry for Syria interviewed 300 people who fled ISIS territory, or are still living there.

It studied pictures and videos and based on that concluded that ISIS “prioritizes children as a vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty, adherence to their ideology and a cadre of devoted fighters that will see violence as a way of life.”
Other groups fighting in Syria also recruit children, but not in the same, systemic way as ISIS. For the latter it is part of its strategy and ISIS calls the youth a “generation of lions, protectors of faith, dignity and land.”
The big questions are whether there is a life for a child after ISIS, and whether the Caliphate will indeed live on through children. Will they be even more vicious, since they will have never known anything else?
Whatever the answers, the world has to be aware of the danger, for society and for the children themselves.

Source:

The UN envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said Friday any peaceful solution to the fighting in Syria must involve Assad. “President Assad is part of the solution,” de Mistura told a joint press conference with Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz in Vienna.

“I will continue to have very important discussions with him,” he added, noting that “the only solution is a political solution.”

This was the first time a UN envoy on Syria explicitly named Assad as part of a peaceful solution after nearly four years of fighting between pro-government fighters and Western-backed rebels seeking the leader’s overthrow.

De Mistura, who was in Damascus this week where he met with Assad, is due to deliver a report on his mission to the UN Security Council on February 17.

If no solution to the conflict is found, “the only one who takes advantage of it is Daesh (ISIS),” de Mistura said, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.

The group is a “monster waiting for this conflict to take place in order to be able to take advantage,” he said.
Kurz meanwhile agreed that “in the fight against ISIS it can be necessary to fight on the same side,” but insisted that “Assad will never be a friend or even a partner.”

In Vienna, de Mistura said the government still controlled a large part of Syria, and that Assad was “part of the solution for the reduction of the violence,” clarifying an earlier remark at a news conference that Assad was part of “the solution.”

“I am not talking about a final solution,” de Mistura told Reuters by phone. “That is something that only the Syrians, if you had asked me, would have to decide upon. The main point was he is part of the solution in reducing violence.”

Earlier, speaking at a news conference with Kurz, he had said: “There is a large part of Syria which is under the control of the Syrian government and I will continue having very important discussions with him because he is part also of the solution.”

In the interview, Assad also said that, in the fight against ISIS, “there is no dialogue” with the US-led coalition, which began airstrikes on ISIS-held regions in Syria in September, a month after it started targeting the jihadist group in neighboring Iraq.

“There’s, let’s say, information, but not dialogue,” the embattled leader said.

Assad reiterated that the UN envoy must pressure all states to implement Security Council resolutions 2170 and 2178 on halting funding of “terrorists” and facilitating their flow into Syria.

De Mistura was hopeful that all sides would cooperate and back his proposed “freezing” plan in order to restore security to Aleppo.

Since October, de Mistura has been working on a plan to broker “local freezes,” starting in the northern city of Aleppo, to alleviate fighting that has killed more than 210,000 people in four years, 2,700 of them in January alone according to pro-opposition monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

He has frequently said the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial hub before the war, would be a “good candidate” for such a “freeze.”

Aleppo, Syria’s second city, is at the heart of clashes between government forces and allied fighters and a range of insurgents which include Nusra, Islamist brigades, foreign fighters in other groups and Western-backed rebels.

Source: al-akhbar

Gunmen claiming to be members of the Islamic State group have seized control of a state-run radio station in Libya’s coastal city of Sirte, residents said Friday.

Jihadist websites also posted pictures showing armed men sitting in front of microphones in a broadcasting studio and brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles.

“They took Radio Sirte yesterday (Thursday). Since then they have been broadcasting (verses from) the Koran and speeches by (IS chief Abu Bakr) al-Baghdadi,” a resident of the central city told AFP by telephone.

The resident said speeches of IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani were also being played on the air.

A former local administration official said the gunmen have also set up a headquarters in the centre of the city, and voiced concern that they could declare an Islamic emirate in Sirte.

“They could take advantage of the absence of any central government authority to transform the city into an Islamic emirate as they did in Derna,” an eastern city held by jihadist groups including IS.

The man, who declined to be named, said the gunmen apparently seized the radio “as a first step to communicate with the population”.

