Heavy clashes have erupted early this morning in Tripoli, with news about blocking roads from down town Tripoli at 11 July Bridge up to Tajoura, like reported by libyanexpress.com.

The clashes have been taken place since Monday around Tripoli Mitiga Airport, at the area known as Ghararat.

Former Libyan Interior Minister Fawzi Abdul Ali said that ISIS has ended in his country as an emirate, but still exists as cells, like reported by aawsat.com.

In an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, Abdul Ali expressed concern that ISIS militants move from Iraq to Syria then Libya, especially lately. “These are real concerns,” Abdul Ali stressed.

Abdul Ali, from Misrata, was named minister of interior in the transitional Libyan government that was formed after ousting Muammar Gaddafi, and it was headed by Abdurrahim al-Keib. He now serves as the ambassador of his country to Bahrain.

Regarding the ongoing anarchy since the death of the former regime leader in October 2011 until this day, Abdul Ali, who was a member of the Transitional Council and chairman of the Security Committee then the arming committee, said there were many reasons leading to it. One of these reasons is the deterioration of the official security and military institutions, their weakness, marginalization and rampant corruption during the ruling of the preceding regime, he explained.

Another reason for this security chaos is the political fragility at this stage, according to Abdul Ali. “Part of it is due to actions of political forces in Libya and the role of foreign interventions, all of what created this chaos that is now taking place.”

“There were obstacles that hindered the restoration of the work of police and internal security services with their full capacity after the fall of the former regime,” Abdul Ali said.

When asked about the reason why police and security forces have not yet fully recovered after six years, he said that there were many obstacles, which prevented the normal restoration of the work of the police and the security services at their full strength after the fall of the regime. The most important can be attributed to the fact that a strong movement belonging to the revolution did not want these bodies to function, merely because they belong to the former regime.

“This movement belongs basically to the so-called ‘political Islam’, topped by Muslim Brotherhood, Ansar al-Sharia, Libyan Fighting Group and others,” Abdul Ali explained.

He also pointed out that some parties, belonging to the former regime, also participated in obstructing the restoration of security “because they wanted to disrupt the formation of any state they cannot head. They wanted the February revolution to appear as a failed revolution that is not able to reconstruct the state, in addition to the failure to unite the army, which contributed to the inability to activate other security apparatuses.”

Abdul Ali was previously a member of the local council in Misrata, during the “February 17 Revolution”, and was also in charge of the security file in the city, which is currently one of the largest Libyan cities in terms of military apparatuses.

Moroccan police arrested 11 members of an “extremely dangerous terrorist” cell linked to the Islamic State group and seized chemical products used to make bombs, the interior ministry said, like reported by news24.com.

The suspects were active in the neighbouring northern cities of Fez and Meknes, in commercial capital Casablanca, as well as in the central town of Khouribga, a statement said.

The ministry said the “extremely dangerous terrorist” cell had planned to carry out attacks in “sensitive areas… in coordination with an affiliate” of the jihadist Islamic State group.

Moroccan media broadcast live video footage showing heavily armed and masked members of an elite police unit surrounding a building in Fez.

The ministry said the unit searched an apartment and arrested the “suspected mastermind of the cell and one of his accomplices”.

Police also seized firearms, knives, gas cannisters as well as “products used to make homemade bombs” and a car carrying “suspicious material” that was near the building, the ministry added.

Morocco has been spared deadly jihadist attacks since a 2011 bombing in Marrakesh’s famed Jamaa El Fna Square that killed 17 people, mainly European tourists.

But in recent months, authorities have regularly announced the dismantling of ISIS cells and arrests of suspected jihadist recruiters.

Only a few areas of the country are not yet controlled by the Libyan National Army (LNA) armed forces commander-in-chief Khalif Hafter has claimed, according to libyaherald.com.

Hafter maintained the LNA now held territory to the west of Tripoli from Zuwara to the Tunisian border. In a few days, he said, Zawia, 30 kilometres west of the capital, would also be under its control.

