The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya

PROLOGUE

FROM THE ROCKING BOAT, they could see the coast of Qaminis town. They were a few hours out of Benghazi when the motor died, somewhere on the eastern rim of the Gulf of Sidra. It was the onset of dusk. The crew set about repairs, while the dying and wounded waited. Now, in the moonless dark around them, they heard the boom and splash of artillery fired from the shore. And with each lurch and roll, Tariq felt an unbearable pain from his shattered femur.

He could hardly believe it’d come to this. He was thirty-six years old and had been born into privilege in England, where his father had been a professor. He’d come back to Benghazi, studying law at the university and entering private practice. In 2011, he was among the first to revolt, joining a group of lawyers, doctors, and academics protesting at the city’s courthouse. Then came the fighting against the dictator. Nostalgia had suffused those heady months with more unity than had actually existed among the rebels. But at least they shared a goal. In the years that followed, many of the protestors would be murdered or exiled. Those who remained would join the opposing sides of a war that ravaged the city of the revolution’s birth.

It was nearly three years to the day after the dictator’s death when that war came to Tariq’s home in Benghazi. He lived in a neighborhood called Tabalino, just north of the university, a well-to-do quarter of cubist villas, iron balustrades, and leafy streets. It was known for private schools and a reputable clinic, all since shuttered. The university was now the front line. One night, a militia made up of young men he’d grown up with and gone to school with attacked Tariq’s house. He fled into the desert with his wife and newborn. And then he returned to Benghazi to join the battle.

Salvos of artillery and mortars crashed into shops, cafés, and homes; snipers dueled from windows and balconies. Civilians died in the cross fire. Close-quarter combat happened mostly at night, when infiltration teams tried to slip past sentries. They shouted across the lines at night, "Khawarij!"—an Islamic term denoting deviants from the faith.

How did this happen, Tariq wondered, this dissolution, this unstitching? Benghazi had once been home to all of Libya’s outlooks and tribes. The nurse-mother to us all, people called it. That was what he was really fighting for, the right to remain and to belong.

I’d gone to Benghazi in the fall of 2015. By this time, the civil war between former comrades-in-arms had lasted longer than the 2011 war to unseat Muammar Qadhafi. A period of hope had followed his death, marked by the first national elections in decades. Then came the fracturing and descent into civil war. The resulting vacuum allowed the Islamic State to establish its strongest branch outside Iraq and Syria. It enabled a surge of migrants from Africa, with thousands perishing before they ever reached the sea or suffering horrific abuses at the hands of smugglers. And it drew in competing Arab powers whose supply of weapons to Libya’s warring militias only prolonged the misery. Meanwhile, the Americans and Westerners had fled.

One evening at a cluster of apartments just before sunset, Tariq got caught in a hail of gunfire coming from the north. He scrambled for cover. One of his friends was hit in the leg and the chest with large-caliber rounds. The young man died quickly. Moments later Tariq felt a stabbing pain in his upper thigh and fell to the ground.

The femur bone that joins the leg to the hip is wrapped in a bundle of arteries, nerves, and muscle. Even a normal fracture, from a fall for instance, can cause bleeding, clotting, and death. A wound from a high-velocity bullet is catastrophic. If the bullet severs or even nicks the femoral artery, a person will lose enough blood to die within minutes. In Tariq’s case the bullet was smaller than those that had killed his friend—it missed the artery but smashed the bone and lodged in his thigh.

At a field clinic, they set his leg with plastic cartons and moved him to a port south of Benghazi where they planned to evacuate him to Misrata, a city to the west. But shelling had forced a delay. Tariq waited all through the night, with no anesthetic. The next day, they loaded him on a small wooden boat along with the other wounded.

When the motor failed, they waited through the interminable night as shells fell around them. Dawn crept slowly over the horizon. The waves pushed the powerless boat closer and closer to shore.

*   *   *

LIKE TARIQ, I wondered: How did this happen? How does a country reach such a point? This book is an attempt to find an answer.

