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The Portland State University Studies program hosted a talk given by one of its mentors, Mohanad Elshieky, on May 17 in Smith Memorial Student Union. The local comedian presented a serious lecture sprinkled with humor called The Road From Libya about living in Benghazi during the Libyan Revolution.

At five years old, the Libyan government killed Elshiekys neighbor and burned his house to the ground. He grew up knowing he couldnt talk about that event or be critical of the government. Anyone could be a government informant and critics would disappear.

Its different because here [in the U.S.] people have suspicions about like, Is the government taping our calls? Elshieky said. But back home it was more like, We are actually listening to every word youre saying, so watch out.

Until Elshieky got internet at home at about 17 or 18, he thought everyones countries were run like his. It was quite eye opening when he realized this wasnt the case.

The Libyan Revolution seemed impossible because Elshieky viewed Gaddafi as untouchable. Elshieky remembers seeing the revolution begin through social media. A Facebook post stated that Feb. 17, 2011 would be the first day of the revolution.

Elshieky recalled how 50100 people took to the streets in Benghazi that day. Many people were arrested or shot. It seemed as though the revolution would be short lived.

Then the next day, on the 18th, I remember my dad woke me up and he was like, Hey, do you wanna go to the courthouse where the people will meet? Elshieky remembers. I was like, Uh, no, its very early in the morning. Tooearly for the fight for freedom. Lets do it during noon or something. But he convinced me, he was like, The internet connection is down. And I was like, Well, I guess we should go then!

That day he saw the new red, black, and green flag that his father told him was the real Libyan flag. That day the revolution actually seemed possible.

I was an activist, in a sense, but to me it was more about doing the right thing, Elshieky said.

During the Libyan Revolution, Elshieky kept busy as a translator for CNN and working for BBC as a war photographer. Elshieky also had a website with other contributors called Alive From Libya, where they broadcast daily to show the world what was happening.

Death became routine, and sometimes the dead were people Elshieky knew. This was the price of the revolution, he believed.

I thought that being emotionless made me brave, Elshieky said.

One morning Elshieky and his father watched a jet being shot out of the sky. Unknown to them at the time, the pilot was his fathers friend.

On Sept. 11, 2012, a peaceful protest was being held at the U.S. Embassy due to a controversial anti-Islamic film released on the internet called The Innocence of Muslims.

The protest turned violent. Elshieky remembers seeing Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamic State Affiliate, drive past the protest. The Embassy was burned down soon after. Nearby civilians took Ambassador Chris Stevens to the hospital where he later died.

Four Americans were killed, seven Libyans were injured that night, Elshieky said. The next day, people in Benghazi took to the streets with signs condemning terrorism. Chris Stevens was a guest at our home and it felt like we betrayed him and failed to protect him.

Elshieky had two loving parents and described his childhood in Libya as being perfectly normal. He watched the Disney Channel, played soccer and went to the beach. Elshieky loved comedy and had Dave Chappelles comedy saved to his computer for easy viewing.

Today, Elshieky wants people to know that the Libyan Revolution was only a small part of his life. When he encounters people here in the U.S., Elshieky wants people to spend less time welcoming him and actually get to know him. He observed how most people only want to talk to him about war and his struggle instead of his interests, which he feels is dehumanizing.

Elshieky feels that most people fall into two categories when finding out he is from Libya. Either they think he is a threat or nothing but a refugee. He feels that feeling like you dont belong is a problem people of color also face in Portland. Elshieky hopes people will spend less time explaining minorities experiences and needs for them and more time asking them.

After this, an older white man stood in front of Elshieky to explain the experiences of immigrants. After this man left, Elshieky commented that this was a perfect example of what not to do.

Shortly after arriving in the U.S., Elshieky began receiving death threats from back in Libya and realized that he probably couldnt go home. His mother told him that she would rather not see him than see him dead.

Due to travel restrictions for those with Libyan passports, Elshieky cannot travel outside the U.S.