Hafter told a gathering of LNA commanders in Benghazi yesterday: “The size of Libya is 1,760,000 square kilometres. The army is currently in control of 1,730,000 square kilometres. There’s only a little left.”

His announcement has been taken as an indication that the LNA would now move on Tripoli. Last December, he said that troops should be ready to “liberate” the capital.

However, Hafter made no mention of Misrata and its battle-hardened militias which though split between Islamist and non-Islamist forces, are assumed to be united in their suspicion and rejection of him and the Libyan National Army (LNA).

Moreover, the idea that LNA units might fight their way into the capital from the east is regarded as dubious. The eastern tribes which underpin the LNA are thought to have little appetite for any major battle away in the west of the country.  His hope must be that, as has happened to the west of Tripoli, militias in the capital will declare for the LNA, thereby abandoning the Presidency Council (PC) and its leader Faiez Serraj.

Hafter said yesterday that his was a battle against terrorism which was working day and night to undermine the country. He said that the LNA had “no choice but victory”.  The sharp divisions within the country between those struggling for power were weakening its stability.

He referred to a violent struggle between those who backed progress against backwardness, humanity against its enemies.  Security was the highest priority and he called for security and military forces to advance under the law and with respect for human rights to triumph on the battlefield over terrorism.

An Islamic State affiliate has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula that killed nine soldiers and wounded at least 37 others, like reported by abcnews.go.com.

The simultaneous attacks, targeting checkpoints across the town of Sheikh Zweid, prompted Egyptian authorities to postpone the opening of the Rafah crossing with Gaza.

The crossing was due to open Monday for four days. No new date has been set.

Security and hospital officials raised the death toll to nine overnight Monday, while the army said 24 attackers were killed. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief media.

The IS claim was carried by the extremists’ Aamaq media outlet.

Egypt declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew in northern Sinai after deadly IS attacks in 2015.

Six army personnel were killed during a militant attack on a security checkpoint in the North Sinai city of Arish, the army’s spokesman said in a statement on Friday, like reported by ahram.org.eg.

Army forces are currently combing the area to arrest the militants, who attacked the army personnel with grenades and automatic fire and then fled.

A number of militants were killed and injured when the army personnel returned fire, the statement added.

Egyptian security forces are battling a North Sinai-based Islamist insurgency that intensified following the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

Hundreds of security personnel have been killed by militants in recent years, while the army says it has killed hundreds of militants in security campaigns in the governorate.

During the past 11 years, Hezbollah has significantly improved its military capabilities in UNIFIL’s area of operation, like reported by jpost.com.

Less than a month ago, the United Nations Security Council decided to extend UNIFIL’s mandate in Lebanon (UNSCR 2373, August 30) for a year, with some new demands.

Hezbollah men harassed a senior Malayan UNIFIL convoy that included the Malayan Deputy of Defense, UNIFIL’s commander of the western sector and the Malayan battalion commander. Hezbollah men blocked the road in the village of Safad al Batikh, inside UNIFIL’s area of operation, so that the convoy was unable to continue on its way back from an event hosted by the municipality. The blockade was a blatant violation of Article 10 in UNSCR 2373, passed in August, which “…urges all parties… to respect the safety of UNIFIL and to ensure that the freedom of movement of UNIFIL is fully respected and unimpeded….”.

During the past 11 years, Hezbollah has significantly improved its military capabilities in UNIFIL’s area of operation. According to Israeli assessments, 40,000 to 50,000 rockets targeting Israel are hidden inside or under the Shi’ite villages in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah in violation of UNSCR 1701, a 2006 resolution that called for the establishment of an “area free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and UNIFIL” between the “Blue Line” and the Litani River.

It should be stressed, that none of the above is new and both resolutions are very similar. UNSCR 2373 is merely an attempt to change the awkward reality of the past 11 years, in which UNIFIL has become a fig leaf for Hezbollah’s military deployment in southern Lebanon.

