Operation Hillary: Month 3, Week 1, Day 3

On Sunday February 15th (15/2/15) the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) announced their presence in Libya with the release of a video showing 21 Egyptian Christians being beheaded. The following day Egypt launched a week of air-strikes against ISIL positions in Libya and "Operation Hillary" was born. Since then things have more or less ground to a halt.

The main barrier to combating the ISIL threat in Libya has been Libya's lack of a functioning government. At the 2012 Libyan elections which followed the 2011 overthrow of the Qaddafi government the Gulf States led by Qatar went to great lengths to ensure that an Islamist government was elected in Libya. This went so far as building up the "Homeland" (Al-Watan) Party led by Abdelhakim Belhadj as an elaborate bluff. Adopting the Qatari national colours of purple and white the purpose of the Homeland party was to trick Libyan voters into thinking they were keeping foreign interference out by voting for the other Islamist parties such as the "Justice and Construction" (Hizb Al-Adala Wal-Bina) Party who are closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and by extension Qatar and Turkey.

This plan was largely successful with Homeland failing to win any seats and Justice and Construction emerging as the second largest party with 17 seats. They were backed by a number of smaller Islamist parties and independents who each won a single seat. However the secularist or moderate religious parties also did well with the "National Forces Alliance" (Taḥaalof al-qiwaa al-wataniyya) Party winning the most (39) seats and the "National Front" (Hizb Al-Jabha Al-Wataniyya) coming third with 3 seats and the "Union For the Homeland" (Al-Ittihad min Ajl Al-Watan) and the "National Centrist" Party added a further 4 seats between them. As a result the Islamist parties were not able to get their own way in the legislature (General National Congress/GNC) and started throwing repeated tantrums.

Initially the Islamist parties refused to turn up to GNC meetings preventing a quorum being reached stopping any laws being passed. Then the Islamist parties started turning up to GNC meetings en masse abut refused to leave at the end of the day staging a series of sit-ins that also stopped laws being passed. Eventually the Islamist parties teamed up with an alliance of Islamist militias known as the "Libyan Dawn Militia" to overthrow the GNC by force. 

This prompted the GNC to flee from the capital Tripoli in the county's west and set up in Tobruk which is in Libya's east. The Islamists that remained in Tripoli then declared themselves to be the government creating the strange situation where the international community continues to recognise the GNC as Libya's legitimate government despite its move to Tobruk but the Islamists in Tripoli have started issuing government contracts in sectors such as the oil industry which have been recognised by Turkey.

Since the GNC were ousted from Tripoli in September 2014 the United Nations (UN) has been holding seemingly endless rounds of talks to reunify Libya's government. The fundamental flaw in the UN process is that it legitimises the Islamists use of violence as part of the political process by seeking to form a government of national unity rather then simply telling the Islamists that they must abandon violence in order to rejoin the GNC. If anything the UN process is making the situation worse because accepting that political power in Libya can come from the barrel of a gun rather then from the ballot box each round of UN talks provokes a fresh wave of tit-for-tat air-strikes and ground offensives with both the GNC and the Islamists trying to show that they have the military force needed to claim power.

Following the round of UN talks that immediately followed the Egyptian air-strikes the situation did improve slightly with the GNC appointing Khalifa Haftar as the new head of the Libya army. 

A senior army officer under Qaddafi who defected after being abandoned in Chad during the Libya/Chad war of the 1970's and 1980's Haftar has been a strong presence in Libya since February 2014 when he united a number of Libyan militias to fight Libyan Dawn in what he dubbed "Operation Dignity." Having lived in the US for a number of years Haftar is so committed to the secular values of democracy that his main selling point amid Libya's chaos is an entirely false claim that he is CIA agent operating with the backing of the US. In reality though the international community and people within Libya have been hesitant to back Haftar because he is viewed as a strongman general rather then a good candidate for political office.  

Making Haftar the head of an army that is answerable to an elected government seems to me to be the perfect role for him.

The Islamists also seem to have got the message from that round of talks that the international community view a desire to fight ISIL as an essential component of any Libya government. Therefore they have recently started to use their military power to attack ISIL and other rival Islamist militias rather then the GNC. However these seems to be an attempt to curry favour with the international community rather then a legitimate attempt to defeat ISIL.

Whatever progress had been made in Libya was set back dramatically on March 27th (27/3/15) when the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a Jordanian drafted resolution that renewed the arms embargo on the GNC. This rejected a call by Egypt and the GNC for the embargo to be lifted so they could be supplied with weapons to defeat ISIL. The existing arms embargo is of course widely flouted by the Libyan Dawn militia. Instead the UNSC resolution renewed a call for a national unity government to be formed which is in effect an endorsement of the continuing chaos in Libya. 

The day before the UNSC vote (26/3/15) Saudi Arabia of course used it's around USD40bn of financial support to convince Egypt that attacking Yemen was a far more important priority then defeating ISIL in Libya.

In the meantime the seasons have shifted from winter to spring. Along with the end of summer/start of autumn the start of spring brings calm waters and strong currents to the Mediterranean Sea that make it the perfect time for migrants to try and cross illegally from Libya into southern Europe. The 2015 crossing season is expected to particularly bad due to the deteriorating situation in Libya. 

