Libya’s Smuggler King has an EU company and a ship that visits Malta

Links between human, weapons and diesel fuel smuggling are there to see, if  the EU wants to

Zwara, the westernmost town on the Libyan coast, boasts turquoise water, endless sand beaches, and delicious fresh fish. You can even sit at a beach café at night and have an espresso while gazing at the Mediterranean. Over the course of several visits in 2011-12, it seemed the most Europeanized place in Libya. But for the last three months, local sources complain that the fish stores have been empty: every fishing boat is involved in human trafficking instead. And photos of corpses of drowned migrants on those endless beaches have shocked the conscience of the world. On Sept. 19^th  alone, almost 4,800 migrants were rescued off Libya. An estimated 130,000 have crossed from Libya to Europe this year to date, mainly from Subsaharan Africa.

On Sept. 28, the European Union Naval Force for the Mediterranean (EUNav) announced that on October 7 it would begin “Operation Sophia” to intercept smugglers’ ships and capture their crews, escalating from the current policy of merely tracking them. EU authorities have identified 17 Libyan boats involved in the trade. It is likely most if not all belong to citizens of Zwara.

One question is why the EU authorities made an advance announcement that gives the ship owners time to switch to other vessels. Another is why the announcement was made just as the summer smuggling season draws to a close.

The biggest question is why the EU ignores the fact that migrant smuggling is just one part of the activities of a well-funded mafia that includes not only the expected Libyan citizens, but also EU citizens.

The EU has mainly turned a blind eye to the trade that brings weapons and ammunition into Zwara for the jihadi coalition controlling Western Libya, Libya Dawn, and takes subsidized Libyan diesel fuel in exchange. By perpetuating the Libyan civil war, this trade also takes lives.

A liter of diesel fuel costs about .10 Libyan dinar or .065 euro in Libya, but upwards of a euro in Malta or elsewhere in southern Europe. The UN has banned both sides of the trade, but the EU doesn’t pay attention very often. (See this recent case of a boat impounded by Greece with weapons aboard)

On Oct. 12, the Libyan Central Bank decided to lift the subsidy on diesel and other subsidized goods in the interest of slowing the hemorrhage of cash out of the country. Fuel represents 70 – 80% of the $9 billion Libya has been spending annually on discounted goods.

Anything that will stop the flow of weapons to Libya Dawn is a good thing.  They are an unsavory lot, closely linked to Ansar al Sharia in Benghazi, the listed terror group that took part in the killing of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 12 2012.  There is hard evidence that Libya Dawn funds the Benghazi Revolutionaries Shura Council, the umbrella group of terrorists that includes Ansar. Libya Dawn regularly sends shipments of weapons and ammunition by sea from Tripoli to Benghazi to re-supply Ansar and other terror groups, including IS, who are fighting the Libyan National Army there.  The internationally recognized Libyan government is based in the eastern cities of Bayda and Tobruk and controls the east and some of the south; Libya Dawn controls Tripoli and most of the coast from Misrata to the Tunisian border, including Zwara.

To this day, despite its financing of Ansar and its complicity in the smuggling trades, the UN and EU consider Libya Dawn as a legitimate negotiating partner in peace talks with the internationally recognized government. And it looks to many Libyans as though the EU does not want to act against the diesel smuggling and arms trafficking that allows the human smugglers the space to operate.

“The Italians want to stop this migrant business,” said a Zwara citizen, “Bashir,”  who is one of a small group who are discreetly acting against the smugglers. “But they don’t care about the other smuggling. We want to stop all! I have met with people from Italian embassy (to Libya, now situated in Tunis) five or six times. They know the names of all the smugglers.”

As Bashir (real name withheld to protect him) and others explain, a group of interlinked crime families, similar to Italian Mafia families and including ties to them, handles human trafficking, diesel smuggling, drug smuggling, and weapons importation.  The kingpins have to be taken down — otherwise, people who specialize in human trafficking will just shift to cocaine or weapons or alcohol smuggling for awhile. (Diesel smuggling is the only business that requires specialized ships.) Tolerating one kind of smuggling is like allowing an American Mafia family to continue to control illegal gambling and drug dealing, but to crack down only on prostitution. But many Zwara people think the Europeans don’t really care about any illicit commerce, except that which deposits unwanted migrants on their shores.