It traces the arc of Libya’s post-Qadhafi journey from euphoria and hope to despair and war. Based on years of travel and reporting across the country, from the revolution’s end to the present, it narrates the experiences of Libyans who sought to bend the new order to their will—and were irrevocably changed in the process. It tries to find the turning points and missteps that caused the splintering of Libya—which I believe was not preordained after the fall of Qadhafi. Ultimately, I want to understand what it was that caused revolutionaries like Tariq and countless others to turn against one another.

The harrowing of Libya today is part of a larger drama unfolding in the Arab world, the struggle of a region trying to remake its politics through violence and other forms of contention. It is too easy to dismiss the current chaos as inevitable, as the bitter proof of a revolution’s dashed hopes. In fact, the battle for the new Libya is far from over.

The battle is also a distinctly American saga, the tale of an intervention by a superpower chastened by its adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, which this time acted from afar and absolved itself from the follow-up. Then came the attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, which killed four Americans and triggered endless partisan attacks at home. The Libya that exists in the American mind is ineluctably linked to that night—and the Obama administration’s response. The ensuing war within the Beltway is not a concern of this book, though I account for its impact on America’s policy in Libya—and on Libyan lives.

I also believe that the histories and fates of Libya and America are more intertwined than many realize. Libya was once home to the largest overseas American military base in the world. More distantly, the opening verses of The Marines’ Hymn—From the halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli—reference an 1805 invasion by American marines to unseat a troublesome Muslim ruler in what is now Libya and replace him with one more amenable to American interests. It was the young republic’s first deployment of its military forces in foreign lands.

A little more than two hundred years later, America returned to the shores of Tripoli, this time from the air, intent on avoiding the sort of ground expedition recorded in the hymn of its marines.

What follows, then, is partly the story of that return, and its consequences.

PART I

NO OWNERSHIP

1

THE TENT CONQUERED THE CASTLE

LATE AUGUST IN TRIPOLI is a time of forbearance. It is still a month before the easterly winds will start their slow assault on the dulling heat. Flowering bougainvilleas have long since bloomed and now dangle down the sides of white-walled villas. At night, families emerge to stroll on a seaside promenade; backgammon players crowd the porticoed cafés of Algeria Square. It is Ramadan 2009. And in just a few weeks it will be forty years since Muammar Qadhafi came to power.

In preparation, louvered shutters across the city are freshly painted green—the official color of the dictator’s state of the masses. In Green Square, in the shadow of an ancient citadel, workers sweep parade grounds and erect scaffolding on vast stages. A Jumbotron video screen looms overhead, ready to broadcast the coming pageantry. Troops of Boy Scouts practice marching.

Qadhafi’s visage is everywhere on billboards. In one, a gallery of revolutionary icons—Mandela, Guevara, Nehru, and Nasser—flanks the smiling dictator in Bedouin headgear. In another, a crowd gathers before a green tent, emanating rays of light. The crowd is waving their hands, as if in gratitude or supplication.

THE TENT CONQUERED THE CASTLE, reads the wording above.

*   *   *

MUAMMAR AL-QADHAFI was born in a tent, a woven goat-hair dwelling that is typical among roaming Bedouin, on June 7, 1942, near a village called Qasr Abu Hadi. He grew up in a sparse country: the village sits on the Gulf of Sidra on a rocky plain flecked with acacia and thorn scrub. Libya then was one of the poorest countries in the world, a nation of mostly illiterate farmers, fishermen, and pastoralists, like his father. The tribe at the time was the dominant unit of social and political organization. And in his final years, after flirting with assorted ideologies, Qadhafi returned to this tribal milieu, ending his rule with an ethos of the desert and leaving a legacy of desertlike desolation.

Libya has always been a place on the margins. The name itself is borrowed from a term first used by the ancient Egyptians to describe the inhabitants on their western borders. In the classical imagination, it denoted all of Africa, a realm of wonders and terrors. Libya is the world’s third part, wrote the Roman poet Lucan. Serpents, thirst, the heat of the sand … Libya is the only thing that can put forth such a swarm of suffering.

The Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans passed through, settling mostly on a sliver of fertile coast where they built cities linking the Saharan south with the Mediterranean basin. The Arabs arrived in the seventh century, displacing the remnants of the Byzantine empire and Christianity and starting a long process of Islamization. During the nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule, Libya remained a backwater: the Ottomans and their principalities never fully controlled it but rather governed through pacts with local notables.