Elshieky speaks to his parents every day. Portland Mercury named Elshieky as one of Portlands Geniuses of Comedy. He is planning on relocating to Los Angeles soon to expand the possibilities of his comedy career.

I didnt know the depth of challenges, said Sam Beebe, a fan of Elshiekys comedy. To go through all that and then stand up in front of a crowd and tell jokes?

For more stories about Elshiekys life during the Libyan Revolution, you can check out his blog, The Road From Libya, at MohanadElshieky.wordpress.com

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Alive from Libya, it's Wednesday at noon! - Psuvanguard.com

New York Times

Timeline Shows Manchester Bomber's Family's Deep Ties to Libya New York Times Salman Abedi, who killed 22 people and wounded 116 more when he blew himself up outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on Monday, was born in Britain to a family with deep ties to Libya. His father, Ramadan, had fled Libya in 1991 after ... How Manchester bomber Salman Abedi was radicalised by his links to LibyaThe Guardian Manchester bomber's brother was 'plotting attack on UN envoy in Libya'Telegraph.co.uk Younger brother of Manchester bomber 'plotted terror attack on UN envoy in Libya'The Independent Breitbart News -Center for Research on Globalization -The Guardian -BBC News all 2,022 news articles »

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Timeline Shows Manchester Bomber's Family's Deep Ties to Libya - New York Times

Benghazi - The Libya connection in the May 22 Manchester concert suicide bombing and Friday's attack on Christians in Egypt has shone a light on the threat posed by militant Islamic groups that have taken advantage of lawlessness in the troubled North African nation to put down roots, recruit fighters and export jihadists to cause death and carnage elsewhere.

Libya has been embroiled in violence since a 2011 uprising toppled and killed Moammar Gaddafi.

Vast and oil-rich, Libya currently has rival administrations, an army led by a Gaddafi-era general as well as powerful Islamist militias that compete for territory, resources and political leverage.

At the peak of its power in Libya, the Islamic State group controlled a 160km stretch of Libyan coastline and boasted between 2 000 and 5 000 fighters, many of them from Egypt and Tunisia.

It is that Libya that the alleged Manchester bomber, 22-year-old British citizen Salman Abedi, found when he and his family moved back from Britain after Gaddafi's ouster in 2011.

Monday's bombing left 22 dead, including an 8-year-old girl, and was claimed by ISIS. Abedi's brother Hashim has been taken into custody in Tripoli and, according to Libyan authorities, has confessed that he and Salman were ISIS members.

In Egypt, President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi sent his fighter-jets to bomb militant positions in eastern Libya just hours after ISIS fighters shot dead 29 Christians on their way to a remote desert monastery.

The military said the attackers were trained in Libya.

Egypt also has long complained that weapons smuggled across the porous desert border with Libya have reached militants operating on its soil.

It also has claimed that militants who bombed three Christian churches since December received military training in ISIS bases in Libya.

The Genesis of Libya's Militancy:

Hundreds of Libyan youths answered the call to Jihad in the 1980s, traveling to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians. When they returned home after the war, Many of them wanted Islamic Sharia laws implemented in their country.

They formed underground cells to escape the regime's watchful eyes and unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Gaddafi.

After Gaddafi's fall, veteran jihadists, al-Qaeda sympathisers and Islamists of all shades formed militias that filled the post-Gaddafi power vacuum.

Libya's present woes are rooted in the failure of the very first transitional government to dismantle those militias and integrate them into a national army. Instead, they carved up Libya into fiefdoms.

Where are the militants now?

Darna:

The eastern Libyan city, where militant positions were targeted by Egyptian warplanes on Friday, has historically been a bastion of radical Islamic groups as well as highly respected Islamic scholars.

Extremists made the city their stronghold in the 1980s and 1990s, protected by the rugged terrain of the surrounding Green Mountain range.

It was the main source of Libyan jihadists for the insurgency in Iraq. Entire brigades of Darna natives are known to be fighting in Syria's civil war.

During the 2011 uprising, residents formed the "Abusaleem Martyrs" brigade to fight Gaddafi loyalists. It proved to be one of the most effective rebel outfits.

Its ranks soon later swelled and its fighters seized the city, setting up the Darna Mujahideen Shura Council to replace the local government.

The Islamic State group's Libyan affiliate had a robust presence in Darna, but the ISIS faction eventually fell out with the council and was driven out.

The ISIS fighters relocated to the coastal city of Sirte and Darna remains to this day under the control of the Mujahideen Shura Council.

Benghazi:

Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, was the first to fall under the influence of extremist Islamic militias. Many of those militias were formed to fight the Gaddafi regime in 2011 and were led by radicals, widely viewed as experienced and motivated.

Perhaps the most notorious of the Benghazi militias is Ansar Al-Sharia, blamed for the killings of hundreds of former Libyan soldiers and for the death of the US ambassador in 2012.

For more than two years, the so-called Libyan National Army led by General Khalifa Hifter has battled an alliance of Benghazi's militias. His forces have managed to secure most of the city, except for pockets of a seaside neighborhood, heavily fortified and surrounded by fields of land mines.

Sirte :

Sirte was where Gaddafi and his loyalists made a last stand in the 2011 civil war. The city, Gaddafi's hometown, was almost completely destroyed in the fighting.

Furious over the city's loyalty to Gaddafi, anti-government rebels punished the city's residents with extrajudicial killings and revenge attacks.

In 2013, Sirte fell under the control of Ansar Al- Sharia, which made alliances with local tribes and an uneasy truce with other militias and the small number of remaining army troops.

The group took over a sprawling former Gaddafi compound and boasted its own TV and radio station.

ISIS also slowly infiltrated the city as fighters from countries like Mali, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria moved in and later declared Sirte an ISIS emirate.

Last year, militiamen from Misrata and other localities in western Libya, acting with the support of a UN-backed government in Tripoli, waged a protracted and bloody campaign to drive ISIS militants from Sirte.

When fighting stalled, the government sought support from the United States, which responded with airstrikes that sped up the collapse of ISIS in the city.

ISIS was finally defeated in Sirte and the fighters who survived the carnage fled to the vast deserts to the south.

SEBRATHA:

Sebratha has earned a reputation as a small but tenacious stronghold of Islamic radicals, something that made it easier for ISIS militants to find a foothold there and spawned a lucrative business in human trafficking to Europe.

The city is the main ISIS gateway due to its location near the Tunisian border.

The jumble of various militias have helped ISIS keep a low profile in the city, but a 2016 US airstrike that killed about 40 of the group's operatives highlighted their presence in Sebratha.

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After UK, Egypt attacks, Libya seen as militants' haven - News24

TRIPOLI, Libya The young militia fighters carried in a comrade who was covered in blood and motionless. It was 1:30 p.m. Friday at the Al Mokhtar Clinic, and Libyas civil war had just reignited in this fractured capital.

Move on, clear the way, one fighter screamed. Hes dying.

Five hours earlier, on the eve of the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, fierce clashes erupted between rival militias. They tore apart a two-month lull in the violence and upended the lives of countless Libyans in neighborhoods that turned into battle zones overnight.

The fighting also underscored the security and logistical challenges British investigators could face if they consider visiting Libya to pursue clues in the Manchester concert suicide bombing that killed 22 people this week. The bomber, Salman Abedi, was of Libyan origin, and his father and brother were arrested in Tripoli. Both are in the custody of a counterterrorism militia aligned with the Western-backed government.

Those challenges were evident during an hours-long drive Friday in a city fragmented as much by politics, ideology and geography as it is by violence and the thirst for power. In the southeastern enclaves, militias deployed tanks and used heavy artillery, leaving families trapped inside their homes and sending many civilians and fighters to hospitals with injuries. Authorities could not provide reliable casualty figures.