As evidence for this, Bashir points to the fact that Zwara’s smuggling king is a shareholder in and a director of a Malta company, and Malta is an EU country.

The smuggling kingpin is Fahmi Slim Mousa Ben Khalifa, aka Fahmi Slim. Slim, a dark-skinned Zwara native said to be about 45, served a few years of a 15-year sentence for drug smuggling in Gaddafi days before the revolution opened the prisons. Now he is so powerful that part of the harbor in Zwara is known simply as “Fahmi Slim’s harbor.” While he is not directly involved with human smuggling currently, locals say that he works with some of the human smugglers in other illegal ventures.

Editor’s note: an official of an international agency confirms that Fahmi Slim is involved in fuel-smuggling activities in Libya and is known to French, Maltese and Italian authorities as a person of interest.

The EU could put pressure on Slim and anyone he controls easily:  Fahmi Slim is a partner in and director of the Maltese corporation ADJ Trading Ltd. ADJ, under its old name of ADJ Swordfish, also owns a tanker called Basbosa Star that has a history of movements that suggest diesel smuggling.  As Zwara does not have an oil terminal – the nearest one is in Zawia, 100km east – any tankers that call at its port are ipso facto suspect. Asia Times editors have seen evidence linking the  Basbosa Star and its sister ship, the tanker Amazigh F, in suspicious activity.

Now, new documents (1) also show Slim’s name on a ship that is being sold with the permission of the Tripoli-based Libya Dawn anti-government. The ship, carrying the IMO number 7900522, was impounded in Misrata, Libya for diesel smuggling years ago, in 2008 or 2009.  It remained in Misrata harbor even after Gaddafi’s fall, slowly decaying, until this spring, when the Libya Dawn coalition that controls Misrata decided it wanted the ship — now derelict — removed.

The vessel is shown on the shipping website Equasis as owned by one “Benkhalifa FSM” since May 22 2015.  That is Fahmi Slim’s full legal name. Each ship has a unique IMO number from build to scrap, so it is an important way to identify ships after name changes. On Equasis, the name of the vessel numbered 7900522 is given as Tiuboda 1. Tiuboda is near Zwara, and Fahmi Slim  is chairman of a Libyan company named Tiuboda Oil Services, #41992.

On another shipping website, Fleetmon.com, the IMO number 7900522 is associated with the name Troodos – owned by an obscure Spanish company, AlvarGonzalez SA, using a Georgian flag (5). This appears to be the owner from the time when the ship was impounded.

Currently the ship is being marketed by a Mr Albarasi. He showed a prospective Libyan buyer a three page contract from the Tripoli Ministry of Transportation, stating that he, Emrajaa Embarek Abdul Hamid, bought the ship from the deputy Minister of Transportation, one Abdul Alatef Mahmod Ben Amer. On the first page, the document states that the Acting Minister gave permission for the sale on March 30, 2015.

Reached by Viber and responding to written  questions in Arabic, Mr Albarasi said he is the sole owner, that “he owns it according to a contract made with Ports and Marine Transportation” and that “nobody else has anything to do with the ship.” He also wrote, “Troodos is the name of the ship.”

Then, on Sept. 19, reached through the prospective buyer who asked not to be identified, Mr Albarasi admitted that although he had bought the ship from the Tripoli ministry, his partner, one Abdulkarim Nassraat, later sold it to Fahmi Slim, who is now the owner. (Equasis shows Slim bought the ship on May 22.) Zwara sources identify Mr Nassraat as a Zwara native. Note that the sale occurred while the Troodos/Tiuboda 1 was still a derelict ship, unable to move under its own power. This makes it look very much like a “wash” sale.

