Libya’s Militias Have Become the State

Consolidation

The military landscape has seen a process of consolidation that began in 2016 and has accelerated ever since, including during the political stalemate since 2021. From a mul­titude of small armed groups, ever larger formations with more extensive territories have emerged.

The pioneer in this respect was Haftar, who mobilised a loose alliance of armed groups in 2014 but increasingly centralised control over his coalition throughout the years. Haftar’s defeat in Tripoli in 2020 temporarily weakened his position in east­ern Libya, but since then his sons have continued to amass military, political and economic power. Many LAAF militias have been integrated into units under the com­mand of Haftar’s sons and relatives. Commanders with loyal followings who had become liabilities for Haftar due to their particular notoriety for war crimes fell victim to assassinations. This centralisation of power within the Haftar clan also al­lowed it to increasingly monopolise control over criminal activities. These include the violent seizure of land, the takeover of state companies and banks, and the smuggling of fuel, drugs, and people. At the same time, Haftar’s sons have strengthened loyal com­manders – as opposed to opportunistic allies – in southern Libya, thereby consoli­dating their direct control over the region.

In western Libya, the consolidation is less advanced, but nevertheless unmistakable. After Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj took office in 2016, a cartel of four militias grad­ually pushed smaller groups out of down­town Tripoli, allowing them to establish a stranglehold over state institutions. During the war for Tripoli in 2019/20, some west­ern Libyan militias proved particularly effective. After the war, they received train­ing and equipment from Turkey in addition to privileged access to state funds, thereby strengthening their position. The Tripoli militia landscape consolidated further when several armed groups were driven out of the capital by their rivals in 2022. This occurred in the context of a power struggle between the GNU and the rival government of Fathi Bashagha – a dynamic that polar­ised armed groups in the greater Tripoli area. The camp supporting Dabeiba pre­vailed in a brief armed confrontation in August 2022. Since then, large parts of Trip­oli have been controlled by only two armed groups: the “Deterrence Apparatus” of Abderrauf Kara and the “Stabilisation Sup­port Apparatus” of Abdelghani “Ghnewa” al-Kikli.

Institutionalisation

The groups that have prevailed in these struggles are in the process of institutionalising themselves in several respects. Many of them had emerged by 2011, and nearly all by 2014; they have since gained perma­nence. Over the years, their leaders have acquired considerable expertise in war, politics and finance. They have also tight­ened what were initially often diffuse com­mand structures. In their established ter­ritories, their patronage networks are now deeply entrenched in the economy and administration.

Institutionalisation is also evident in the links between the militias and the state. From the outset, armed groups entered state institutions, thereby claiming to rep­resent the state. This included adopting official-sounding names such as “116th Brigade”. Another common practice was to appoint career officers as pro forma com­manders of such units in order to conceal the role of the actual militia leaders, who were civilians. Now, these same militia leaders have not only emerged as official commanders of these units but also as top government officials. Examples include GNU interior minister Emad al-Trabelsi; his counterpart in the rival east-based govern­ment, Essam Buzriba – a brother of Stabil­ity Support Apparatus deputy commander Hassan Buzriba – and his deputy, Faraj al-Gaim. In addition, an increasing number of senior officials owe their positions to mili­tia leaders, who now collect the lion’s share of embezzled state funds. In this sense, armed groups’ quest for official status is no longer a matter of camouflage: they now indeed represent the Libyan state as it exists today.

Finally, the process of institutionalisation is evident in the growing professionalisation of armed groups. Militias are increas­ingly trying to appear as providers of secu­rity, just as they work to counter civilian perceptions that they are primarily a threat. In this regard, militias in Tripoli have benefited from the fact that armed clashes, which were previously common in the capi­tal, have almost completely ceased since August 2022. In interviews with the author, commanders argued that disorderly fac­tions had been gradually eliminated, thus prompting other militias to conclude that they needed to work together to provide security in order to survive.

In Tripoli, which was dominated by par­ticularly unruly militias only a few years ago, the 444th Brigade is now the new model. It is a unit that is seen as disciplin­ed, reliable and uncompromising in dealing with crime in the areas it controls south of Tripoli. Part of this model, which more and more groups are imitating, is that units recruit beyond the areas of origin of their leaders, rather than remaining associated with a particular social constituency. Still, this definitely does not mean that these units are under state control as the govern­ment would not be able to change their commanders. Like Haftar’s LAAF, they are therefore private armies.

Professionalisation further means that militias place greater emphasis on the skills of their personnel. They acquire these skills, for example, through the military training that western Libyan units have re­ceived from Turkey and Haftar’s forces received from Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Professionalisation also encompasses an increasing reliance on members of the Qadhafi regime’s security forces. Here too, Haftar has been a pioneer, recruiting the former regime’s military and intelligence officers and using them to engage in fierce repression. In western Libya, the recruitment of such personnel had long been considered taboo, but this has gradually been overcome since 2016. The first group to recruit former intelligence officers in large numbers was the “Deterrence Apparatus”. Later, militia lead­ers in Tripoli began to revive the domestic and foreign intelligence services along with their old staff. The network around Abdel­ghani al-Kikli controls the Internal Security Agency, while several militias compete for influence in the foreign intelligence service. Under the helm of the militia leaders, the institutional culture of these agencies is experiencing a renaissance in the form of hostility towards civil society, which is sus­pected of being an instrument of foreign subversion. The intelligence services and their new masters try to portray themselves as the guardians of Libyan sovereignty by arresting civil society activists and then re­leasing videos of confessions extracted under pressure. In this way, the political culture of the old regime and the personal interests of militia leaders intertwine to create a new western Libyan security appa­ratus.

Politicisation

Libya’s armed groups long played only a limited political role. While they acted as veto powers in individual political deci­sions, they often had diffuse leadership structures and no clear political agendas. They were only indirectly involved in the negotiations to end the civil wars of 2014/15 and 2019/20. The unity governments that emerged from these negotiations subsequently had to come to terms with the armed groups by granting them posts and affording them budgets. The only coherent politico-military actor was Haftar, who declared his forces to be the Libyan army from the outset and pursued the goal of seizing power. He was always included as a key stakeholder in negotiations by inter­national mediators.

However, since the power struggle be­tween the Dabeiba and Bashagha governments, western Libyan militia leaders have taken on a more explicit political role. They have been able to do so not least because they consolidated military power over the years, and thus also gained more and more political weight. Since spring 2022, a small group of Western Libyan militia leaders has been meeting regularly with Haftar’s sons and other representatives. These talks are about the distribution of posts and funds, but also more fundamental questions con­cerning the political process and the condi­tions for possible elections. One participant in these negotiations told the author that this group of commanders had come to the realisation that they had to take the politi­cal initiative themselves – they could not just let Libya’s politicians “keep playing their games”, and then bear the brunt of fighting if things escalated.

One consequence of these negotiations is the appointment of the warlords’ representatives to high positions. These include the chairman of the NOC, the board of directors of the General Electricity Company of Libya, the interior minister and many others. In addition, western Libyan com­manders are exerting increasing pressure on parliamentarians, as Haftar has done for years, in order to influence political nego­tiations.

Consequences

The evolution of armed groups calls for a re-evaluation of the way in which Libya’s security sector is being conceived. Until now, these forces have been rightly under­stood as militias, or in other words, groups that, despite their official status, are not really state entities because they represent particular interests. However, the institutionalisation of these groups and the mas­sive influence of their leaders at the highest levels show that the militias have become the state. The broad contours of the security sector are likely to remain for years to come: a military landscape characterised by competing centres of power, whose leaders use military clout for political and financial gain.