The Italians arrived in 1911, latecomers to European imperialism, and wrested the territory from the Turks. Resurrecting the ancient term Libia to stress the region’s Roman antecedents, they set about colonizing it, luring Italian settlers to emigrate with exaggerated promises of empty farmland. They joined the historic provinces of Tripolitania (the west), Cyrenaica or Barqa (the east), and Fezzan (the south) under a single governor.

With the rise of the Fascists in Italy came a decade of unrelenting military conquest, marked by aerial bombardment and poison gas. The trauma of that period remains today. To be sure, the Italians imprinted Libya with asphalt highways and buildings, but they did little for Libyans themselves, shutting them out of education or any role in governance. Their farming projects subverted the economy of pastoralism. Their brutal counterinsurgency imprisoned two-thirds of the population in eastern Libya in concentration camps; by some estimates, one out of every five persons in the country perished as a result of Italian rule.

But the colonial era also gave rise to one of Libya’s great legends: the Sufi teacher turned guerrilla leader Omar al-Mukhtar. For nearly two decades, before his capture and execution at the age of seventy-three, Omar al-Mukhtar fought the Italians across the eastern Green Mountains with a band of fighters numbering no more than a thousand.

A lesser-known Libyan combatant in that struggle was the grandfather of Muammar Qadhafi, whose exploits later hagiographies would laud and embellish. The Libya that his only son, Muammar, grew up in stood on the cusp of great change. After World War II, the country was administered by the victorious British and French militaries, remaining bereft of any political institutions, with the exception of a Sufi revivalist movement under the Sanusi dynasty. The Sanusi protostate gave way to the monarchy after independence: on December 24, 1951, Muhammad Idris, the diffident, scholarly grandson of the Sanusi order’s founder, became the ruler of the United Kingdom of Libya.

His reign was relatively peaceful, but far from successful. Infrastructure and education were underdeveloped and the country was mired in poverty. Years of famine killed and displaced thousands. The literacy rate barely rose above 10 percent. The discovery of oil in the 1950s—Libya has the largest reserves in Africa and the ninth largest in the world—did little to improve things. I wish your people had discovered water, Idris reportedly told an American diplomat. Water makes men work; oil makes men dream. Idris also opened Libya to American and British military bases, yet these allies looked uneasily on his rule—and his staying power.

The king offers Libya no inspiring leadership, a 1953 CIA assessment noted. In fact he seems more interested in retiring to his ancestral hills and allowing the infant state to disintegrate.

As is often the case, the first steps toward modernization taken by a sclerotic king are his last. Urbanization and education exposed young Libyans to the seductions of Arab nationalism. On September 1, 1969, a group of such Libyans, army officers who’d been cadets together at Benghazi’s military college, overthrew King Idris in a bloodless coup. Like Muammar Qadhafi, the captain who became their leader, many hailed from rural backgrounds and lesser tribes, shut out from the cronyism of the monarchy.

What followed in the months ahead was an attempt by Qadhafi to replicate the rule of his idol, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, in neighboring Egypt. The recipe would involve a mix of socialism and pan-Arabism with the nationalization of foreign banks and oil companies and the closure of foreign military bases (negotiations for the departure of the Americans had already been under way during King Idris’s rule). The new regime set about purging the last vestiges of the monarchy, especially the Sanusi endowments. But the putschist officers lacked the administrative and economic skills to run the country.

In 1973, buoyed by the quadrupling of oil prices and an infusion of sudden wealth, Qadhafi embarked on a decades-long political experiment at home and militant adventurism abroad. The dictator first turned inward, codifying his musings into a multivolume tract called the Green Book. Breathtaking in scope and incoherence, the Green Book was a farrago of socialism, democracy, and capitalism. Put into practice, it resulted in the deinstitutionalization of Libya and the dismantling of the professional bureaucracy, to be replaced by various popular committees and people’s militias. Libya was proclaimed in 1977 to be a state of the masses, or a Jamahiriya, an Arabic neologism coined by Qadhafi himself.