But in the northern neighborhoods, untouched by Fridays violence, Tripoli residents surreally socialized in cafes and water-skied in the Mediterranean Sea, even as the sound of explosions and gunfire thundered nearby. Huge plumes of black smoke from burning buildings rose over the city.

This has become normal for us, said Shukri Salim, 27, a Libyan Airlines employee, who was having coffee with friends in a cafe and watching a televised soccer match.

I knew it was Ramadan and the war is going to start, said his friend Ayoub Aldabaa, 27, an accountant, who was with him. Were so accustomed to this.

Last year, too, fighting engulfed the capital during Ramadan. That time, the clashes involved different militias.

It has been mostly like this since the 2011 populist uprising, part of the Arab Spring, that ousted Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi and led to his killing. A constellation of tribal and regional militias emerged, seizing advantage of the power vacuum and abundance of weapons in a quest for power and wealth.

Today, militias have carved up the oil-producing country into fiefdoms, each aligned with one of three competing governments. And Tripoli, as expected, has been a major battleground with armed groups fighting for control of neighborhoods, even streets and buildings.

Fridays violence pitted militias aligned with the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) against Islamist-leaning forces of the self-declared National Salvation government who are trying to reclaim territory lost in recent months, according to security officials.

A spokesman for the National Salvation government said a GNA-aligned militia erected a fake checkpoint to kidnap some of its fighters. So we decided to attack the GNA boys, said the spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mahmud Zaghal.

But there has also been speculation for weeks that the National Salvation militias were planning a counterattack. A Facebook page created by its supporters carried a post on Thursday night announcing that it would launch assaults against rivals in southern Tripoli.

The clashes Friday mostly unfolded in the neighborhoods of Abu Salim, Salahedeen and Al Habda. Fighting also erupted in areas near the Rixos Hotel, which has been used by officials and lawmakers aligned with the GNA government.

Last October, their new legislative body was ousted from the buildings by the Salvation militias. In December, the area was the scene of heavy fighting over several days. Militias aligned with the GNA currently are in control of the complex and surrounding neighborhoods.

We will retake the Rixos, Zaghal vowed.

At the Al Mokhtar Clinic, the toll of the fighting was obvious. Doctors and nurses were inundated by the wounded. One man arrived with blood splattered on his legs.

My brother was injured, another man said as he waited outside. He was just standing in front of his house when the shells landed.

But the militia fighters were most visible at the clinic.

I want to get inside the room, one fighter screamed, as others held him back from accosting the doctors and nurses.

Other fighters, clad in black and clutching AK-47 rifles, stood outside.

At 1:53 p.m., screams filled the room. Some militia fighters cried, their faces now filled with anguish.

Their comrade had died on the operating table.

An hour later, Aldabaa and Salim were in the cafe. As they have done during previous clashes, they called friends and family around the city to make sure they were safe. They also checked Twitter and Facebook to see which neighborhoods had turned into no-go zones.

Salim had just spoken to a friend who was stuck in his home as fighters pummeled each other outside.

He and Aldabaa had both taken part in the revolution. Salim said he did not regret fighting against the Gaddafi regime, but regretted the people who came after the revolution.

Aldabaa blamed the Western countries for helping the rebellion that ousted Gaddafi, and now regrets that the revolution happened at all.

We were expecting to take the country in a better direction, he said. Unfortunately, we left it in a worse condition.

At 3:15 p.m. near the Rixos Hotel, militia fighters in pickup trucks waited for the next offensive. Graffiti on the wall of the complex read: Free Libya.

By 4:30 p.m., drivers were in lines at gas stations around the city, preparing for shortages that usually come after each clash.

And the people of Tripoli were certainly expecting more fighting.

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A day in Libya's capital, just as the civil war reignites - Washington Post

Police in Manchester as the investigation continues.

