Rival Libyan factions were set to resume peace talks on Tuesday after a partial deal was reached last month, but hopes for a lasting ceasefire remain dim without the support of key power brokers.

The negotiations at the United Nations in Geneva are being hosted by UN envoy Bernardino Leon, who said the accord signed in Morocco on July 11 was an important step towards ending four years of deadly chaos.

That deal was backed by members of Libya’s internationally-recognised parliament based in the eastern port city of Tobruk, as well as members of other political parties, civil society and local officials.

But it was boycotted by the Islamist-aligned General National Congress (GNC), which was installed in Tripoli by a powerful militia alliance that seized the capital last year.

The UN has not yet confirmed those attending the latest round of talks and it was not immediately clear if any GNC representatives had travelled to Geneva.

But experts said that even if the GNC commits to the UN dialogue, a durable ceasefire could remain elusive.

“There may be a disconnect between the negotiators and those fighting,” said Frederic Wehrey, a North Africa specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The UN-backed talks include “fairly influential people”, and may ultimately lead to the declaration of a prospective ceasefire, he said.

But he warned that without “a separate (negotiation) track for these armed groups”, stopping the bloodshed could prove impossible.

Libya has been plagued by near relentless violence since the 2011 overthrow of Muamer Gadhafi.

With the country deeply fractured — including two parliaments vying for power and a slew of armed groups battling for control of the country’s oil wealth — the UN hopes to forge a unity government that can ease the violence.

The West “may see the negotiations process as a path to ‘stability’ rather than peace necessarily,” said Fadil Aliriza, a Libya specialist at the London-based Legatum Institute.

“But it’s hard to imagine how political figures with dubious popular support and minimal control over their armed forces can bring peace to a fractured country.

“Even if GNC comes on board, which is anyone’s guess, the international community’s focus on getting a unity government doesn’t fix the sources of conflict,” he told AFP in an email.

http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/news/middle-east/349877/rival-libya-factions-resume-peace-talks-in-geneva

Tunisia”s National Guard dismantled a fundamentalist cell that operated in high areas in the demilitarized region of Kaserin, bordering Algeria, according to a communique of the Tunisian Interior Ministry.

It is a grouo linked to Al Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb and other extremist organizations that use the area in their trips to-from Syria, Iraq and Libya, says the text.

Armament, ammunition and special night vision gear were seized in the operation.

A commando of an unspecified nationality was killed in the clash while another that was giving logistical support to the group was captured, and the rest of the insurgents is being searched in the mountains by security forces.

Yesterday, the Tunisian Army had bombed intensively the area of Sammama mount in the region of Kaserin bordering Algeria, the site where those actions took place later.

The 100-square km demilitariuzed mountainous area of the Kaserin region is used as passage and refugee by fundamentalist groups operating there.

An Egyptian court on Monday handed preliminary death sentences to ten Islamists on charges of setting up a group linked to Al Qaida, legal sources said.

The Cairo Criminal Court will send the rulings to the country’s chief Islamic authority, the mufti, to approve or reject as required by Egyptian law, they added.

The final verdict will be announced on September 27.

On that day, the court will also deliver rulings for 58 co-defendants, including the brother of Ayman Al Zawahiri, the Al Qaida chief, in the same case.

Mohammad Al Zawahri and the other defendants are charged with forming a terrorist group linked to Al Qaida to target security forces and the Christian minority, as well as planning terror operations following the army’s 2013 overthrow of Islamist president Mohammad Mursi.

Eighteen of the accused are being tried in absentia in the hearings that started in June last year.

Mohammad, 62, joined Egypt’s militant Jihad group in the 1970s.

He fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He was detained and extradited to Egypt where he was imprisoned until he was released following the 2011 uprising that brought Islamists to power.

Egypt rearrested him in August 2013 as part of a relentless crackdown that has targeted Islamists since Mursi’s overthrow.

http://gulfnews.com/news/mena/egypt/egypt-sentences-10-islamists-to-death-1.1564066

After more than a month of boycotting the UN-brokered Libya Dialogue negotiations because of its opposition to the Draft agreement presented by UN Special Envoy Bernardino Leon, the continuing General National Congress (GNC) in Tripoli has agreed to send its team to the latest round, due to begin later today, Monday, in Geneva. The GNC has made it clear, however, that while it wants to continue with dialogue, it rejects the Draft and expects the UN to agree to make changes.