UNSCR 2373 is a compromise between the US new policy headed by Ambassador Nikki Haley on one hand and the Lebanese government on the other. Ambassador Haley wished to create a situation in which the UN forces are reinforced and their presence in the area is enhanced. UNIFIL will inform the UN Security Council in real time about any violation of Resolution 1701 or other disturbances by Hezbollah – as is mentioned in UNSCR 2373. The Lebanese government wished to emphasize that UNIFIL will work together with the Lebanese armed forces, to create the “new strategic environment in southern Lebanon” that Ambassador Haley actually wanted.

The decision to extend UNIFIL’s mandate was perceived by most of the Arab media as a step that will not lead to any change in the balance of power in southern Lebanon. They pointed to the unchanged UNIFIL activity or authority in the region. Lebanese Foreign Minister Jubran Basil said, “Israel tried to alter UNIFIL’s missions, but we succeeded in preventing that. Lebanon needs to stand on guard to prevent any new attempt regarding this issue.” The Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar reported passage of UNSCR 2373 with the headline “Washington failed in turning UNIFIL into a patronizing force!” Later, Lebanese President Michelle Aoun, interviewed by Almonitor, said that UNIFIL is not a military force and therefore Lebanon cannot authorize UNIFIL to search for weapons in Lebanese houses. He added that Hezbollah would not be asked to disarm itself as long as Israel threatens and attacks Lebanon.

In an interview with Le Figaro, Aoun commented: “Hezbollah uses its weapon to ensure our resistance against the Israeli entity, which still occupies a part of our land – about 30 kilometers of Sheba’a farms and refuses to implement and respect the international authority’s decisions. We cannot prevent Hezbollah from holding weapons as long as Israel does not respect the decisions of the international authority and the decisions of the UN.”

President Aoun referred to the village of Ghajar, through which runs the international border, and is divided between Israel and Lebanon, even though all its residents are Israeli citizens. Both UNSCR 1701 and 2373 called for the immediate withdrawal of the Israeli army from northern Ghajar without further delay – in coordination with UNIFIL.

As for the Shaba’a Farms, although the UN determined that Israel had retreated (from Southern Lebanon) to the international border in July 2000, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have been arguing that Shaba’a Farms is Lebanese territory occupied by Israel – notwithstanding the historic fact that it was seized from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967 and not from Lebanon.

Returning to UNIFIL’s activity in southern Lebanon, the group has frequently been harassed by Hezbollah activists, who prevented them from finding any evidence of Hezbollah’s military operations in the villages. Yet, it seems that on this occasion – assuming the incident against the Malayan convoy was planned – Hezbollah crossed some red lines, testing whether there really is a “new-look” UNIFIL. This time, the UNIFIL force sharply condemned this event and declared, “It is not the first event that involves such a brutal attack against UNIFIL’s convoys and patrols.”

Would this condemnation suffice? Allegedly, it may seem that the Lebanese army is heading in the right direction. Just last week, the Lebanese military published, for the third time this year, a statement reminding all citizens of the “obligation to avoid hunting and moving around armed with any weapon, especially in the area between the south of the Litani River and the international border.

Criminals will be arrested and judged.” However, the army is unwilling to confront the source of the problem – Hezbollah.

Moreover, Hezbollah is a member of the Lebanese government and is emerging as a prominent factor on the strategic level – taking into consideration its victories against the rebels in Syria and against ISIS on the Lebanese- Syrian border. In this confronting this reality, Ambassador Haley and the US administration would have to find more creative ways to challenge Hezbollah’s military posturing against Israel on its northern border.

Sarit Zehavi is a lieutenant colonel in the IDF reserves, served for 15 years in the military specializing in intelligence and holds an MA in Middle East Studies from Ben-Gurion University. She is the founder and CEO of ALMA, an organization specializing in research and analysis of Israel’s security challenges on the northern border.

