U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands
By JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar
last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew
that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants,
according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Libyans in Benghazi last year in front of a Libyan
flag, right, and a Qatari flag painted on the wall.
Related
Times Topic: Libya — the Benghazi Attacks
-
Pressure Builds on Syrian Opposition Coalition; Fears of Chemical Weapons Rise (December 6, 2012)
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris
during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that
killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in
Benghazi, Libya, in September.
But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried
about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan
militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons
and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing
them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi
government.
The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration
considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries.
The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar
began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not
offer encouragement, according to current and former administration
officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that,
just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants.
The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in
Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of
the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send
weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports
that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more
antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam”
than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department
official.
The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States
demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing
with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest
movements while avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on
surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off
operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with
American interests.
“To do this right, you have to have on-the-ground intelligence and you
have to have experience,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department
adviser who is now dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,
part of Johns Hopkins University. “If you rely on a country that
doesn’t have those things, you are really flying blind. When you have an
intermediary, you are going to lose control.”
He said that Qatar would not have gone through with the arms shipments
if the United States had resisted them, but other current and former
administration officials said Washington had little leverage at times
over Qatari officials. “They march to their own drummer,” said a former
senior State Department official. The White House and State Department
declined to comment.
During the frantic early months of the Libyan rebellion, various players
motivated by politics or profit — including an American arms dealer who
proposed weapons transfers in an e-mail exchange with a United States
emissary later killed in Benghazi — sought to aid those trying to oust
Colonel Qaddafi.
But after the White House decided to encourage Qatar — and on a smaller
scale, the United Arab Emirates — to ship arms to the Libyans, President Obama
complained in April 2011 to the emir of Qatar that his country was not
coordinating its actions in Libya with the United States, the American
officials said. “The president made the point to the emir that we needed
transparency about what Qatar was doing in Libya,” said a former senior
administration official who had been briefed on the matter.
About that same time, Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the
Libyan transitional government, expressed frustration to administration
officials that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist
groups opposed to the new leadership, according to several American
officials. They, like nearly a dozen current and former White House,
diplomatic, intelligence, military and foreign officials, would speak
only on the condition of anonymity for this article.
The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid
for by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials
said. Qatar is believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms,
including machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it
has demanded reimbursement from Libya’s new government. Some of the arms
since have been moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in
Mali, where radical jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law
in the northern part of the country, the former Defense Department
official said. Others have gone to Syria, according to several American
and foreign officials and arms traders.
Although NATO provided air support that proved critical for the Libyan
rebels, the Obama administration wanted to avoid getting immersed in a
ground war, which officials feared could lead the United States into
another quagmire in the Middle East.
U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands
Published: December 5, 2012
(Page 2 of 2)
As a result, the White House largely relied on Qatar and the United Arab
Emirates, two small Persian Gulf states and frequent allies of the
United States. Qatar, a tiny nation whose natural gas reserves have made
it enormously wealthy, for years has tried to expand its influence in
the Arab world. Since 2011, with dictatorships in the Middle East and
North Africa coming under siege, Qatar has given arms and money to
various opposition and militant groups, chiefly Sunni Islamists, in
hopes of cementing alliances with the new governments. Officials from
Qatar and the emirates would not comment.
Related
Times Topic: Libya — the Benghazi Attacks
-
Pressure Builds on Syrian Opposition Coalition; Fears of Chemical Weapons Rise (December 6, 2012)
Readers’ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
After discussions among members of the National Security Council, the
Obama administration backed the arms shipments from both countries,
according to two former administration officials briefed on the talks.
American officials say that the United Arab Emirates first approached
the Obama administration during the early months of the Libyan uprising,
asking for permission to ship American-built weapons that the United
States had supplied for the emirates’ use. The administration rejected
that request, but instead urged the emirates to ship weapons to Libya
that could not be traced to the United States.
“The U.A.E. was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,” said one
former official. “We told them it’s O.K. to ship other weapons.”
For its part, Qatar supplied weapons made outside the United States,
including French- and Russian-designed arms, according to people
familiar with the shipments.
But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the
emirates could not be completely hidden. NATO air and sea forces around
Libya had to be alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters
transporting the arms into Libya from Qatar and the emirates, American
officials said.
Concerns in Washington soon rose about the groups Qatar was supporting,
officials said. A debate over what to do about the weapons shipments
dominated at least one meeting of the so-called Deputies Committee, the
interagency panel consisting of the second-highest ranking officials in
major agencies involved in national security. “There was a lot of
concern that the Qatar weapons were going to Islamist groups,” one
official recalled.
The Qataris provided weapons, money and training to various rebel groups
in Libya. One militia that received aid was controlled by Adel Hakim
Belhaj, then leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was held
by the C.I.A. in 2004 and is now considered a moderate politician in
Libya. It is unclear which other militants received the aid.
“Nobody knew exactly who they were,” said the former defense official.
The Qataris, the official added, are “supposedly good allies, but the
Islamists they support are not in our interest.”
No evidence has surfaced that any weapons went to Ansar al-Shariah, an extremist group blamed for the Benghazi attack.
The case of Marc Turi, the American arms merchant who had sought to
provide weapons to Libya, demonstrates other challenges the United
States faced in dealing with Libya. A dealer who lives in both Arizona
and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Turi sells small arms to
buyers in the Middle East and Africa, relying primarily on suppliers of
Russian-designed weapons in Eastern Europe.
In March 2011, just as the Libyan civil war was intensifying, Mr. Turi
realized that Libya could be a lucrative new market, and applied to the
State Department for a license to provide weapons to the rebels there,
according to e-mails and other documents he has provided. (American
citizens are required to obtain United States approval for any
international arms sales.)
He also e-mailed J. Christopher Stevens, then the special representative
to the Libyan rebel alliance. The diplomat said he would “share” Mr.
Turi’s proposal with colleagues in Washington, according to e-mails
provided by Mr. Turi. Mr. Stevens, who became the United States
ambassador to Libya, was one of the four Americans killed in the
Benghazi attack on Sept. 11.
Mr. Turi’s application for a license was rejected in late March 2011.
Undeterred, he applied again, this time stating only that he planned to
ship arms worth more than $200 million to Qatar. In May 2011, his
application was approved. Mr. Turi, in an interview, said that his
intent was to get weapons to Qatar and that what “the U.S. government
and Qatar allowed from there was between them.”
Two months later, though, his home near Phoenix was raided by agents
from the Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials say
he remains under investigation in connection with his arms dealings. The
Justice Department would not comment.
Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his
proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama
administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained,
imposed no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out
like candy,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment