Militia in Benghazi Flees After Deadly Gun Battle
Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters
A Libyan Army member as fighting flared on Monday with an Islamist militia tied to the killing of an American ambassador.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: November 25, 2013
CAIRO — A militia in Benghazi, Libya, tied to the killing of Ambassador
J. Christopher Stevens fled its headquarters on Monday after an
hourslong gun battle with a local military unit, a potential turning
point in a continuing struggle between Islamists and their foes for
control of the city.
Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters
Libyan army troops during clashes with Ansar
al-Shariah, a local hard-line Islamist group, on Monday in Benghazi.
At least nine people were killed and more than 50 were wounded, health
officials said, as the battle flared out across Benghazi, beginning
before dawn. Stores and schools were closed. The local authorities
advised residents to stay in their homes and avoid the streets. And by
late afternoon, the militia, Ansar al-Shariah, appeared to have
disappeared underground. Photographs circulated over the Internet that
appeared to show its headquarters emptied and smoking, with the wreckage
of a burned-out car sitting outside.
The melee followed the deaths of more than 40 people in a similar battle in Tripoli
this month, when militiamen from the coastal city of Misurata opened
fire on civilians protesting their continued presence in the city. Both
battles come during the run-up to another attempt to elect a
constitutional assembly that might relieve the expiring transitional
Parliament and lay the foundations for a new national government two
years after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
It was unclear how the fighting in Benghazi began, but animosity between the two camps had been building for months.
Ansar al-Shariah, the most extreme of Benghazi’s well-known Islamist
militias, has been a target of suspicion and resentment at least since
some of its fighters were seen participating in the attack on the United
States Mission in Benghazi last year that killed Mr. Stevens and three
other Americans. (In a statement read over local television the next
day, its leaders denied playing any role in the assault but at the same
time lauded it. )
Ansar al-Shariah rejects the transitional Libyan government as
insufficiently theocratic. It maintains its own armed brigade outside of
government control. Its fighters retained control of a strategic
checkpoint on the coastal road toward Tripoli, but also guarded a local
hospital. Its opponent in the battle was a former army unit known
locally as special forces, which defected from Colonel Qaddafi’s forces
at the start of the uprising against him.
Before they defected, soldiers from the special forces had helped carry
out Colonel Qaddafi’s crackdowns on Libya’s Islamists, instilling a
mutual distrust. During the fight against the colonel, Islamists were
blamed for the assassination of the special forces’ leader, Gen. Abdul
Fattah Younes, and they are presumed to be responsible for a long series
of assassinations of former Qaddafi security officers since then.
Other Benghazi residents, caught in the crossfire, grew increasingly
resentful of the Islamist militias’ dominance of their city — especially
after the attack on the American Mission. And the special forces have
stepped forward to try to retake control of the streets, positioning
themselves as saviors. By Monday afternoon, their forces occupied highly
visible checkpoints around the city, including a Western entrance to
Benghazi previously controlled by Ansar al-Shariah.
In a local television interview, a man who identified himself as a
member of an allied group of the same name in the coastal city of Derna,
which is a hotbed of Islamist militancy, accused the special forces of
having started the fight by attacking a checkpoint controlled by Ansar
al-Shariah. “They are the ones responsible for all that spilled blood
since they attacked us,” said the man, Mahmoud al-Barrasi. He also
faulted the military units for having failed to stop the United States
from abducting from Tripoli a man suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda, Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known as Abu Anas al-Libi, a few weeks ago.
“All this army deployment? Why didn’t they deploy when the Christians
attacked our country and kidnapped Abu Anas?” Mr. Barrasi said. “Our
role models are those who want Allah’s Shariah, like Sheikh Osama bin
Laden.”
Prime Minister Ali Zeidan of Libya flew to Benghazi with a delegation of
cabinet officials to meet with local leaders about the unrest.
The fighting in Tripoli that started on Nov. 15 was another flare-up of
public hostility to the fractious former rebel militias that have
dominated the country, albeit without the same ideological divide.
A cluster of militias from Misurata began shooting at civilian
demonstrators demanding an end to the militias’ dominance. In the
aftermath, residents called for a three-day general strike to demand
that the Misuratans and other militias withdraw from the city, and many
appear to have complied.
In an appearance in London over the weekend with Mr. Zeidan, Secretary
of State John Kerry called the situation “a moment of opportunity where
there’s a great deal of economic challenge, there’s a great deal of
security challenge.”
Mr. Kerry said that the Libyan prime minister had described “a
transformation that he believes is beginning to take place and could
take place because the people of Libya have spoken out and pushed back
against the militias.”
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