Operation Oil Theft: Month 3, Week 1, Day 1.

On May 10th Abdul Fattah Younis, the commander of the Libya rebel forces promised that that the next few days would bring a surprise victory for the rebels that would dramatically shorten the war. So far no such victory has materialised making the announcement look like a false promise designed to reassure people that the conflict won't be dragging on until September at the earliest. In the east the rebels only real option is to re-take Brega and even if they are able to achieve this they will still have to re-take around 400km of desert road before they come up against the strategically important defensive line at Sirte.

In the west the rebels did claim a victory on May 11th by re-taking Misrata airport. Although this means that the rebels have taken control of a part of the city they didn't control before it's hard to see how it's given them much of an advantage. The no-fly zone has rendered Misrata airport, along with all of Libya's airports, inoperable for the last three months so by taking control of it the rebels have not prevented Libyan government forces from using it. It is possible that the airport could be used to bring in humanitarian supplies but it is still in a combat zone making it difficult for planes to land and the international community has so far not expressed any interest in using it to deliver supplies. That is unlikely to change unless the United Nations is prepared to breach it's impartiality and start using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war by only supplying it to rebel held areas.

NATO has confirmed that they have carried out over 6000 bombing missions against Libya. In a worrying diplomatic development it was today (12/5/11) announced that NATO had bombed the North Korean Embassy in Tripoli. North Korea has been a vocal critic of the NATO operation. This is a problem because the North Korean Embassy remains North Korean sovereign territory so if it was deliberately targeted then NATO have not only breached it's UN mandate by undermining Libyan sovereignty it has also violated North Korean sovereignty.

Away from Libya the NATO operation is causing deep divisions in the European Union (EU). Since the start of the conflict some 26,000 Libyans have, quite reasonably, sought asylum on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Never a fan of immigrants at the best of times the Italian government has dealt with this problem by giving the migrants temporary EU residency status and then transporting them on mass to France. Currently in the grips of the political rise of the fascist National Front France has responded by refusing to accept the refugees and closing it's border with Italy. This breaches the Schengen agreement that guarantees the free movement of EU residents between EU countries and the ensuing argument is threatening to undermine one of the central principles of the European Union.

Since the migration argument ignited there has been a worrying increase in the number of refugee boats from Libya being lost at sea with some 600 refugees drowned in the last week. Things have got so bad that NATO generally and France and Italy specifically have been forced to deny that they are purposefully allowing refugees from Libya to drown rather then grant them asylum.