A series of drastic reforms accompanied the new experiment. Some had a positive impact: literacy rose to 82 percent and a free health-care system expanded across the country. Women’s status improved as well: laws forbidding polygamy and child brides were implemented, and women were afforded access to higher education. Yet other, more radical initiatives proved catastrophic. Believing that renting was a form of tyranny, Qadhafi allowed tenants to claim ownership of land and dwellings. He exhorted workers to seize businesses and turn them into collectives, banned private land ownership, and created state supermarkets. The result was the gutting of the entrepreneurial class and its flight abroad.

Radicalism at home was matched by radicalism abroad. Anti-imperialism, anti-Westernism, and anti-Zionism had long been hallmarks of Qadhafi’s worldview. Now, buttressed by newfound oil wealth, he used Libya to project that ideology, training a wide array of militants, including Palestinian groups, the Irish Republican Army, European and Latin American leftists, African insurgents, and even South Pacific separatists. By one count, more than thirty organizations passed through Libyan camps. It wasn’t just unconventional warfare that defined Libya’s bellicosity abroad: Qadhafi embroiled Libya in a disastrous nine-year war with neighboring Chad over a uranium-rich piece of border territory called the Aouzou Strip.

By the early 1980s, this militancy had brought Libya into confrontation with America, especially the administration of Ronald Reagan, who famously called the dictator the mad dog of the Middle East. In 1986, citing evidence of Qadhafi’s complicity in the bombing of a West Berlin disco that killed American soldiers, Reagan sent fighter-bombers to strike Libya’s terrorist training facilities. Dubbed Operation El Dorado Canyon, the raid destroyed a number of camps and military targets, killing roughly forty soldiers and civilians, with the loss of one American aircraft and its two-person crew. The attack also resulted in a gradual diminution of Qadhafi’s anti-American statements and support for terrorism, but only after a bloody uptick: the bombing in 1988 of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270, and a French airliner over Niger in 1989 that killed 156. Qadhafi’s refusal to hand over suspects in the bombings resulted in a UN embargo against the country in 1992. The United States added its own sanctions in 1996.

By the 1990s, Libya was in ruins. Falling oil prices, combined with the effects of ill-conceived policies and now sanctions, had inflicted untold suffering on the population. The mask of egalitarianism fell away: a kleptocratic elite centered on Qadhafi’s family enriched themselves at the expense of the masses. The Revolutionary Committees became little more than thugs and enforcers. Unemployment was rising, inflation had soared to 50 percent, and Libyans faced shortages of basic foodstuffs, with fistfights arising over loaves of bread at state-run bakeries. And despite his pretensions of doing away with tribalism, Qadhafi leaned on tribes even more to maintain control.

Then, at the turn of the millennium, Qadhafi came in from the cold. In 1999 he surrendered the suspects in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing and positioned himself as a useful counterterror partner for the West, especially after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The dictator had faced an Islamist insurgency of his own starting in the mid-1990s, led by Libyan jihadists returning from Afghanistan, and he was quick to frame his campaign against these local militants as part of America’s global war on terrorism. His government, he liked to point out, was the first in the world to issue an Interpol arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden, as early as 1998.

On top of this, in December 2003, Qadhafi announced Libya would dismantle its nascent nuclear weapons program and surrender its stocks of biological and chemical weapons—a decision the Bush administration claimed had been accelerated by its invasion of Iraq. In fact, the Libyan ruler had entered into secret negotiations with Washington well before this, under Clinton, and his choice to disarm resulted less from coercion and more from the prospect of reintegration into the global economy. In 2003, the United Nations lifted its sanctions, followed soon after by the United States.

In 2006, after thirty years of enmity, America and Libya restored full diplomatic relations, marked by the reopening of an embassy in Tripoli and agreements on trade, science, and education. The oil companies returned, and the Pentagon began a modest effort to assist the Libyan military. Yet a seeming tug-of-war between reactionary and reform-oriented factions in Tripoli threatened to upend the diplomatic gains. Where Qadhafi stood was always unclear. Some hoped that limited engagement with Libyan moderates could influence the domestic power balance in favor of a supposedly progressive camp led by Qadhafi’s London-educated son, Saif al-Islam.

