Egypt's foray into Libya underlines its concerns
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| A fire truck drives towards smoke caused by an attack by Islamist militias during clashes with forces led by renegade Libyan Gen. Khalifa Hifter in Benghazi, Libya, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2014. Islamist militias fought Wednesday with forces loyal to Hifter, who vows to seize the eastern city of Benghazi, as a top militia commander accused Egypt of bombing his positions with warplanes. |
BENGHAZI, Libya
(AP) -- Egypt's military involvement in Libya underlines Cairo's
concerns about the threat posed by Islamic militant groups operating
near the two nations' porous border, as well as home-grown jihadis who
rely on their Libyan comrades for weapons. Above all, Egypt aims to
prevent these groups from linking up.
As
fighting continued for a second day Thursday in Benghazi, where
residents reported Egyptian warplanes have been pounding Islamist
militia positions, analysts warned that Cairo's foray into the ongoing
fighting in Libya could deepen the turmoil there.
Egyptian
and Libyan officials have denied Egypt was carrying out airstrikes,
while the United States, which maintains a naval force in the
Mediterranean that includes surveillance aircraft, has not confirmed the
aerial campaign.
Egypt's military involvement
reinforces the notion that Libya has become a proxy battleground for
larger regional struggles, with Turkey and Qatar backing the Islamist
militias while Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates support
their opponents.
U.S. officials confirmed over
the summer that Egypt and the UAE were carrying out airstrikes against
militia positions in and around the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Egypt
denied involvement, while the UAE said nothing publicly.
Egyptian
military intervention in Libya has long been anticipated since the
election in June of its new president, former army chief Abdel-Fattah
el-Sissi, who has striven to restore Egypt's traditional role as the
region's chief player.
But it has also been
dictated by the growing threat from weapons and militants illegally
crossing the desert frontier between Libya into Egypt, where Egypt is
determined to prevent Egyptian and Libyan militant groups from linking
up on its soil.
Egypt has been battling a
burgeoning insurgency by Islamic militants since the ouster last year by
el-Sissi of the nation's first freely elected president, the Islamist
Mohammed Morsi. Authorities have since cracked down on Morsi's Muslim
Brotherhood, killing hundreds of its supporters and jailing thousands.
The
post-Morsi violence began in the Sinai Peninsula, long a bastion of
dissent and militancy that borders
Gaza and Israel, but later spread
across much of the country with bombings and assassinations.
"This
is bound to exacerbate the fault lines and push the other side toward
more militancy," Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate in the Middle East
Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said of
Egypt's involvement in Libya.
"Libya is
complex, with a mixture of hard-core jihadi groups, but a lot of those
Islamists are into participation in the political process," added
Wehrey, a frequent visitor to Libya.
Jason
Pack, a Libya expert at Britain's Cambridge University, also warned of
the complexity of the Libyan conflict, saying Egyptian involvement could
have unforeseen consequences.
"Egyptians are
making the same mistakes in Libya that the West made in Iraq and
Afghanistan," Pack said. "They support one side over the other. But in
Libya the divisions are not between Islamists and non-Islamists.
The
conflict is very complex."
Libya is witnessing
its worst spasm of violence since Moammar Gadhafi's regime was
overthrown in 2011 by NATO-backed rebels following an eight-month civil
war. Militias born in that conflict have since challenged successive
governments, which have failed to integrate them into the army and
security forces or rein them in, leaving armed militiamen to operate
outside state control with impunity.
In June,
after Islamist factions fared poorly in parliamentary elections,
militias supporting them launched a broad offensive that ended with
Libya's two biggest cities - Tripoli and Benghazi - falling under their
control. The elected parliament and internationally recognized
government was forced to set in the eastern city of Tobruk as the
militias in Tripoli revived an old parliament and formed their own
government.
Since Gadhafi's ouster and the
overthrow of Egypt's long-time ruler, Hosni Mubarak, in Arab Spring
uprisings, Egypt has become a major transit route for smuggled arms and
militants across the Egyptian-Libyan border. Rockets, anti-aircraft
guns, mortars and artillery that flooded Libya during the civil war have
f
ound their way to the Sinai and into the hands of the militants
fighting army troops and police there.
Through
an elaborate network of underground tunnels under the Sinai-Gaza
border, some of those weapons have also reached Gaza's militant Islamist
groups, including Hamas.
Since his rise to
power, el-Sissi has repeatedly warned that the upheaval in Libya poses a
serious threat to Egypt's national security.
Over
the past year, Egypt's army has stepped up its patrolling along the
frontier with Libya, cracking down on smugglers and beefing up security.
In Sinai, it has destroyed most of the tunnels leading to Gaza and
intensified its campaign against the militants.
Still,
a brazen attack by militants in July killed 22 army soldiers in Egypt's
western desert near the Libyan border in one of the deadliest attacks
on the Egyptian army in years. El-Sissi vowed then that the attack would
not go unpunished.
In an interview with The
Associated Press last month, el-Sissi blamed the West and NATO for
backing the rebels fighting Gadhafi's forces then withdrawing with the
"job incomplete."
"Weapons should have been
collected, the army and security agencies should have been rebuilt, and
there should have been help in setting up a democratic system that
satisfies all Libyans. That never happened," he told the AP.
As
the Benghazi fighting continued on Thursday between a coalition of
Islamist militias and government troops backed by armed residents,
masked and armed civilians set up checkpoints across the city to guard
their neighborhoods.
Army supporters used
garbage dumpsters, tires and cars to barricade streets as they searched
passers-by. Most shops were shuttered, although a few bakeries,
pharmacies and coffee shops were open early in the morning.
The Egyptian airstrikes were greeted with mixed reactions on the ground in Libya.
"If
I were el-Sissi, I would do the same," said former rebel commander
Fadallah Haroun, who supports the Libyan army's Benghazi offensive.
Libya's eastern frontier, he said, is "Egypt's strategic backyard and it
is better to secure it before chaos spills across the border."
"If
you ask people here, they would support Arab involvement to restore
stability and stop the daily bloodshed. A lot of blood has been spilled
here," he added.
Mohammed Gaballah, a 23-year-old activist in Benghazi, said he opposed foreign involvement.
"I
am against turning Libya into a stage for settling scores among
international and regional players. This will only increase the proxy
war," he said.