“The situation in Sirte is very complex,” he said, because many radical groups have a foothold there.

Since the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed dictator Moamer Kadhafi, Sirte, the former strongman’s hometown has become a stronghold of extremist groups.

Sirte is a bastion of Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamist blacklisted by the United Nations and the United States.

And militias of the Islamist-backed Fajr Libya (Libya Dawn) coalition control some parts of Sirte, and launching attacks against key oil installations nearby in December.

Powerful militias, backing rival governments and parliaments, have been battling for control of key cities and the country’s oil riches since the uprising.

Amid the chaos, IS has made an appearance in Libya where it has claimed a series of deadly attacks. The latest targeted a luxury hotel in Tripoli on January 27, when nine people were killed, five of them foreigners.

Source:  thepeninsulaqatar

Tra gli aspetti della strategia mediatica dell’Isil vi è la continua estrinsecazione della particolare visione dell’Islam che caratterizza il gruppo. La rivista web Dabiq è un elemento centrale nella propaganda dell’Isil, redatta in lingua inglese in quanto si propone di diffondere il più possibile la visione del gruppo. Dabiq, nel suo quarto numero affronta la questione della schiavitù, secondo un’interpretazione “letteralista”, a-storica e come vedremo, a tratti escatologica, arrivando a giustificarla, promuoverla, propagandarla come segno della diffusione dell’Islam e dell’avvicinarsi dell’ “Ora”, del Giorno del Giudizio.

L’Isil rivendica infatti la schiavitù delle donne yazide, nell’articolo significativamente titolato: “The revival of slavery. Before the Hour”, “Il ritorno della schiavitù. Prima dell’Ora” [del Giudizio]. L’articolo sin dall’inizio racconta della presa della zona di Sinjar, intervallando la narrazione con hadith del Profeta e versetti del Corano, precisando che prima di conquistare l’area, i giurisperiti dell’organizzazione avevano studiato approfonditamente la questione della religione degli yazidi, che viene riassunta dagli jihadisti in una visione parodica, in cui gli yazidi sono rappresentati semplicemente come adoratori di Satana: “Hanno reso Iblīs – che è il più grande dei tāghūt, (degli oppressori) – il simbolo dell’illuminazione e della devozione! Quale miscredenza più arrogante può oltrepassare questa?”

L’articolo prosegue cercando di spiegare perché le donne yazide meritano di essere ridotte in schiavitù secondo la particolare interpretazione della Shariah dell’Isil: “Di conseguenza, lo Stato islamico ha trattato con questo gruppo, nel modo in cui la maggior parte dei fuqaha, dei giurisperiti, ha indicato che dovrebbero essere considerati politeisti, mushrikīn. A differenza degli ebrei e cristiani, non c’era spazio infatti per il pagamento della tassa di protezione, la jizyah. Inoltre, le loro donne possono essere schiavizzate a differenza delle apostati femmine che la maggioranza dei fuqaha invece sostiene non poter essere schiavizzate, e a cui può essere dato solo un ultimatum tra pentirsi o affrontare la spada. Dopo la cattura, le donne yazide e i bambini sono stati divisi, in base alla Shariah, tra i combattenti dello Stato Islamico che hanno partecipato alle operazioni di Sinjar (…)”.

In realtà, come dovrebbe essere noto a tutti i musulmani e agli studiosi dell’Islam, secondo l’ortodossia sunnita la schiavitù fu eliminata dal Profeta Muhammad tramite una metodologia gradualista, per cui non venne proibita “tout court” ma venne continuamente scoraggiata fino al punto da renderla illecita. Tutti i maggiori giuristi musulmani concordano nel ritenere la schiavitù totalmente in contraddizione con l’Islam e i paesi musulmani l’hanno abolita da tempo, inclusa l’arretrata Arabia Saudita. Nel campo del pensiero islamico, e anche nelle più rigide correnti dell’Islam politico, la schiavitù è unanimemente condannata e proibita, ad esempio, uno dei più noti sapienti islamici al mondo del XX secolo, l’indiano-pakistano Abu ala al-Mawdudi – accusato tra l’altro di radicalismo religioso-politico e vicino al “padre spirituale” del jihadismo, l’egiziano Sayyd Qutb – così scriveva a proposito della schiavitù: “L’Islam ha chiaramente e categoricamente vietato la pratica primitiva di catturare un uomo libero, a fare di lui uno schiavo o di vendere lo schiavo”.