One piece of Tripoli Port (Lebanon) paperwork –in English – locates the ship, under its Fahmi Slim-registered name of Tiuboda 1, in Tripoli, Lebanon harbor on July 15, “coming from Malta.” Mr Albarasi explained in Arabic, “The ship was towed from Misrata to Malta and the engines were maintained there.” He says the vessel is currently in Beirut obtaining an inspection.

If the EU wants to put pressure on those who have the power to stop human trafficking in Zwara, Fahmi Slim is an excellent place to begin. Why was his ship allowed in Maltese waters? Why is his Maltese company allowed to conduct business?  The sale of the “Troodos/Tiuboda 1” to Mr Albarasi and its sale barely two months later to Fahmi Slim suggests that  the Tripoli anti-government works hand in glove with Slim. In this instance as in others, Libya Dawn behaves more like a criminal enterprise than a government. Isn’t it time for the EU to bring its formidable soft power to bear to stop these needless deaths by stopping the money flows to the smugglers?

atimes.com

Militants kidnapped three pro-government tribal fighters manning a checkpoint in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Thursday, officials said, in an attack claimed by jihadists.

Two fighters from a tribal militia at the checkpoint were also wounded in the attack in the North Sinai town of Sheikh Zuweid, security officials and medics said.

The “Sinai Province“, Egyptian affiliate of the Islamic State jihadist group, claimed the attack on a Twiiter account, saying a number of tribal fighters were killed. Its claim could not be independently verified.

In a separate attack late Wednesday, a civilian was killed and six policemen were wounded as a roadside bomb struck a passing armoured police vehicle in El-Arish, provincial capital of North Sinai.

The area is a stronghold of jihadists, who have carried out regular attacks on security forces since the military’s July 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

Jihadists say their attacks are in retaliation for a bloody crackdown on supporters of Morsi following his overthrow.

At least two persons were killed and six conscripts injured in a bomb explosion in the restive city of Al-Arish in Egypt’s North Sinai governorate, reports the Press Trust of India (PTI).

One civilian and a conscript died in the explosion which took place late last night, medical and security sources said.

The bomb was planted by unknown militants and went off when an armoured vehicle belonging to security forces passed by it in Al-Bahr street in Al-Arish city, the sources said.

A number of civilians in the area were also injured, they added.

Ambulances were rushed in to the place of the incident and the injured were taken to the hospital.

The area in which the explosion took place is also where the military prosecution building, Al-Ahli Bank and a police station are located.

Egypt’s North Sinai has witnessed many violent attacks by militants since the January 2011 revolution that toppled the ex-president Hosni Mubarak.

The attacks targeting police and military increased after the ouster of Islamist ex-president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by military following massive protests against his rule.

Over 600 security personnel have been reported killed since then.

The military has launched security campaigns in the area, arrested suspects and demolished houses that belong to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.

Israel on Wednesday began deploying more soldiers to support police in cities across the country in an effort to tighten security after weeks of violence among Israelis and Palestinians which has left more than 30 dead and hundreds injured.

The Israeli army said six companies, made up of hundreds of soldiers, would join police forces after a government security cabinet decision late Tuesday approved additional steps to bolster security throughout the country.

The moves included imposing a closure on parts of East Jerusalem, the recruitment of 300 security guards for public transport and the revocation of residency rights of those committing serious crimes, according to a statement issued by the Israeli government.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will again convene a security cabinet on Wednesday afternoon to address the security situation, in particular the question of how best to tackle the incitement of violence among Palestinian youths, the government said.

The additional security measures came after a flurry of stabbing and shooting attacks across Israel on Tuesday morning when three Israelis were killed in one of the bloodiest days in weeks of unrest.

Seven Israelis have been killed and dozens wounded in a shooting, a stoning and stabbings since late last month.

At least 27 Palestinians been killed by Israeli gunfire, including 10 identified by Israel as attackers and the rest in clashes between stone-throwers and Israeli troops.

