Those
backing Mr. Badi say his attack was a pre-emptive blow against an
imminent counterrevolution modeled on the military takeover in Egypt and
backed by its conservative allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates.
Photo
Their
opponents, including the militias stocked with former Qaddafi soldiers
that controlled the airport, say Mr. Badi was merely the spearhead of a
hard-line Islamist onslaught resembling the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria and supported by the Islamist-friendly governments of Turkey and
Qatar.
The
ideological differences are blurry at best: both sides publicly profess
a similar conservative but democratic vision. What is clear is that
Libya is being torn apart by an escalating war among its patchwork of
rival cities and tribes.
In
a broad series of interviews on a five-day trip across the chasm now
dividing the country — from the mountain town of Zintan, through Tripoli
to the costal city of Misurata — many Libyans despaired of any
resolution.
“We entered this tunnel and we can’t find our way out,” said Ibrahim Omar, a Zintani leader.
Towns
and tribes across the country are choosing sides, in places flying the
flags of rival factions, sometimes including the black banners of
Islamist extremists.
Tripoli,
the capital and the main prize, has become a battleground. The fighting
has destroyed the airport, and on Saturday night Mr. Badi’s allies
finally captured the remaining rubble, at least for the moment. Constant
shelling between rival militias has leveled blocks, emptied
neighborhoods and killed hundreds of people. Storage tanks holding 90
million liters of fuel have burned unchecked for a month. Jagged black
clouds shadow the city, with daily blackouts sometimes lasting more than
12 hours.
Motorists
wait in lines stretching more than three miles at shuttered gas
stations, waiting for them to open. Food prices are soaring, uncollected
garbage is piling up in the streets and bicycles, once unheard-of, are
increasingly common.
In Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, the fighting has closed both its airport and seaport, strangling the city.
In
an alarming turn for the West, the rush toward war is also lifting the
fortunes of the Islamist extremists of Ansar al-Shariah, the militant
group involved in the attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, as
other militias have allied with its fighters.
The
United Nations, the United States and the other Western powers have
pulled their diplomats and closed their missions. “We cannot care more
than you do,” the British ambassador, Michael Aron, wrote in a Twitter
message to a Libyan pleading for international help. (The United Nations
is sending a special envoy, Bernardino León, to try to arrange a
truce.)
Even
the first years after Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster were better, said Hisham
Krekshi, a former Tripoli councilman, savoring a few hours of
uninterrupted electricity in the upscale cafe that he owns, its tables
and the street deserted. “This is a war, and a lot of innocent people
are dying.”
Until
now, a rough balance of power among local brigades had preserved a kind
of equilibrium, if not stability. Although the transitional government
scarcely existed outside of the luxury hotels where its officials
gathered, no other force was strong enough to dominate. No single
cleavage divided the competing cities and factions.
But
that semblance of unity is now in tatters, and with it the hope that
nonviolent negotiations might settle the competition for power and,
implicitly, Libya’s oil. In May, a renegade former general, Khalifa Hifter, declared that he would seize power by force
to purge Libya of Islamists, beginning in Benghazi. He vowed to
eradicate the hard-line Islamists of Ansar al-Shariah, blamed for a long
series of bombings and assassinations.
Borrowing
lines from President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, General Hifter also
pledged to close the Parliament and arrest moderate Islamist members.
And he has mustered a small fleet of helicopters and warplanes that have
bombed rival bases around Benghazi, a steep escalation of the violence.
To
fight back, moderate Islamists and other brigades who had distanced
themselves from Ansar al-Shariah began closing ranks, welcoming the
group into a newly formed council of “revolutionary” militias.
“A
lot of them have fought well,” Ali Bozakouk, a moderate Islamist
lawmaker from Benghazi, said of militants with Ansar al-Shariah,
speaking last week after meetings in Misurata. “When you are fighting
against an intruder, sometimes you have hard choices. You are brothers
in arms now and work out your differences later.” But the war has driven the other militias closer to the militants and further from moderates like Mr. Bozakouk.
Last
week, a broad alliance of Benghazi militias that now includes Ansar
al-Shariah issued a defiant statement denouncing relative moderates like
the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. “We will not accept the project of
democracy, secular parties, nor the parties that falsely claim the
Islamic cause,” the statement read. “They do not represent us.”
Although
the general’s blitz has now stalled, it polarized the country, drawing
alarms from some cities and tribes but applause from others. Perhaps the
loudest applause came from the western mountain town of Zintan, where
local militia leaders had recruited hundreds of former Qaddafi soldiers
into special brigades, while also keeping control of the Tripoli
airport.