The U.S. military is ramping up operations and bombing raids against the Islamic State in Libya, where the terrorist group’s fighters have increasingly found refuge as their territorial base shrinks in Syria and Iraq, like reported by washingtontimes.com.

U.S.-backed militias largely crushed the Islamic State’s Libya operation in late 2015, but signs that the group is gaining a new foothold in the North African nation began emerging last month. Images of Islamic State fighters moving through the vast deserts around their former stronghold in Libya’s northern coastal city of Sirte circulated through the terrorist group’s social media and online propaganda sites in mid-September.

Libya is seen as a promising base for the terrorist group because a deep factional split has prevented the creation of a functioning national government in Tripoli since the ouster of dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

While the Trump administration has publicly resisted a major U.S. military role in Libya, the Pentagon wasted little time responding to the flurry of Islamic State activity there. On Sept. 22, military officials announced that American fighter jets had been dispatched to pound an Islamic State encampment roughly 150 miles south of Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown.

U.S. Africa Command said in a statement that the encampment was being “used by ISIS to move fighters in and out of the country, stockpile weapons and equipment and to plot and conduct attacks.” It was the first time in roughly eight months that American warplanes had bombed an Islamic State target in Libya.

Islamic State and al Qaeda “have taken advantage of ungoverned spaces in Libya to establish sanctuaries for plotting, inspiring and directing terror attacks,” AFRICOM said in a statement late last month.

Siddiq al-Soor, who heads the Libyan government’s public prosecutor’s office in Tripoli, told reporters last week that Islamic State forces in the country were still operating a “desert army” after losing their Sirte base, citing information gleaned from an Islamic State fighter who was captured after U.S. airstrikes in the Wadi Skir region. He said some of the fighters, including leader Abdul Qader al-Najdi of Iraq, had ties to al Qaeda as well as Islamic State, according to a report in the Voice of America.

The Sirte outpost was vital to Islamic State in part because it is the heart of Libya’s oil-producing region, a potential source of vital funding for the group.

Former U.S. Special Envoy for Libya Jonathan Winer said in an interview Wednesday that it is clear Islamic State, which set itself off from rival jihadi groups like al Qaeda by its ability to take and hold territory, is trying to restore its foothold in Libya.

“They’ll nurse their wounds [from Iraq and Syria] and try to come back to North Africa,” he said.

Mr. Winer, who served in the Obama administration, said officials were wary even before 2015 that Islamic State would seize on the post-Arab Spring security vacuum in Libya to establish an operations hub there. “We were worried about it back then,” he said. “That was our fear.”

A top European intelligence official told The Washington Times over the summer that many Europeans who had traveled to fight with Islamic State in the region were relocating to Libya as the prospect loomed of defeat in Syria and Iraq.

While the European fighters may be seeking eventually to return to their home countries, a significant portion of them are at least temporarily staying in Libya, Europol Director Rob Wainwright said.

The situation is compounded by the fact that Tunisia, which intelligence officials once described as the top source country of Islamic State foreign fighters, borders Libya to the northeast. Tunisian followers of Islamic State may now also be massing inside Libya because they fear imprisonment if they return home.

Thousands of Libyans are also known to have gone to Syria and Iraq for Islamic State. Mr. Winer, now a scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, noted Wednesday that Libya has been second only to Tunisia as a source country for the terrorist group’s ranks.

U.S. military officials put the number of Islamic State fighters active in Libya at 500, down from an estimated 6,000 when the terrorist group was running Sirte, the Voice of America reported.

Sleeper cells

Islamic State sleeper cells are already creeping back into neighborhoods and villages surrounding Sirte, said Emily Estelle, a Libya analyst at the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.

“We are definitely seeing a resurgence in Libya” she said Wednesday. “They have spent the better part of a year putting themselves back together.”