Nel settembre del 2014, un primo gruppo di centoventi Sapienti musulmani, tra i quali il Mufti d’Egitto, il Mufti di Gerusalemme e della Palestina, il Presidente del Cair – la principale organizzazione islamica in USA – hanno diffuso una lettera aperta di 18 pagine, in cui si trattano approfonditamente e strettamente su basi religiose, gli errori e i crimini dell’Isil. Tra questi spicca l’argomento della schiavitù: “La reintroduzione della schiavitù è proibita nell’Islam. Essa è stata abolita per consenso universale”. Le firme alla lettera aperta stanno continuando ad arrivare da tutte le principali istituzioni e organizzazioni islamiche nazionali e sovranazionali, nonché da tutti i principali Sapienti riconosciuti nella comunità islamica mondiale.

Nell’articolo apparso su Dabiq però si intende parlare di schiavitù anche dal punto di vista escatologico. Infatti, a circa metà articolo, viene affrontato il tema messianico della “al-Malhamah al-Kubrā” (lett: la più grande battaglia prima dell’Ora) affermando: “è interessante notare che la schiavitù è stata menzionata come uno dei segni dell’Ora nonché una delle cause di al-Malhamah al-Kubrā”, cui segue l’hadith, in cui si sostiene che il Profeta disse che uno dei segni dell’Ora è che “la schiava darà alla luce il suo padrone”. Da qui vengono espresse differenti interpretazioni, sebbene si giunga poi alla conclusione che il modo più corretto di leggere questo hadith sia quello della promessa di un’espansione tale dello “Stato Islamico” da arrivare a conquistare il mondo.

Ed infatti l’articolo si conclude così: “conquistare la vostra Roma, rompere le vostre croci, e schiavizzare le vostre donne, con il permesso di Allah, l’Eccelso. Questa è la Sua promessa a noi; Egli è glorificato ed Egli non manca alla Sua promessa. Se non raggiungeremo noi quel tempo, poi i nostri figli e nipoti sapranno raggiungerlo, e venderanno i vostri figli come schiavi al mercato degli schiavi”.
Viene ripreso un tema costante del discorso dell’Isil: la conquista di Roma, simbolo della Cristianità, un argomento che Al-Baghdadi aveva ripreso con forza sin dalla suo discorso di insediamento come Califfo, proclamato dalla moschea di Mosul, e rappresentato anche nella eloquente copertina di Dabiq, recante una foto di San Pietro dominata dalla bandiera nera dell’Isil.

Source: ArabMediaReport

La prima volta che John Cantlie apparve sullo schermo con la solita tenuta arancione era da solo e seduto dietro una scrivania. Non era inginocchiato sulla sabbia del deserto, non aveva nessun coltello minaccioso alla tempia, non lasciava trapelare la preoccupazione per la propria situazione, tanto meno la rassegnazione.

Già dai primi secondi di quel suo primo video, dovette essere evidente l’atipicità dell’ennesimo ostaggio dell’Isis. Si presentò perfino da solo: “Sono John Cantlie, un giornalista britannico che lavorava con alcuni dei più grandi giornali e riviste del Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph. Oggi, quasi due anni dopo il mio rapimento molte cose sono cambiate”. Il fotografo 43enne John Cantlie tesse le lodi dell’organizzazione che lo tiene prigioniero dal novembre 2012. Si trovava in Siria al momento del sequestro, avvenuto insieme al collega James Foley, tristemente noto prima di Cantlie per essere stato il primo ostaggio decapitato di fronte alle telecamere dei jihadisti.

Dopo quattro mesi e altri sette video da quel primo messaggio, si potrebbe dire che altro ancora è cambiato. L’ultima apparizione di Cantlie di fronte alle telecamere dell’Al-Hayat Media Centre (canale della propaganda del Califfo che la scorsa settimana ha pubblicato anche il video dei bambino soldato che giustizia due prigionieri) mette in scena la sua evoluzione: da prigioniero a inviato speciale al soldo dei jihadisti.