Salman Abedi was 16 when he first visited Libya, the country his parents had fled in 1993 to escape persecution under Muammer Gaddafi. But this was no ordinary coming-of-age trip for Abedi. Once there, he reunited with his father, who had left his family in Manchester three years earlier to aid the revolution against Gaddafi. And, according to friends of the family, members of the Libyan community in Manchester and sources in Libya, Abedi had come to fight.

He was not alone. It was 2011, and dozens of other Mancunians were already there. Mustafa Graf, the imam of the Didsbury mosque, the centre of the Libyan community in south Manchester, had also travelled back to Libya to help topple Gaddafi. Manchester became a fundraising centre for their war effort. Preachers travelled between the two countries, encouraging the fight, invariably couching it in terms of jihad.

This week, the 22-year-old Abedi detonated a rucksack filled with tricyclic acetone peroxide, bolts and nails, murdering 22 others and maiming dozens more, many of them children and young adults, in the worst terror attack to strike the UK since the 7/7 London bombings 12 years earlier. The attack on the Manchester Arena cast a spotlight on the city and its community of Libyan exiles, dozens of whom have gone to fight in Libya in recent years with Islamist militias.

Throughout the years of Gaddafi rule in Libya, Manchester was a magnet for Libyan exiles like the Abedis. The city's Libyan community, one of the largest outside Libya, is tightly knit. "Everyone knows everyone," says one Libyan living in the city.

Britain's intelligence agencies knew the community well, too, and had longstanding dealings with its Islamist contingent. But the attack raises serious questions over their assessment of it. MI5, the UK's domestic intelligence agency, facilitated the travel of many Islamist Mancunians back to Libya.

Until recently, the UK's spymasters have not seen the community as a particular threat. Libyan Islamists in Manchester, many believed, were too focused on waging a national jihad in their homeland to be a threat to the UK. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war and the spate of attacks in France, Belgium and Germany, anti-terror work in the UK and Europe has focused on young returnees from Syria.

Security officials have repeatedly sketched out the dangerous dynamics the Syrian crisis has unleashed: a cohort of young Britons who will be brutalised by the conflict, skilled in the trade and tools of war, connected to transnational networks of fellow fighters by powerful bonds of kinship and shared suffering.

It is a prognosis that holds true for the civil war in Libya. The story of Salman Abedi is one of a parallel, overlooked jihad to that in Syria.

"These are fundamentally questions of identity. What are the local grievances that would lead someone to blow up a load of young people at a concert with nails and bolts? Manchester isn't the city that made those grievances fester and grow," says Richard Barrett, former director of global counter terrorism operations at MI6. "It's the ability of groups like ISIS to wrap up your individual and local anxieties and grievances into this overall huge picture to make you a somebody."

Throughout Abedi's childhood in Manchester, Libya was ever-present. The vast majority of Libyans in the city are well integrated, but some cliques remain staunchly nationalist, still affected by the brutal treatment at the hands of Gaddafi's regime that prompted many families to flee. Islamist views the cause of that persecution often shade into such nationalism.

Ramadan Abedi, Salman's father, was a member of the Libyan nationalist-Islamist nexus in Manchester. By some accounts, he was a senior member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, the liberation movement that was the core of anti-Gaddafi Salafism. His sons grew up with tales of the injustices inflicted on devout Muslims in Libya.

When Salman was 13, his father returned to Libya as part of a deal brokered between the Gaddafi regime then keen to rehabilitate itself on the global stage and migr Islamists. It was an uneasy rapprochement, and one in which the UK's intelligence agencies were deeply involved, as they sought to mine information from both sides to advance the war on terror.

Three years later, in 2011, the uneasy settlement in Libya had broken apart in the wake of the Arab uprisings, and the country was at war. It was then that Salman and his father were reunited.

