Libya: Chaos on Land Brings Instability at Sea

Author: Zachary Horsington, The Australian National University

From the very beginning, Libya was an artificial entity, created after Italy stitched together three regions of the decaying Ottoman Empire in 1911. These regions had very little common culture or history, and when the Allies stripped Italy of its colonial possessions in the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations decided to preserve Italy’s negligent handiwork. Understanding Libya’s fragile origin is critical to help contextualize the fragmentation that manifests in Libya today.

Following a coup d’état that overthrew King Idris I in September, 1969, Mu‘ammar al-Qaddafi seized control of Libya and established a secular dictatorship. After forty-two years of Qaddafi’s repressive rule, Libyans, inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, rose up, and with significant assistance from NATO, forced the downfall of Qaddafi’s regime in 2011. Just weeks after Gaddafi’s fall, in the absence of a unified legal authority, insurgents and armed non-state-actors began to fragment along regional and tribal lines, armed from large weapons stockpiles in the southwest of the country.

Today Libya is divided between two main factions: The Libyan National Army (LNA) and the Government of National Accord (GNA). While these groups defacto hold large sections of the country under their authority, de jure, territory is still controlled by tribal factions and armed militant groups weakly consolidated under broader governmental movements.

The LNA, which currently control most of the country, is led by General Khalifa Haftar, and supported by the Libyan House of Representatives. It is bolstered by Egypt, which has provided substantive military and diplomatic assistance; the UAE, which has supplied CAS aircraft and PMCs, with the goal of leveraging its support to dominate shipping lanes that flow into the Mediterranean; Russia, which has also contributed significant military resources, with the supposed goal of securing naval access to warm water ports; Saudi Arabia, which has mobilized a propaganda machine to win the war narrative around Haftar, highlighting asymmetrical aspects of the conflict; and the likes of France, with some postures more recently from US president Donald Trump as well.

Conversely, The GNA is the official internationally recognised government of Libya, however, it only holds marginal influence over a small section of the country centred around Tripoli in the North West. The GNA is backed by most European countries, namely Italy who has provided significant military assistance and naval vessels, along with Turkey, which has played a mercurial, yet growing role in Libya as its interests there have developed

With regards to maritime security, the security environment in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya is risk-negative. Sea ports outside Tripoli have little to no functional governance, with multiple tribal, political, and organised criminal, non-state-armed-groups (NSAGs) operating in and around these areas, making the control of ports highly fluid and liable to change with little to no warning. These groups have and will unilaterally seize merchant vessels, as seen in February 2017 when the Turkish-flagged oil tanker Hacl Telli was seized by armed militants in the north-western city of Zuwarah. Moreover, NSAGs have attacked vessels with small arms fire and rockets, as seen in September 2017, and have been known to hijack and ships, such as the Sicilian-flagged Airone in April 2015. Furthermore, Aircraft of the officially recognised Libyan government have also launched airstrikes on vessels seen to be supplying opposition forces, such as the Liberian-flagged oil tanker Araevo in January 2015.

The civil war in Libya has also created a volatile humanitarian crisis, with many internally displaced persons (IDP) fleeing the country, along with other foreign opportunistic migrants exploiting the country’s lack of a unified coastal authority to make their way over to Europe by sea. However, it is significant to mention that these migrants can represent a significant security risk to vessels off the coast of Libya. Just recently, in March this year, a group of 108 migrants hijacked the Palau-flagged tanker M/T El Hiblu 1 near Tripoli after the vessel offered humanitarian assistance. Criminal human traffickers have also been known to attack search and rescue vessels, such as the Luxembourg- flagged Bourbon Argos in August 2016.

The ongoing civil war in Libya has established a multi-factional, fluid and fragmented security environment that is highly dominated by well-armed NSAGs. This anarchic status-quo onshore has with time made its way offshore, with these incidents highlighting how both the Libyan government and NSAGs represent a direct kinetic security risk to offshore shipping traffic that is unlikely to change anytime soon