The presence of the GNC team appears to be conditional on Leon accepting the demand.

The decision came during a stormy session in Tripoli yesterday in which, according to several sources including one from the Justice and Construction Party (J&C), GNC president Nuri Abu Sahmain almost came to blows with Nizar Kawan, the nominally independent representative from Hay Al-Andalus but who is regarded as one of the leaders of the J&C in Congress. Kawan, who is said to have collapsed after being threatened, had been calling for Congress to return to the Dialogue and accept the Draft, already approved in principle by the J&C leader Mohamed Sawan. Abu Sahmain, at that point, is said to have been adamantly opposed to any return.

At one point, the sources claimed, presidential guards were called in to restore order.

Following the meeting, Abu Sahmain wrote to Leon saying that the GNC team would join the Geneva talks but expected to discuss amendments to the Draft which in its current form it rejected.

For its part, the House of Representatives has said that it will accept no changes to the text of the Draft.

https://www.libyaherald.com/2015/08/10/congress-in-tripoli-agrees-to-join-geneva-but-rejects-draft/

A dozen police officers, one with an assault rifle across his knees, guard the presidential mausoleum in this seaside resort, easily outnumbering the foreign visitors on a recent morning.

It was here, the hometown of Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, that a teenager once tried to blow himself up amid a group of tourists. The attack failed — his bomb did not explode and a tour guide tripped up the would-be bomber as he tried to escape — but it was only by luck that disaster was averted.

That was two years ago. More recently, despite ample warnings, Tunisia has had less luck in the face of a growing terrorist threat. Gunmen trained in Libya and linked to the Islamic State and Al Qaeda killed 22 people at a national museum in the heart of Tunis, the capital, in March and 38 tourists along a beach in the nearby town of Sousse in June.

Those attacks have provoked a widening security crackdown, and left Tunisians wondering if their country can withstand the onslaught of terrorism without giving up the tentative freedoms they — alone in the region — earned with their revolution that set off the Arab Spring more than four years ago.

The situation is increasingly precarious, nearly all agree. Last week, President Beji Caid Essebsi extended a state of emergency for two months. He had warned that another attack could cause the state to collapse. He later dialed back that comment, but only slightly.

“I want to reassure Tunisians that the state is not on the point of collapsing, but they must know that the hour is grave and we have to unite against terrorism,” he said in an interview on the Tunisian channel Attasia TV.

Aggravating the situation is the deepening presence of extremist Islamist groups allied to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in neighboring Libya, government officials, Western diplomats and security analysts say.

Militant groups here, which have been waging a low-level insurgency for several years, have now linked up with them, injecting a new level of violence in Tunisia.

The change in terrorist tactics has left nearly everyone on edge, with the government raising alert levels all around, said Yassine Brahim, minister for development and international cooperation.

“That is a new level, attacking tourists,” he said in an interview. “They were attacking security forces last year, now they put another target. We need to anticipate other levels.”

Tunisia’s security forces have conducted hundreds of raids, and frequently announce arrests and successful operations against insurgents.

Yet as more young people join the militant groups and receive training in Libya, security officials acknowledge that they cannot keep up.

“What the security forces tell us is that, ‘We start, we fight and we win battles, but we find that people go to Libya and come back,’ ” Mr. Brahim said. “So we need more means to follow the speed at which this is moving.”

The violence, which started sporadically, has steadily gained pace against security forces, which have been largely unprepared. It began with a violent demonstration against the American Embassy in 2012, two political assassinations of leftists in 2013, and attacks on police and army units in the western regions along the Algerian border.

As shocking as some of the attacks were — eight soldiers were beheaded in one ambush, 14 killed in another — the problem still seemed remote and, officials insisted, the groups of insurgents were small, 30 to 40 people.

But by last year, the antiterrorism police were discovering cells of armed militants in suburbs of the capital. Now, after the two brazen attacks on foreign tourists this year — which British and Tunisian security officials say were carried out by gunmen who trained together in Libya — the Tunisian authorities are taking the threats more seriously than ever before.

Members of the Tunisian Army and National Guard, long kept poorly equipped and trained for political reasons by the former dictator President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have received special forces training in the United States. The antiterrorism police have dealt swiftly with gunmen in several sieges in the capital, including the museum attack in March.