Diffuso nei primi giorni del 2015, ma girato a dicembre 2014, “From inside Mosul” è un reportage dalla forma curata che ricalca, nello stile, il format classico dei servizi che tanto piacciono al pubblico occidentale. Cantlie parla con tono pacato e a tratti ironico, guida e cammina per le strade della città irachena che da giugno è nelle mani dell’Isis, presentandola quasi come fosse una meta turistica. “Ai media piace disegnare la vita sotto lo stato islamico come depressa”, lamenta prima di esaltare i colori e le luci di una passeggiata al mercato della città. Altro che la guerra, a Mosul la vita è “business as usual!”. Anzi, forse è pure migliore ora che al posto di Saddam o degli statunitensi c’è l’Isis: questo è il messaggio che Cantlie vuole veicolare, smontando a parole le versioni dei media.

“Dicevano che i prezzi dei beni di prima necessità si erano impennati, che le persone non avevano soldi, che la spazzatura si accumula ai bordi delle strade, senza essere raccolta e ci sono circa due ore di elettricità ogni quattro giorni. Beh qua ci sono neon e insegne colorate che sono state accese ben più che per sole due ore negli ultimi quattro giorni.” – dice, citando apertamente quanto pubblicato dal Guardian il 27 ottobre.

Cantlie rischia di passare alla storia come il volto occidentale dell’Isis, attraverso quel “Lend me your ears. Messages from the British Detainee John Cantlie” (Prestatemi orecchio. Messaggi dal prigioniero britannico John Cantlie) che più come una testimonianza si impone come un vero e proprio appuntamento seriale – con tanto di sigla iniziale e formula di chiusura che invitano a non perdere la puntata successiva.
“Voi pensate che lo faccia solo perché sono un ostaggio e ho una pistola puntata alla tempia e sono stato costretto, giusto? Beh, è vero sono un ostaggio, questo non posso negarlo. Ma essendo stato abbandonato dal mio governo e essendo il mio destino nelle mani dello stato islamico, non ho niente da perdere. Forse vivrò o forse morirò, ma voglio prendere questa opportunità per portarvi alcuni fatti che voi potete verificare. Fatti che se presi in considerazione, possono aiutare a salvare qualche vita.” Così spiegava nel primo video di “Lend me your ears”, vestito con la veste di Guantanamo e accerchiato dalle pareti anonime del bunker.

Lo scopo delle sue apparizioni è duplice: smentire i media occidentali e accusare i governi di aver lasciato soli gli ostaggi (“Salve, sono John Cantlie, cittadino britannico abbandonato dal mio governo e prigioniero dello Stato Islamico” – è la frase con cui Cantlie accoglie il suo pubblico all’inizio di ogni videomessaggio).

I “fatti” annunciati da Cantlie non sono, per la verità, propriamente tali. Nelle diverse puntate di “Lend me your ears”, le uniche cose verificabili sono i riferimenti alle dichiarazioni ufficiali e alle notizie citate. E anche nel video apparentemente girato a Mosul (il secondo che vede Cantlie fuori dal bunker anonimo e in abiti civili), le inquadrature sono sempre così strette sul volto e sulla figura di Cantlie da non lasciar trasparire alcuna indicazione che possa far partire la verifica del video.

Alla fine, l’importanza delle cronache di Cantlie sta nel non detto. I contenuti, benché densi e critici, comunicano poco rispetto al contenitore. L’esempio più chiaro arriva proprio dal primo “live report” da Kobane, emerso ad ottobre. Allora i veri messaggi trasmessi furono chiari: l’Isis non intendeva più nascondersi, né aveva più paura di uscire allo scoperto. Anzi, semmai aveva voglia di sfoggiare un salto di qualità – non solo in termini di propaganda, ma anche in termini di tecnologia militare, ostentando le immagini girate dalle telecamere sui droni dei jihadisti.

