“We are coming Tripoli, we are coming,” Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the military strongman who heads the Libyan National Army (NLA), said in an audio recording posted on the army’s Facebook page on Thursday. Haftar ordered his forces to march towards Tripoli, after they took over Gharyan, a town 100 km south of the city.
This has led to a real danger of a major face-off between rival militias and the UN-backed government in Tripoli, headed by Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj.
Since Gaddafi’s downfall, the country has been divided between the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli and the parallel administration allied to Haftar.
The offensive is a setback for the United Nations and Western countries which have been trying to mediate between Serraj and Haftar, who met in Abu Dhabi last month to discuss a power-sharing deal.
The conference the U.N. is helping to organize is aimed at forging agreement on a road map for elections to resolve the prolonged instability in Libya, an oil producer and a hub for refugees and migrants trekking across the Sahara in the hope of reaching Europe.
Haftar enjoys the backing of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which see him as bulwark against Islamists and have supported him militarily, according to U.N. reports.
Seeking to encircle the capital his forces approached from south and west, seizing one town south of the city before stopping for the night some 60 km (37 miles) south of Tripoli, eastern officials said.
The offensive marked a dramatic escalation of a power struggle that has dragged on in Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The capital is the ultimate prize for Haftar’s eastern parallel government. In 2014 he assembled former Gaddafi soldiers and in a three-year battle seized the main eastern city of Benghazi, then this year took the south with its oilfields.
Euronews reports that the LNA by now has obtained control of two-thirds of Libya, including almost the entire southern region, known as Fezzan, complete with its oil fields and major population centres.
Haftar’s order calling for a march on the capital city came a day after United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in Libya to broker a political process leading to peace. Things took a turn and, fearing escalation, Guterres called on Libyan forces to show restraint.
I leave Libya with a heavy heart and deeply concerned. I still hope it is possible to avoid a bloody confrontation in and around Tripoli.
The UN is committed to facilitating a political solution and, whatever happens, the UN is committed to supporting the Libyan people.
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) April 5, 2019
Guterres said on Twitter on Friday morning that he was flying east from Tripoli to Tobruk and Benghazi. “My aim remains the same: avoid a military confrontation. I reiterate that there is no military solution for the Libyan crisis, only a political one,” he tweeted.
Asked about the offensive, Guterres said Libya needed a political, not a military, solution. His Libya envoy Ghassan Salame sat next to him stone-faced with folded arms.
As Haftar’s forces advanced on Friday, G7 foreign ministers said that they were strongly opposed to military action in Libya and implicitly warned the easter Libyan commander against continuing his advance on the capital.
“We firmly believe that there is no military solution to the Libyan conflict,” the foreign ministers from France, Britain, Germany, United States, Italy, Japan and Canada said in a statement.
“We strongly oppose any military action in Libya. Any Libyan actor or faction that precipitates further civil conflict are harming innocent people and standing in the way of the peace that Libyans deserve.”