But how much power did Saif and his reformers really have? And was the seeming perestroika genuine?

*   *   *

I FIRST WENT to Libya in the summer of 2009 as a military officer working at the U.S. embassy. I was no stranger to the Arab world and its discontents—and to the paradoxes of U.S. policy in the region. I’d studied at Cairo University at the peak of an Islamist insurgency against Egypt’s dictatorial president Hosni Mubarak. I’d lived with Palestinian families during the Israeli occupation of Gaza and with Bedouin Arab tribes in Israel’s Negev Desert. During military service in Iraq, I’d met with dozens of former regime henchmen, Ba’athists, and soon-to-be insurgents. Leaving active duty, I’d interviewed the spiritual guide of Hizballah in southern Beirut and sat on the floor of his mosque listening to his sermon on American abuses in Iraq. In Saudi Arabia’s restive Eastern Province, I’d met with wanted dissidents from the kingdom’s minority Shi’a sect.

Still, nothing could prepare me for Libya. It had been an enigmatic place ever since my youth, when one of my first political memories was Ronald Reagan’s bombing of the country. For most of the intervening years, the idea of going to work there on behalf of the U.S. government would have seemed far-fetched.

The Libya I encountered was a place of enchantment. You could choose to insulate yourself completely in its culture and history. Wander at night in the warrens of Tripoli’s Old City, past the Gurgi mosque with its glazed tiles, the clock tower, and the cavernous baths. Travel west or east for a day to the Roman ruins at Sabratha and Leptis Magna, resplendent with colonnaded streets, amphitheaters, and views of the sea. Pause for a moment on the manicured lawn of a war cemetery, where the fallen of Britain and its empire rested after fighting the Axis. Journey south to the white-terraced town of Ghadames, the pearl of the Sahara.

The postcard sheen quickly wore off. The modern city of Tripoli seemed stricken and tired. True, you did not find the soul-crushing poverty of Cairo’s slums. But an aura of dread pervaded the place; people still disappeared in prisons. You were never without a minder from the mukhabarat or secret police. Libyans looked at the potted roads, the shabby housing in short supply, and the threadbare clinics, and they saw little benefit from the country’s staggering oil wealth.

They started to wonder where it was all going.

*   *   *

MY OWN VIEW of Libya’s decay was focused on its military. I was working at the embassy’s defense attaché office, shepherding the limited American effort to assist the Libyan army.

The American defense attaché was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army named Brian Linvill. Raised in South Carolina to a family of educators, Linvill chose a military career. He was commissioned as an infantry officer after graduation from Ohio State University and then became a foreign area officer: a soldier-diplomat who specializes in a particular region and speaks a local language. To prepare him for the job, the army sent him to Princeton University to earn a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies and a year-plus of Arabic training in Monterey, California, where he met a fellow military student named Anna whom he would marry.

He rushed headlong into his Libya assignment, inhaling the country’s culture and lore. Libya soon became a family affair. His wife, a fluent Arabic speaker and accomplished opera singer, taught music at an international school. They took their children on weekend trips to archaeological sites. His brother, Darren, a professor at Clemson University, would later conduct research on Libya’s educational system. Linvill had an easy smile that disarmed his Libyan hosts.

The Libyan army we dealt with was shockingly decrepit, the result of decades of deliberate neglect by Qadhafi, who had feared the army might try to overthrow him. After he toppled the monarchy in 1969 with his fellow army officers, Qadhafi faced a succession of countercoups, linked to his comrades-in-arms. And so by the late 1980s, he started depriving the army of funds and equipment and stopped training new officers. In its place, he set up the Revolutionary Committees and other popular militias—lightly armed rabble. And in the 1990s, he built up his ultraloyal palace guard—elite brigades commanded by his sons and staffed by favored tribes, whose main purpose was to put down revolts. All the while, the regular army withered away. Linvill and I met officers who wore civilian clothes at work because they lacked funds to maintain their uniforms and did not want to wear them out. Soldiers who reported for duty would show up for just a few hours and then vanish to work second