Source: ArabMediaReport

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) said on Thursday it was holding a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship who had posed as a foreign fighter in order to spy for Mossad, an account denied by Israel and the man’s family, who said he had been kidnapped.

In an interview published by ISIS’s online English-language magazine Dabiq, Mohammed Musallam, 19, said he had joined the insurgent group in Syria so as to report to the Israelis on its weapons caches, bases and Palestinian recruits.

After his conduct aroused the suspicion of ISIS commanders, Musallam was quoted as saying, he broke cover by phoning his father in East Jerusalem, leading to his capture.

“I say to all those who want to spy on the Islamic State, don’t think that you’re so smart and that you can deceive the Islamic State. You won’t succeed at all,” Dabiq quoted him as saying, using a different name for ISIS.

“Stay away from this path. Stay away from helping the Jews and the murtaddin (apostates). Follow the right path.”

Musallam’s father, Said, denied his son was a spy, saying he went missing after traveling as a tourist to Turkey. Mohammed then phoned home, saying he had been abducted and taken to neighboring Syria but could buy his way out, his father said.

“He said, ‘Dad, I need $200 or $300 so they will let me go,'” Said Musallam told Reuters. Before he could send the money, he said, another man phoned to inform him Mohammed had escaped his captors but had been seized by ISIS.

An Israeli security official claimed Musallam traveled to Turkey on October 24 in order to fight for ISIS in Syria.

“He went on his own initiative, without his family’s knowledge,” the official told Reuters. Asked whether his statement constituted a denial that Musallam was an Israeli spy, the official said: “You can understand it that way, yes.”

Israel has stepped up monitoring and prosecution of its Palestinian citizens, which constitute 20 percent of the population in Occupied Palestine, claiming concern that 1948 Palestinians might travel to Syria or Iraq to join Islamist insurgent groups and then return radicalized and battle-ready.

Turkey draws many Palestinians with Israeli citizenship holidaymakers. It is also a major conduit for foreigners who slip across the border to help insurgents fight against the Syrian army.

Mohammed Musallam worked as a firefighter, his family said. A friend of his who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said Musallam had posted pro-ISIS messages on social media. Reuters could find no social media accounts under Musallam’s name.

In the first conviction of its kind, Israel in November jailed Ahmed Shurbaji, a 1948 Palestinian who returned voluntarily after spending three months with ISIS in Syria.

He received a relatively light term of 22 months in return for cooperation with security services according to the court, in a possible allusion to information he provided about ISIS.

A source in the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said Palestinians with Israeli citizenship returning from Syria were routinely questioned for intelligence on jihadist groups.

Shurbaji had phoned an Israeli security official from Syria to broker a deal. The Shin Bet source said such communications with 1948 Palestinians who wanted to return from Syria had sometimes been handled by Ayoob Kara, an Israeli Druze politician and former army officer close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Contacted by Reuters, Kara said he was aware of Musallam’s case and did not believe he was a Mossad spy.

While declining to discuss Musallam in detail, Kara said he knew of several young Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who had gone to Syria to aid refugees or for the thrill of being in a warzone, only to be kidnapped and exploited by insurgents like ISIS.

Over the past months, there have been several claims and stories about young men from occupied 1948 Palestine joining ISIS.

In late October, Shin Bet said that a Bedouin doctor has been killed fighting for ISIS in Syria.

Abdul-Qiyan, a 26-year-old Palestinian with Israeli citizenship from the Palestinian Bedouin village of Hura, studied medicine in Jordan and worked as an intern at an Israeli hospital, had died in the fighting in August.

Aside from direct military action, Israel’s role in the Syrian conflict has reportedly included relations with rebel groups, as several reports claimed that some of these groups maintain frequent contact with the Israeli military forces.

Source:  al-akhbar

Egyptian President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi has ordered the evacuation of Egyptians in neighbouring Libya after reports that Daesh militants had threatened to execute 21 Christian Egyptians kidnapped in Libya more than a month ago.

For peace negotiations to successfully halt a conflict, three conditions are usually required: the existence of discrete warring parties, represented at the talks by acknowledged leaders, each of whom possess sufficient clout to enforce any agreed upon peace terms on their supporters.