The reunion took place against a backdrop of mounting western concern over Libya. As Gaddafi's repression grew bloodier, Britain and France led a push for military intervention. The UK's military role in the Nato-led coalition that ousted the regime is well documented. Less well covered is the degree to which it facilitated the movement of anti-Gaddafi Islamists from Britain. Dozens of migrs who had fled Gaddafi for Manchester returned to fight him.

In Libya, many connected with Islamist militias, the most capable anti-Gaddafi forces, and swelled their ranks.

Bilal Bettammer, a Libyan student and social activist in the revolution, now a lawyer in Canada, recalls the influx.

"I'd say of the more hardline groups, 60 or 70 per cent of their fighters in the beginning were from abroad. In 2011 we noticed a big influence from Manchester. There were lots of them in Derna. There were Libyan families here cashing British welfare cheques. Those went a long way in dinar."

Mr Bettammer recalls watching a British preacher in Libya. "We have to choose sharia and reject secularism, he was saying. He was from Manchester, talking about stories of his life there. About the need to convert people. It was all the usual rhetoric but, in Libya, it had a violent meaning."

Mr Bettammer says he and other secularist campaigners tried to warn the British ambassador to Libya at the time about the number of Britons and their radical views but were rebuffed. The UK, he says, wanted to encourage them instead because it viewed the Islamist groups as a more viable anti-Gaddafi alternative to native secularists.

Libyans dubbed the ranks of British Islamists "double shafras" - shafra is the Arabic word for a SIM card. It is a telling metaphor for the degree to which the fighters easily straddled two worlds. Back in Manchester, the phenomenon was well known in the Libyan community. "I think everyone knows someone who went," a local housewife says.

But within the Libyan foreign fighter movement another divide would emerge, as younger fighters became more radicalised.

Akram Ramadan, a Libyan who lives upstairs from one of the flats in Manchester's Whalley Range neighbourhood that was raided in the wake of the attack, says a "lack of family control" led many of the younger Mancunian fighters towards violent anti-western jihadism. Mr Ramadan fought against Gaddafi in the revolution and saw its effects on the sons of Manchester's Libyan fighters.

"They're not accepted in any society this society or that society over there," Mr Ramadan says. "Here, they look foreign. There, they sound foreign. There's no acceptance of them or appreciation for what they did.

"It happened to a lot of kids. They hung about together and played football together. Some of them went into drugs. Some of them got their heads down and went into study. Some were easy picking for the terrorists."

Even before Abedi's atrocity, there was evidence of the problem.

Last year, Abdelraouf Abdallah, who had fought in Libya, was jailed for terrorism offences. Police said he had become one of IS' most prolific recruiters in the UK. He was well known to the Abedi family. After a bullet in his spine left him wheelchair-bound in 2012, Abedi's brother Ramadan spent time at Abdallah's bedside in Tripoli.

It is still far from clear when or how Salman Abedi fell in with IS or even if he did. IS has claimed him as a member, but the group's messaging has been uncharacteristically confused.

UK security officials are treading carefully. The connections between the Abedis and Islamist networks in Libya are firmly established, says one western diplomat based in Tripoli. But the interactions between those networks and IS is still unclear.

In some ways, the distinctions as to which group a terrorist like Abedi took directions from are artificial, says Raffaello Pantucci, international director at the think-tank RUSI. "Before you may have had these specific networks, but really the key point now is that, certainly in the UK context, it's all the same pool of people the same radical community that these extremist groups' attack planners go fishing in."

Homegrown terrorists like Abedi, Mr Pantucci says, are less likely to make doctrinaire distinctions about the groups they are affiliated with than the senior figures in those groups directing them. "These kids go to a war zone populated by Islamists, then they come back to the UK, they know bombs, they know how to make bullets," says Mr Bettammer, the former activist. "[Salman Abedi] was in Libya fighting other Muslims. What do you think he's going to do when he's back in the UK?"

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Britain counts cost of ignoring Libyan extremists - The Australian Financial Review