But the lower ranks remain poorly trained and motivated. The 14 soldiers killed last year were sitting down to break their fast during Ramadan and had failed to post any lookouts. The police units in the beach resort of Sousse took 20 minutes to respond to the attack in June, because they were away from their post at the time.

Of greater concern is the failure of the intelligence services to gain any forewarning of either attack. “They have not managed to infiltrate these groups,” said Ridha Tlili, a political analyst and director of the Ahmed Tlili Foundation for the Culture of Democracy. “They are always surprised.”

The interior minister, Najem Gharsalli, recently announced two successful operations against Okba Ibn Nafaa, a group linked to Al Qaeda in North Africa, but acknowledged that the organization had expanded its territory.

Some of the men killed by security forces had been in the process of carving out a base in southern Tunisia to facilitate communication and supply lines from Libya across Tunisia, he said.

But any steps toward greater security may come at a cost, and could themselves exacerbate the situation. Critics of the government crackdown say it has become too sweeping and threatens to restore harsh methods by the security forces that Tunisians hoped to leave behind after throwing off nearly 60 years of dictatorships.

Defense lawyers and families of some of those arrested complain that innocent people are caught in security sweeps. The Tunisian Organization Against Torture is investigating nearly 70 cases of torture from 2015.

Hundreds of young men are fleeing the country, many of them to Libya where they can find work, but most are joining extremist militant groups, government officials say.

A group of eight human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Carter Center, have criticized Tunisia’s newly amended counterterrorism law, which grants the police broad monitoring and surveillance powers and the ability to hold suspects incommunicado for up to 15 days.

A recent report by a United Nations working group warned that Tunisians were abandoning the country to join militant groups like the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in a way that was “unprecedented in term of the sheer scale.”

Some 5,500 Tunisians have joined extremist groups, with about 4,000 in Syria and up to 1,500 in Libya, the report said. Smaller numbers are fighting in Iraq, Mali and Yemen, it said.

Women are among those who have joined extremist groups and even entire families have traveled to conflict zones. But most include young people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. They are being recruited through local chapters of extremist groups, in mosques and in prisons. Some of the activity is facilitated by a large inflow of money from abroad, the report said.

“Vulnerability on many dimensions — physical proximity, socioeconomic, psychological and financial — has apparently thereby created fertile ground for manipulation and recruitment,” it said.

Former Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali is among those voicing concern. The strained political and economic conditions of the country, the lack of development in the poorest regions — especially the south, which borders Libya — and the government’s limiting of democracy, will open the way for extremist groups such as the Islamic State, he said.

“Unfortunately when they come here, I am afraid they will find a reservoir,” he said in an interview at his home in Sousse.

“Beware, because the south of Tunisia is totally ready, favorable to that,” he went on. “They will perhaps open the doors to Libya, and then watch out, that is a time bomb.”

The self-declared Islamic State of Barqa (Cyrenaica), or Daesh, paid public condolences to the death of one of their leading commanders, Imad Zway, who was killed during fighting with Libyan National Army forces led by Hafter in Benghazi.

IS said that Zway had died during fighting in the Buatney district of Benghazi.

The LNA has been engaged in fierce fighting with the terror groups in the Buatny dstrict ever since the terror group gained control of the area in July 2014 after successfully gaining control of the Special Forces (Saika) brigade’s base there.

https://www.libyaherald.com/2015/08/09/is-commander-killed-in-benghazi-fighting/

A car bomb exploded in Derna in eastern Libya on Sunday, killing at least seven people and wounding 19 others, medics and residents said, as Islamic State militants pressed an offensive to retake the port city.

It was not immediately clear whether Islamic State was responsible for the car bomb. Accurate information is difficult to obtain in Derna, a remote city controlled by Islamists outside government control.

Islamic State has built up a significant presence in Libya, exploiting a security vacuum as two rival governments battle for power four years after the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi.

But Islamic State was expelled from Derna in June by rival Islamist groups backed up by residents angry over the arrival of foreign fighters and clerics in the city.

Islamic State fighters were trying on Sunday to retake Derna, residents said. The rival Islamist Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade managed to repulse their attack, but fighting with heavy weapons raged on the eastern edge of the city late into Sunday night, they said.

An Islamist commander opposing Islamic State was killed, Islamic State said, adding others had been killed and wounded. But no further details were immediately available.

The air force of Libya’s official government, which has been based in the east of the country since losing control of the capital Tripoli a year ago, conducted an air strike on an area that Islamic State was trying to take, said Abdul-Karim Sabra, a local military spokesman.