While the growing Islamic State faction in Libya consists of mostly local fighters, its ranks will likely expand over the coming weeks and months as veterans of the wars in Iraq and Syria are absorbed into the group, she said.

The growing Islamic State force in Libya is a combination of “Desert Brigades,” lightly armored and highly mobile units that spearheaded the terrorist group’s drive across Syria in 2014 and 2015 and clandestine sleeper cells, Ms. Estelle said.

One of these cells carried out a suicide attack last week in the northwestern Libyan city of Misurata, killing five and wounding 20. Such revenge attacks are targeting paramilitary groups and militias that backed the campaign to drive Islamic State out of Sirte last year, Ms. Estelle said. Militias in Tripoli and elsewhere in eastern Libya are also likely targets in what could be a brutal terrorist campaign in the weeks to come.

President Trump has repeatedly expressed a vow to destroy Islamic State but is reluctant to expand the U.S. commitment to Libya.

“I do not see a role in Libya,” Mr. Trump said at a press conference in April. “I think the United States has right now enough roles.”

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in May that the U.S. military’s strategic approach centered on severing the “connectivity between ISIS affiliates” and driving down the group’s “capability to a point where local forces, with tailored support from the international community, are able to provide security.”

“We’re doing this,” Gen. Dunford said at the time, “in Libya, Somalia and Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan.”

Next steps

The security vacuum and political uncertainty that took root after the fall of Gadhafi in 2011 made the North African nation a prime target for Islamic State as the terrorist group rose to power in 2014. Islamic State fighters solidified their foothold in the country in 2015 after seizing Sirte that year.

An established Islamic State outpost just over 700 miles from southern Europe’s borders prompted the Obama administration to take action. The effort, a combination of U.S. air power and training for Libyan forces on the ground, led to the retaking Sirte a year later.

But Islamic State’s jihadi message continued to attract converts, and many inside Washington viewed a U.S. militarytraining mission for Libyan paramilitary forces as a failure, producing only a handful of U.S.-trained rebels at a cost of millions of dollars to the Pentagon. There were reports that U.S. weapons and hardware tied to the effort were finding their way into extremists’ arsenals.

The Pentagon quietly restarted a version of the Libya training mission in May in the run-up to the latest Sirteoffensive. U.S. forces have been rotating in and out of two main bases around the northeastern coastal city of Misurata, roughly 130 miles west of the country’s capital of Tripoli, and Benghazi on the country’s western coast since last year.

While the status of that effort remains unclear, U.S. strategy going forward in Libya should be focused on disbanding the vast array of competing militias that constitute the country’s security forces and help foster an “effective military under civilian control,” Mr. Winer said.

That effort should be subsidized by targeted U.S. airstrikes and counterterrorism operations, he said, adding that Washington should look to “create security and stability where you can and execute counterterrorism [operations] where you should.”

That light U.S. military footprint, compared with the American presence in Iraq and Syria, will allow Washington to contain Islamic State’s efforts to regroup in North Africa “without compromising the legitimacy of the Libyan government,” Mr. Winer noted.

But as Tripoli’s tenuous hold on power comes under growing pressure from Russian-backed militias under the Libyan National Army in eastern Syria, the legitimacy of Libya’s government remains in question, hindering U.S. efforts to battle Islamic State’s growing presence, said Ms. Estelle.

“If infighting continues, we are just going to see [a U.S.] air campaign. That is all we are going to see,” she said.

The Libyan Attorney General issued 824 arrest warrants against Libyan Islamic terrorist.

“Within the framework of investigations by the Public Prosecution on issues of terrorism and threats to state security, arrest warrants have been issued against 824 terrorist suspects. Their names have been circulated to border checkpoints for necessary actions,” Attorney General’s chief investigator, Al-Seddiq Al-Sour, told Xinhua.

“The Interpol issued international arrest warrants against some of those suspects,” Al-Sour added.

These names came up during the investigations with arrested terrorists from different cities of the country, Al-Sour confirmed.