Despite the heroic efforts of international mediators and the courageous confidence building measures embraced by the negotiations’ participants, Libya’s current civil war lacks all three prerequisites for a mediated solution to hold. Unlike in the 2011 anti-Gaddafi uprisings, Libya’s current war is fought between loose blocs rather than discrete factions.

Furthermore, power has so fragmented that no one can actually point to who holds real authority. The tribes, the local councils, and the rival parliaments all hold some sway and possess a modicum of independence of action, but in fact, it is the men with guns who form the bedrock on which the politicians’ and traditional leaders’ influence is built.

And inconveniently, there are no command and control structures which unambiguously govern the relations of the various militias which comprise the warring blocs. Therefore, speculating which militia actors actually call the shots and can impose their will on the communities they claim to represent is incredibly difficult, not least because Libyan hierarchies of power – and the alliance system that undergirds them – are constantly shifting.

Dawn v Dignity
In the second half of 2014, it was useful shorthand to think of Libya’s post-Gaddafi power scramble as being waged between two main factions: Misratan-led Libya Dawn and the Western/Egyptian-aligned Operation Dignity. However, fracturing within these broad divisions means this shorthand is no longer sufficiently accurate to be of value.

This week, the UN pulled a rabbit out of a hat by bringing the talks back to Ghadames – calling the bluff of one faction of former parliamentarians who previously insisted on boycotting the talks on the grounds that they were not being held in Libya. Yet, despite including a greater range of stakeholders than ever before, it was clear that those who sat around the table still don’t have the power to stop the war.

So this makes you wonder, what are the talks’ real purpose? Their immediate aim is not actually to bring peace to Libya (which, of course, they would love to achieve, but is an unreasonable short term goal) but rather to detach the extreme factions who favour military conflict from those who favour dialogue. The mediators’ theory holds that this approach will separate the moderates from the spoilers and allow the formation of an anti-extremist coalition.

The paradox of success
A bloc of moderates has actually been formed and more actors are willing to join the talks each week. And yet, it is this momentum for rapprochement which has put significant strain on the fundamental alliances which had previously held together the political and military wings of Dawn and Dignity.

Libya Dawn is gradually fracturing into two camps: one led by Misratan civic leaders who favour negotiations and the other led by rejectionist militia commanders and hardline jihadists who seek to derail the talks. As meaningful compromises appear more likely, the lengths to which spoilers will go to derail them increases. The attack on Corinthia by an ISIL-aligned group is likely to herald more terrorist outrages and possibly an intra-Islamist war.

This situation is mirrored in the Dignity camp. Most elected members of the parliament have been won over to the idea of dialogue, but General Khalifa Haftar’s army and the Federalist militias have not. Therefore, while a ceasefire is theoretically in place, Haftar’s men have claimed to retake a key base in Benghazi and the Federalists briefly declared a strike shutting down Libya’s last functional oil port. Both are attempts to score points before the bell – increasing the power of the armed movements relative to their political patrons.

Time to oust Haftar?
Tensions between Operation Dignity’s higher military echelons and members of Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni’s cabinet have reached new lows – with the Minister of Interior Omar al-Sinki declaring that Haftar should be marginalised. On the one hand, this seems a promising sign. Haftar is Libya’s most divisive figure. And many revolutionaries feel that the revolution won’t be complete until he goes.

As such, Haftar’s leaving Libya is the primary precondition that the Misratan moderates have articulated for participating in a national unity government. And yet, without Haftar, the Dignity camp will lack a clear cut military leader. This means that Dignity is now not only fighting Dawn, it is engaged in an internal polarising power struggle. In an attempt to prove his relevance before his erstwhile allies abandon him, the renegade general looks with increasing interest to Derna as a new arena for boosting his anti-jihadist credentials.

Over the next weeks, centrifugal forces within each block are likely to gain in strength, reducing the potential effectiveness of any negotiated bargain. Meanwhile, new tribal, regional, local, and militia stakeholders are likely to emerge demanding to be accommodated or to cause havoc.

In the wake of Gaddafi’s demise and the empowering climate of the post-Arab Spring chaos, Libya has too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

Source:  aljazeera