Prior to the overthrow of Qaddafi many of the migrants making the crossing who come from sub-Saharan Africa would simply have stayed in Libya taking lucrative jobs in the oil and construction industry. Following the removal of Qaddafi and his pan-Africanist policies there has been a significant rise in anti-black racism in Libya which has made the country less hospitable to the migrants. The confrontation between the GNC and the western Islamists has formally shut down the nation's oil industry with the GNC declaring Force Majeure in the sector due to the frequency that oil facilities were being hit by air-strikes and takeovers by rival militia groups. The construction industry has also been thrown into chaos with the western Islamists cancelling many of the GNC issued contracts and issue ones of their own.

The chaos of course makes it impossible for the Libyan government to take any real action to control the nations coastline and the people smugglers who are putting the migrants onto boats.

On Tuesday (14/4/15) a boat carrying 400 migrants was lost off the coast of Libya. Today another boat was lost with 700 people on board. This brings the migrant death toll from the past 6 days to over 1,100 or around 183 people killed per day.

Today ISIL released another video highlighting the plight of migrants in Libya. I will be back to cover that shortly.

16:35 on 19/4/15 (UK date).

Edited at around 17:00 on 19/4/15 (UK date) to add;

In order to properly discuss today's video from ISIL I must first talk about the output from a slightly more reliable media outlet - the BBC. As part of their "This World" series which is broadcast globally the BBC has produced a series of documentaries focusing on ISIL. 

The first of these entitled "Jihadi Brides" which was broadcast in the UK last Wednesday (8/4/15) looked at the trend of young Muslim girls who travel from developed nations such as the UK to Iraq and Syria in the hope of marrying ISIL fighters. Telling the stories of Halane twins from Manchester and Grace Dare from London amongst others the documentary focused on Aqsa Mahmood a young woman from Glasgow, Scotland who acts as a main online recruiter for ISIL under the name Umm Layth (Mother of Lions). Although I don't follow her online I suspect that Ms Mahmood would not have appreciated the way she was portrayed in the documentaries dramatic reconstructions.  

The UK broadcast prompted "Jihadi Brides" to trend globally on Twitter for several hours although that was mainly people making jokes about how it seemed so much less fun then UK Channel 4's long-running"Big Fat Gypsy Weddings" series.

The second program in the series broadcast last Wednesday (15/4/15) was a much more serious production entitled "Killing the Christians." My main complaint about this documentary is that it didn't answer the fundamental question of why ISIL keeps killing Christians. However having lived and breathed this issue for the last 9 months I'm still at a bit of a loss of how to answer that one myself.

What the program did do was go out and speak to all the Christian groups that have been under threat from ISIL such as the Assyrians in northern Iraq and Syria. Here I think the program was particularly brave because in speaking to a Christian community outside Damascus in Syria it almost went so far as to suggest that the Syrian government are the least brutal of all the groups fighting in the Syrian civil war. It also mentioned the Armenian genocide before going to look at Christian communities in Lebanon and Israel. As such I was tempted to recommend it to the Obama administration who seem a little confused as to the geography of the Middle-East.

Today's ISIL video seems largely to have been a response to the BBC documentary putting forward ISIL's explanation of why they kill Christians. This obviously presents ISIL with a bit of a challenge because although they dispute the Son of God status and the Resurrection Islam actually considers Jesus Christ to be the second most important of God's Prophets behind Mohamed and belief in him is a central tenet of Islam.

However in a roughly 25 minute documentary style portion of the video which I didn't watch in it's entirety ISIL focused on how Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and used this to portray Christians as imperial crusaders who wish to dominate Islam. In itself this isn't actually true because the Roman Empire was well established long before the birth of Christianity and it was actually Muslims who began the crusades to impose Islam on the Middle-East. Ignoring that fact though ISIL argued that because of Christianity's desire to dominate Islam no true Muslim - as ISIL see themselves - could tolerate polytheism so must kill the followers of all other religions including Christians. Polytheism is of course the worship of multiple gods whereas Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the same God but this wouldn't be the first time that ISIL logic has given me a headache and the desire to bang their leader over the head with a book.

To show their commitment to killing Christians the video then cut to a roughly five minute sequence in which they killed a lot of Christians. The first thing of note about this sequence is that while the documentary portion of the video had been shot in Iraq/Syria the killings were taking place in Libya. In an effort to show how powerful they are in Libya ISIL made a point of executing two groups of Ethiopian Christians in two separate locations. 

The location of the first group dressed in black jumpsuits was given as being deep in the desert of Libya's south. This group featured a lead 'executioner' was dressed in a "Jihadi John" inspired costume who spoke with a north American (possibly Canadian) accent. He said the group of around 15-20 had been given the choice to convert to Islam, pay a Jizya tax for being Christian or be killed. Because they'd refused the first two options they were all then shot in the back/back of the head with assault rifles.

The location of the second group dressed in orange jumpsuits was given as being an eastern coastal town - possibly Al Bayda. Here there was no lead executioner and the group were simply knelt down and beheaded. As has become the style of ISIL videos it took great pleasure in showing not only the victims throats being cut but the severed wound of their necks as their heads were placed on their bodies.

The video did not give the exact number of people being killed nor did it show all of those involved. However I would guess that around 30 people were killed in total but the actual figure could be as high as 40 or as low as 20. At this time Ethiopia cannot confirm where those killed were it's nationals let alone how or where they were kidnapped.

18:05 on 19/4/15 (UK date).