The eastern government forces have had a presence near Derna for more than a year but have not tried to take the city.

The government and parliament based in Tripoli are not recognised internationally.

Both Libyan administrations are allied to loose groups of former anti-Gaddafi rebels who have divided up along political, tribal and regional lines.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/09/libya-security-idUSL5N10K0NJ20150809?rpc=401

Five people affiliated with the banned-Muslim Brotherhood group were killed Thursday in a fire exchange with police forces, which raided their “hotbed” in Fayoum city, southwest of Cairo, Youm7 reported.

In a security campaign in Abu Naour Village in the city, counter-terrorism forces targeted the location in nearby farms to arrest a number of assailants accused of engaging in violence. An anonymous security source at the Ministry of Interior told Youm7 that the killed people were members of a “specialized operations committee” that belongs to the Brotherhood.

The bodies were transferred to the morgue, and investigations are being carried out to verify whether the killed assailants partook in the recent killing of four-year-old girl Jessy, the daughter of Lieutenant Sherif Samy.

This is not the first time the Egyptian police have killed alleged militants in a location reported to the police as a hideout for militants.

Two men who allegedly belong to the militant group Ajnad Misr (Soldiers of Egypt) were killed July 27 in confrontations with police forces in an apartment in a Giza suburb.

On July 1, police forces killed nine Brotherhood members in an apartment in Giza’s 6 October city after they opened fire on the forces, according to a Ministry of Interior statement. The ministry said it had received intelligence information the group was planning to carry out “terrorist attacks.”

A new round of the UN-brokered Libya Dialogue negotiations will begin next Monday, the United Nations Special Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) has announced.

No location has been announced for the talks although they are likely to be again the Moroccan resort of Skhirat or, possibly, in Algeria.

Both countries have played host to negotiation sessions in recent months.

The so-called Leon Plan, now effectively in its fifth draft and which was approved last month by all the delegates to the Dialogue apart from those from the continuing Tripoli-based General National Congress (GNC), plans a new Government of National Accord which would include members representing key factions across the Libyan political firmament.

The latest Dialogue round is to discuss and chose names for the posts of Prime Minister and the two Deputy Prime Ministers. Once chosen, they will then select government ministers in cooperation with the Dialogue members.

Although there seems to be consensus on the role and powers of the new government, there has been friction over how legislative powers should be divided. The HoR would remain the primary legislature, but HoR members objected to Draft Four of the Leon Plan which had powers being given to a State Council, made up largely of former GNC members.

HoR members are much happier with the fifth draft which downgrades the State Council to an advice-only body, but unsurprisingly the GNC has said no.

UN Special envoy Bernadino Leon has already tried – so far unsuccessfully – to persuade the GNC to endorse the proposed power-sharing plan. But it is now boycotting the proceedings and, if anything, appears to be hardening its position.

Leon has tried throughout the summer to win consensus and, having last month won outline support for the Draft from the House of Representatives and a number of other bodies including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party, a week ago he met leaders of the GNC in Algiers to try and bring them back on board the process as well. It did not work.

It now appears that, just as he decided last month to go ahead with the initialing of the Draft without the GNC, so too he is going ahead with choice of prime minister and the two deputies without them as well.

The new round of talks will take Leon closer to the one-year anniversary of the start of his attempts to mediate peace in September last year, and his office this week sounded a cautious note.

“SRSG Leon acknowledges that while some of the parties continue to have reservations about what has been achieved to date, it is important for all parties to continue working on jointly addressing and resolving these concerns within the framework of the dialogue process,” said a statement from his office.

“Mr Leon is urging the main parties to redouble their efforts and continue working together towards narrowing existing differences and forging a common platform that can form the basis for a peaceful resolution of the political and military conflict in Libya.”

A second issue the next round of talks must resolve is which units will form the new Libyan security forces and who leads them, because all other forces would be required to disband.

As summer gives way to autumn Leon’s plan will also face a legitimacy problem, with the HoR, elected in June last year, seeing its original mandate expiring in October. A proposed extension of that mandate without elections would risk undermining the democracy Leon says must underpin any agreement.

Meanwhile there are growing rumours in Brussels that he is growing increasingly tired and frustrated with the process and is thinking of returning to Spanish politics.

https://www.libyaherald.com/2015/08/06/libya-dialogue-negotiations-to-resume-on-monday/