The prolonged period and nature of the violence has raised fears of a wider Palestinian uprising, or intifada. The first Palestinian intifada erupted in 1987 and the second in 2000 after tensions flared at the Temple Mount, or Noble Sanctuary, a holy site to both Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem’s Old City that has been at the center unrest in recent weeks.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the killings on Tuesday and the wider unrest. He has made separate telephone calls in recent days to Mr. Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority president Abbas, urging both leaders do all they could to stop the assaults.

Hamas, the political party that governs Gaza, issued a statement on Wednesday in response to Mr. Kerry, condemning him for failing to mention Palestinian victims.

Mr. Netanyahu had already been increasing security in and around Jerusalem. On Sunday, he ordered more than 1,000 border police to Jerusalem to meet the threat of further attacks on Israeli citizens. Last month he also gave officers greater leeway in firing at Palestinians throwing stones, who now face stiffer prison sentences.

The attacks by Palestinians appear uncoordinated and the work of lone assailants. But Israelis have contested that Palestinian leaders are inciting young people to become terrorists and aren’t doing enough to calm the situation.

Palestinian officials, meanwhile, have said disaffection with military occupation among the youth is the cause of the attacks.

Two Tunisian soldiers were killed and four wounded in a clash with militants in a western region near the Algerian border, the defence ministry said.

Tunisia has faced an upsurge in militant violence since its 2011 revolution that has cost the lives of several dozen soldiers and police, with most attacks claimed by Al-Qaeda’s North African branch.

“During a search operation, militants hiding out on Mount Sammama opened fire on our soldiers. Two soldiers fell as martyrs and four were wounded,” ministry spokesman Belhassan Ouselati told AFP.

He said the army operation was launched after a shepherd was kidnapped on Sunday near Mount Sammama in the Kasserine region, located next to the main militant hideout of Mount Chaambi.

The Tunisian branch of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terror network’s North African arm, claimed the clash, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist Internet sites.

The Okba Ibn Nafaa Battalion also claimed the execution of spies and threatened anyone who informed on its fighters, SITE said.

The group has been behind numerous bloody attacks on Tunisia’s armed forces, including the murder of a customs official in Kasserine, near the Algerian border.

But the bloodiest attacks, for which the Daesh has claimed responsibility, killed a total of 38 foreign tourists, targeting the national Bardo museum in Tunis in March and a Sousse beach resort in June.

On Friday, Tunisian civil society groups won the Nobel Peace Prize, in a symbolic show of support following the militant attacks for the country where the Arab Spring was born four years ago.

Since the Tunisia uprising in 2011, the Arab world has been rocked by massive upheaval that has toppled leaders in Egypt, Libya and Yemen and plunged Syria into a brutal civil war.

There is no proven playbook for negotiating the end of a multipolar civil war. The conundrum is further complicated when the negotiator has limited leverage and many parties genuinely believe they can secure their interests better through fighting than compromise.

Grasping at straws after over a year of little progress, Bernardino Leon, the top UN Negotiator for Libya, unilaterally announced on October 9 the ministerial list of a Government of National Agreement (GNA) meant to reign in the militias and stabilize Libya. Lacking a pre-existing signed accord from the various Libyan factions, the move is highly unorthodox. It allows opponents of the negotiations to claim that the GNA is akin to outside intervention. Like a last-minute Hail Mary pass, a long shot likely to backfire, it might nonetheless have been Leon’s best chance to get an agreement before the October 20 hard deadline.

Unsurprisingly, figures from both sides—the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR), Libya’s internationally recognized government, and the Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC), the country’s previous legislature—have already begun denouncing the move. In the ensuing chaos, it is possible that violent clashes will break out between groups who support and those who reject a deal. Additionally, opportunists might use the chaos to seize key pieces of infrastructure. Furthermore, in an attempt to derail the negotiations, an attack on Western interests in Libya by jihadists or the anti-negotiation Steadfast Front looks increasingly possible.

Why Can’t They All Just Get Along?