The
alarms went off in the rival coastal city of Misurata, where militias
have allied with the Islamists in political battles and jostled with the
Zintanis for influence in the capital. Since Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster,
the Misurata and Islamist militias developed a reputation for besieging
government buildings and kidnapping high officials to try to pressure
the Parliament. But in recent months the Zintanis and their
anti-Islamist allies have stormed the Parliament and kidnapped senior
lawmakers as well.
Adding
to the tensions, the newly elected Parliament, led at first, on a
seniority basis, by a member supportive of Mr. Hifter, announced plans
to convene in Tobruk, an Eastern city under the general’s control.
About
30 members, most of them Islamists or Misuratans, refused to attend,
dispelling hopes that the new legislature might unify the country. “That
is foreign territory to me,” said Mr. Bozakouk, the Benghazi
representative, who joined the boycott. (Tripoli’s backup airport, under
the control of an Islamist militia, has cut off flights to Tobruk, even
blocking a trip by the prime minister.)
Over
the weekend, a spokesman for the old disbanded Parliament, favored by
the Islamists and Misuratans, declared that it would reconvene in
Tripoli. In Tobruk, a spokesman for the new Parliament declared that the
Islamist- and Misuratan-allied militias were terrorists, suggesting
that Libya might soon have two legislatures with competing armies.
Each
side has the support of competing satellite television networks
financed and, often, broadcast from abroad, typically from Qatar for the
Islamists and from the United Arab Emirates for their foes.
“It
is a struggle across the region,” said Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan-born
business mogul who owns one of the anti-Islamist satellite networks,
speaking in an interview from an office in the Emirates. “We are in a
state of war and this is no time for compromise.”
He
said he had also suggested moving the newly elected parliament to
Tobruk, and then he helped pay to transport it there, in General
Hifter’s turf. “If I try to think of all the money I spent, I will get a
heart attack,” Mr. Tatanaki said.
Fighters
and tribes who fought one another during the uprising against Colonel
Qaddafi are now coming together on the same side of the new fight,
especially with the Zintanis against the Islamists. Some former Qaddafi
officers who had fled Libya are even coming back to take up arms again.
“It
is not pro- or anti-Qaddafi any more, it is about Libya,” said a former
Qaddafi officer in a military uniform, who had returned from Tunisia.
He lounged against the wall of a mountainside guardhouse full of Zintani
fighters who were his foes three years ago.
Beneath
the battle against “extremists,” he said, was an even deeper, ethnic
struggle: the tribes of Arab descent, like the Zintanis, against those
of Berber, Circassian or Turkish ancestry, like the Misuratis. “The
victory will be for the Arab tribes,” he said. He declined to provide
his real name, insisting all journalists were spies.
Those
sympathetic to Mr. Badi’s assault on the airport argue that his fight
is an extension of the fight against General Hifter’s anti-Islamist
coup, arguing without evidence that their opponents were using the
Tripoli airport to bring in weapons and equipment from abroad.
Mr.
Badi “wanted to have them for lunch before they had him for dinner,”
Mr. Krekshi, the former Tripoli councilman and a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, said. (The Brotherhood has said it takes no side in the
armed struggle and seeks only dialogue, but in an interview the chief of
its political office also refused to condemn the airport assault.)
Misurata
city leaders said they had no warning of Mr. Badi’s attack. But the
city’s powerful militias swung in full force behind him, and city
leaders said the presence of former Qaddafi soldiers among the Zintani
militia at the airport convinced them that there was no room to
compromise.
“We
are sorry for the bloodshed, but this is a necessary surgical
operation,” said Abdel Rahman al-Kisa, a lawyer tapped to speak for
Misurata’s city leaders, coolly defending the destruction of Tripoli.
(Fuel, food, and electricity are still plentiful in Misurata, which has
its own airport and seaport, and checkpoints force departing cars to
empty any gas cans.)
In
Zintan, on the other side of the fight, city leaders said Mr. Badi
personified the extremist threat: as an ultraconservative former
lawmaker, he once scolded a hostess at the inauguration for her
uncovered hair.
“It is creeping up on us,” said Mr. Omar, the Zintan leader. “It is going to be like a new Afghanistan.”
In
Misurata, several local leaders suggested that opposing cities were
under the domination of armed Qaddafi loyalists and still in need of
liberation. Elsewhere, several fighters even said they no longer
believed that the rival cities, Zintan and Misurata in particular, could
coexist as a nation. “When the dust settles, Misurata will be alone,
because their arrogance has created so many enemies,” Ali Mohamed
Abdullah, a Zintani fighter, declared.
Taking
stock of the damage Tripoli has already suffered, another fighter, Amr
el-Taher el-Sayed, shook his head. “Libyans have become monsters,” he
said.