Reaching a peace accord to end Libya’s fifteen-month-old civil war is proving harder than trying to save a marriage after the divorce lawyers have divided the assets and made the infidelities public. This is a political environment in which the Libyan branch of the Islamic State (IS) wishes to operate—perpetual political manoeuvring with no coalition of actors strong enough to encroach on its territory or check the expansion of its smuggling, recruitment, and terrorist networks. Rather than trying to coax an anti-IS coalition to life, the key novelty of Leon’s proposed ministerial list is the relative absence of GNC supporters, largely due to the GNC’s inability to advocate for its candidates. The GNC negotiating team failed to agree upon a list of names to recommend to the UN, and its internal voting session in Tripoli was suspended after unknown assailants struck the conference hall with RPGs.

Nonetheless, Leon smartly wishes to draw the GNC back into the fold and has therefore offered a key position to a member of their dialogue team. However, this is unlikely to be enough to convince hardline GNC supporters that their interests are safeguarded by the GNA lineup. Instead, they might go rogue and back various shades of Islamist spoilers, with whom they are already tenuously aligned.

The proposed government can therefore be viewed as a balance between the Misratans and the wing of the Federalists who support Ibrahim Jadhran (the chief of the Petroleum Facilities Guard in Libya’s oil crescent). The Misratans represent the bulk of military power in western Libya, as well as the key militias that could tackle IS, while Jadhran’s Federalist supporters are the only force able to secure the stability of oil export revenues from the east of Libya. Both of these parties quickly announced their support for the UN proposal. The Muslim Brotherhood has also endorsed the plan, although more hesitantly.

The majority of other major local councils and militias, however, have denounced the proposal in the strongest terms. Paradoxically, the HoR, which stands to gain the most from a successful GNA, held a session on Monday, October 12 to vote on the proposed government but came to no conclusion.

Despite the political twists and turns, it seems the international community has taken its eye off the ball. No coherent plan to tackle the IS threat in Sirte has materialized, even from the political factions that still back the UN process. IS breeds on insecurity and aids Islamist spoilers such as the Steadfast Front, all of which hope to obstruct the peace process. This negative feedback loop must somehow be broken.

In an attempt to derail even the minimal progress being achieved at the negotiating table, IS has enlarged the geographical scope of its operations in Libya with an attack on October 1 against a checkpoint at the entrance of the Sidra oil terminal—190 km East of its home base in Sirte. While the death toll was not high, the symbolic significance was great. Although IS’ move against the federalists and the oil ports is meant to sabotage the negotiations and provoke fragmentation within the existing blocs, it could also cause a reorganisation of militia alliances which might lead to the creation of an anti-IS coalition. This positive realignment could be coaxed by sage international policies.

Shifting Alignments

Within the Tobruk faction, tensions between the HoR and they man they appointed Commander-in-Chief, General Khalifa Haftar, have approached the boiling point, due in no small part to Haftar’s ever-more evident ambition to take a portion of the country by force and sideline the HoR. His actions are proving divisive and destabilising, and Haftar’s former partners are abandoning him in droves, some of them to side with their former enemies and definitively evict IS from Derna.

Meanwhile, in Western Libya, the previously Haftar-aligned Warshefana forces joined with their former opponents, the Misratan militias. This newfound alliance might lay the foundation for an anti-extremist operation to regain control of Tripoli.

These shifting alliances demonstrate that moderate Islamist and anti-Islamist brigade commanders might be considerably more willing to work together against IS than the bickering political echelon that appears unlikely to make the sacrifices necessary for building a broad enough consensus for the “unity” government.

Such pragmatism from the militia commanders hasn’t come a moment too soon. If the political stalemate persists and factionalization worsens, IS will only be able to inflict greater damage and gain control over larger swaths of territory.

The only feasible path towards minimizing the IS threat lies in the kind of cooperation that is now taking place between the Warshefana and Misratan militias and others. If key militias supporting opposing political blocs can show more vision than high-level political leadership and put aside their differences to confront the common enemy, both the security and political situations stand to benefit.

Cooperation could prove to be a necessary first step towards rebuilding trust in the wake of a faltering negotiations process, and perhaps even serve as a way to begin reordering Libya’s unwieldy security sector. In fact, if the top-down UN attempts to forge a new government definitively fail, maybe a new round of talks could bring together sympathetic militia leaders and attempt to build a political process capitalising on their successful operational collaboration against IS.

nationalinterest.org

Alarmed by developments in Libya, the United States this week moved 200 troops to a base in Sicily so that they could respond more quickly if the U.S. needs to evacuate its embassy in Tripoli, two administration officials have told McClatchy.

The troop move is the latest acknowledgment from the Obama administration that three years after a NATO bombing campaign helped topple the government of Moammar Gadhafi, conditions in the oil-producing country are deteriorating and security concerns that previously were confined to Benghazi and Libya’s east have spread to Tripoli, the capital, and the country’s west.

Of special concern is that Islamist militias could easily close Tripoli’s airport, complicating any effort to evacuate U.S. diplomats if the situation deteriorates further. Militias also are in position to seize control of Libya’s other airports, including the one in Benghazi, where militants in 2012 attacked U.S. diplomatic facilities, killing four Americans including the ambassador, Christopher Stevens.

One senior diplomat in Tripoli said U.S. officials are living under severe security restrictions. “You have to have a new normal,” said the diplomat, who was not authorized to talk to the press and spoke on condition of anonymity. “We’re built to hunker down.”

The fluidity of the security situation in Tripoli played out again Friday, as Algeria reportedly sent in members of its special forces and a military plane to evacuate its ambassador and staff after militants threatened them.

Since the attacks on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, there have been a number of kidnappings and assassinations of diplomats and other leaders in Tripoli, including the prime minister, Ali Zaidan, who subsequently resigned and fled the country. Key members of the government that replaced Zaidan’s, including the deputy intelligence chief, Mustafa Noah, have been kidnapped as well.

But the apparent impetus for the U.S. troop movement was the release this week of Jordan’s ambassador to Libya, Fawaz al-Itan, after 28 days as a hostage, possibly in exchange for Jordan’s release from jail of a top Libyan Islamist. Officials fear the deal might encourage more kidnappings.

How long the U.S. troops will remain in Sicily was unknown, but the security situation in Libya is unlikely to improve anytime soon.

The central government’s lack of control over its fragmented military was never more evident than on Friday, when fierce fighting gripped Benghazi after a key commander in the 2011 uprising, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, commandeered government troops and air power to attack Islamist militias. It was the worst fighting there in three years.

The central government said it had not authorized the attack by Hifter, who was a well-known commander during Libya’s incursion into neighboring Chad in the 1980s but left Libya and lived in northern Virginia for years before returning as the anti-Gadhafi rebellion gained momentum. Many expected him to assume command of a post-Gadhafi national army, though that appointment never took place.

Residents of Benghazi said that while they were uncertain they could trust Hifter, they welcomed anyone waging a serious campaign against the militias that control the city. At least nine government troops were killed and 43 others wounded in Friday’s fighting, during which Hifter’s forces captured the western entrance to the city from Ansar al Shariah, the largest militant group in Libya. Ansar al Shariah members are believed to have been responsible for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed Stevens.

Mossam al Fitory, a 23-year-old activist and journalist based in Benghazi, said he welcomed Friday’s offensive, even as he acknowledged Hifter’s motives and agenda are unclear.

“Benghazi needs a strong hand to fight back against Ansar al Shariah. They are responsible for the instability,” Fitory said. “We are with anybody trying to secure Libya.”

Hours before Hifter’s campaign began, two special forces soldiers and an imam were assassinated in Benghazi.

Security in Libya has been deteriorating almost from the moment the rebellion against Gadhafi ended with the leader’s death in October 2011. The transitional government that had been located in Benghazi during the fighting announced it was moving to Tripoli, drawing the ire and suspicion of groups in Benghazi that feared a Tripoli-based government would attempt to control the east’s oil reserves as it had under Gadhafi.

By the time of Libya’s July 2012 parliamentary elections, the central government largely had lost control of the eastern part of the nation, home to the majority of Libya’s oil reserves. In the months since, the government also has lost sway in the west of the country.

This week, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the international community would soon take steps to help Libya’s weak central government assert its authority and “confront the threat from extremism.”

Those steps are expected to include the appointment of an internationally backed envoy who would work with Libya’s warring political factions to resolve their differences, particularly on Libya’s so-called political isolation law, which bans those who served in Gadhafi’s government from joining Libya’s new political process. The State Department is expected to name David Satterfield, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, to lead the U.S. portion of that effort, two administration sources told McClatchy.

“Libya is a country rich in resources, rich in people with talent and capacity, and we hope that in the days ahead we’re going to be able to tap into that and find a way to help the Libyan people to move forward to have the kind of stability and peaceful governance that they aspire to,” Kerry said Thursday during a stop in London.

Members of the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIS, were searching for buried money Tuesday in Libya near one of the homes of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in his hometown of Sirte, according to a new report. Around 30 members of ISIS were spotted carrying drilling equipment, looking for ammunition, weapons and cash, locals told the Libyan news outlet Alwasat Tuesday.

The terror group that has taken over vast swathes of Iraq and Syria has looked to expand its influence to Libya, in North Africa. The group has had a presence in the nation for a little more than a year. In that time, it has become the location of ISIS’ largest base outside of the Middle East. The group’s headquarters in Libya are in Sirte.

#ISIS searching for buried money at #Gaddafi's former residence in #Sirte. #Libya http://t.co/BcVXKeRo4u pic.twitter.com/JPILmnAJcO

— Alwasat (@alwasatengnews) October 13, 2015

Sirte sits on the northern coast of Libya facing the Mediterranean Sea, about halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli, and only 400 miles from southern Europe. Gadhafi was killed in the coastal town in 2011 following a rebel overthrow of his regime.

Since his death and the disintegration of government in Libya, the nation has struggled to find stability. Libyan leaders have tried in vain to transition to a new regime, with fighting between two rebel factions spiraling into a civil war.

The power vacuum left ISIS the opportunity to move in. In the year since ISIS arrived to Libya, the group has greatly expanded their presence there. Libya has also served as a recruiting center for would-be militants, as paths through Turkey into Syria have become more difficult to traverse, with local authorities monitoring the borders.

Militants from the terror group stepped up their call for recruitment, especially for Westerners, via a social media campaign Sept. 28, Newsweek reported. “Libya is a much bigger market for Western recruits than Syria because if you look at the background of Western Muslims being from North Africa, Libya is right there,” London-based security strategist Olivier Guitta told Newsweek.

President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton inherited a Libya in the midst of slow but sure liberalization — “a model ally” in fighting terrorists — and instead created a training ground for terrorists, the former chief of the House intelligence committee argues in a new book reviewing the evidence.

Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Republican who spent 10 years on the committee with oversight of America’s clandestine operations, dubs Mr. Obama and his top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton, the “Architects of Disaster” — the title of a new book he’s written accusing them of bungling the run-up to war, wrongly ousting leader Moammar Gadhafi, then leaving the country a mess that has already come back to bite with the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi.

“How many are aware, for example, that Islamic terrorists almost surely got their hands on the remnants of Gaddafi’s chemical weapons arsenal of sulfur mustard gas, only about half of which had been destroyed at the time of the uprising?” Mr. Hoekstra argues. “The tragedy of misbegotten American policy in Libya continues to unfold, and only the most deluded optimists believe that there will not be more bad news to come.”

The book, which is being released Tuesday, was written for the Investigative Project on Terrorism, where Mr. Hoekstra is a senior fellow.

He argues, using publicly reported sources, that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton should have seen Libya’s progress after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which scared Gadhafi into ceding his nuclear weapons program and paying damages to the victims of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

As a member of the intelligence committee, Mr. Hoekstra traveled to Libya in 2003, at the behest of the Bush administration, to determine whether Gadhafi’s conversion was real, and he says Republicans and Democrats on that trip unanimously concluded the Libyan leader had been scared straight — both by the U.S., and by fears of radical jihadists overthrowing him.

“Yes, Gaddafi was a monster, but he was our monster. In the ways that mattered most, he was preferable — immensely so — to many of those who brought him down, and the stability of

Libya under his control was preferable to the chaos that has followed,” the former congressman concludes. “Although NATO effectively brought down Gaddafi, it broke Libya but didn’t own it or do anything to fix it.”

With the exception of the investigation into the Benghazi attack, Libya has faded from the headlines as attention has turned to Syria, where the facts on the ground are strikingly similar: a regime intent on attacking some of its own citizens, a jihadist insurgency and an international community torn over how to react.

Despite the parallels, Mr. Obama has handled them very differently. In Libya he led a coalition to impose a no-fly zone that targeted Gadhafi’s forces, reversing the rebels’ fortunes and ensuring their victory. But in Syria the president has rebuffed calls for a no-fly zone and only tepidly backed rebels with a training program that after a year was so much of a failure the administration called it off last week.

The president, in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” program this weekend, said he’s convinced the Islamic State insurgents will eventually fade.

“Over time, the community of nations will all get rid of them, and we will be leading getting rid of them. But we are not going to be able to get rid of them unless there is an environment inside of Syria and in portions of Iraq in which local populations, local Sunni populations are working in a concerted way with us to get rid of them,” he said.

Mr. Hoekstra argues Mr. Gadhafi was just such an anti-Jihadist partner in Libya, and he said the president’s inaction in Syria is hypocritical given the greater death toll there.

“President Obama broke Libya,” Mr. Hoekstra said, adopting the “you break it, you own it” school of war and foreign relations. “Worse, in this case, some would say that the United States actually supported the wrong side, overthrowing an ally in the war against radical Islam in favor of the jihadists.”

In a series of recommendations, Mr. Hoekstra cautions against the belief that U.S.-style democracy can be imposed, saying that local customs and traditions exist because they are embraced by the locals. American efforts, he said, need to adapt to that — much as the 2007 troop surge in Iraq did.

Mr. Hoekstra also briefly re-litigates the questions leading up to that war, saying that the answer to the question of whether the regime possessed weapons of mass destruction “is unclear,” even more than a decade later.

“As I learned back in 2005, as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the military had unearthed hundreds of chemical weapons shells in Iraq, a discovery the Bush administration, foolishly preferring (as Karl Rove put it) to ‘let sleeping dogs lie,’ withheld from the public,” the former congressman wrote. (washingtontimes)

Libya’s rival parliament and government both have showed opposition to a UN-proposed peace deal installing a unity government, with one lawmaker saying it would deepen rifts in the country.

“This government is rejected… It will deepen differences between the Libyan people,” said Mahmud Abdel Aziz of the General National Congress, which has yet to vote on the plan.

The Tripoli-based GNC is refusing to discuss the proposed government until its demands are met for amendments to the UN-proposed plan for Libya, which plunged into chaos after the 2011 uprising that toppled dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

In the aftermath of his fall and murder, the country has been ruled by powerful armed militias and has had two governments and two parliaments since August 2014.

The internationally recognised parliament is based in the east and met yesterday to discuss the UN-proposed unity government, lawmaker Ali Tekbali said.

However, he also dismissed the UN plan, saying the government it has proposed is one of “divisions, not unity”.

The talks in the eastern-based parliament are to continue today, said the Lana news agency.

UN special envoy Bernardino Leon “wants to impose a fait accompli on us,” Tekbali said.

The Tripoli-based government also rejected the proposal in a statement released late on Sunday.

On Friday, Leon proposed a unity government aimed at ending years of conflict in Libya, saying it would be headed by Fayez el-Serraj, a deputy in the Tripoli parliament.

It would also include three deputy prime ministers, one each from the west, east and south.

Leon made the announcement in Morocco after months of tough negotiations with Libyan political players and members of civil society.

World leaders and the United Nations have lauded the proposal and urged Libya’s warring parties to sign the deal — the latest in a string of initiatives aimed at restoring stability to the strife-torn country.