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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?"

Read the original:
Britain counts cost of ignoring Libyan extremists - The Australian Financial Review

Tunis - Tunisian security forces on Saturday rescued 126 sub-Saharan migrants including seven pregnant women who had been trying to reach Europe from Libya, a Red Crescent official said.

Fishermen had alerted the authorities to the presence of a vessel in distress off Ben Guerdane in southern Tunisia near the border with Libya, Dr Mongi Slim told AFP.

Among the migrants were 48 women, seven of them pregnant, and three children.

Those rescued were mainly from Nigeria, Mali and Gambia, and had set off from Libya, he added.

They were taken to the Tunisian port of Zarzis to be given first aid before later being transferred to nearby Medenine, he said.

People traffickers have exploited the chaos that has ravaged Libya since the 2011 revolution that toppled and killed Moammar Gaddafi to expand their lucrative trade.

Each year they send desperate migrants seeking a better life in Europe on the dangerous voyage to Italy, often aboard boats in too poor a condition to complete the trip.

On Friday, more than 3 400 migrants were rescued off Libya, bringing to about 10 000 the total number rescued over four days, Libyan and Italian officials said.

At least 10 bodies were also found by the Italian coastguard.

24.com encourages commentary submitted via MyNews24. Contributions of 200 words or more will be considered for publication.

Excerpt from:
Tunisia rescues 126 migrants who set off from Libya - News24

Taormina - G7 nations including France and Britain came under pressure on Saturday from Libya's neighbours to help put out the fires of a conflict that is already causing trouble further afield.

The world's most powerful democracies, at annual summit talks, called in a statement for "inclusive political dialogue and national reconciliation" in Libya - but stopped short of any detailed pledges of collective help.

They had been joined at the summit by African leaders whose countries are all implicated in the migration crisis affecting Europe.

Lawlessness in Libya has facilitated the transit of hundreds of thousands of African migrants embarking on perilous voyages across the Mediterranean.

And it is now directly implicated in European terrorism after a Briton of Libyan descent blew himself up at a Manchester concert, killing 22 people including several children.

"The fight against terrorism (in North Africa) demands that urgent measures be taken to extinguish the Libyan cauldron," Niger's President Mahamadou Issoufou told the G7 countries.

Niger lies to Libya's south and Issoufou said a holistic approach was needed to deal with issues surrounding security, economy and extremist ideology.

He urged both the G7 and the United Nations to "devote the means necessary" to set up a rapid reaction force against regional jihadists sought by Niger and other countries in the Sahel region.

France and Britain, two of the G7's top military powers alongside the United States, face particular criticism for helping to topple the Libyan regime of Moammar Gaddafi in 2011 without planning sufficiently for the power vacuum that ensued as the country plunged into chaos.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, at the G7, said the Manchester suicide bomber's links to Libya "undoubtedly shine a spotlight on this largely ungoverned space on the edge of Europe".

"So we must redouble our support for a UN-led effort that brings all the parties to the negotiating table and reduces the threat of terror from that region," she said on Friday.

In a meeting on Saturday on the G7 margins with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi underlined the need for collective action on Libya.

The security challenge, in particular dealing with the proliferation of armed groups, would take "long months to stabilise", Essebsi said, according to a French official.

24.com encourages commentary submitted via MyNews24. Contributions of 200 words or more will be considered for publication.

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G7 urged to douse Libyan inferno - News24

The father and a brother of suspected Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi have been detained by security personnel in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, according to witnesses and officials.

Ramadan Abedi, at his home before being detained in Tripoli, Libya, on May 24.

Photographer: Ghaith Shennib/Bloomberg

Three vehicles drove up to the Abedi home Wednesday evening and several men wearing uniform, some of them masked, detained Ramadan Abedi, the alleged attackers father, and two other unidentified men in the street. It wasnt immediately possible to reach a spokesman for the United-Nations backed government in Tripoli for comment.

Separately, security forces announced they had Salman Abedis younger brother, Hesham, in custody. In a statement, theSpecial Deterrence Force said he had admitted to having links with Islamic State and being in the U.K. at the time the Manchester attack was being planned. The statement said Hesham had received money from his elder sibling. The force couldnt immediately be contacted.

The 22 people killed in the Manchester bombing included elementary school students, with the youngest just eight years old. Of the 59 wounded, many were children under 16. The U.K.s terrorism threat has been raised from severe to critical -- the highest level -- for the first time since 2007, meaning another attack may be imminent. The army will be deployed to guard national sites under police review as campaigning for the June 8 general election resumes on Thursday. Authorities fear Abedi wasnt working alone.

Ramadan Abedi was detained hours after he described in an interview with Bloomberg his disbelief over newshis 22-year-old son had carried out the U.K.s deadliest act of terrorism in more than a decade. He said the two had last week spoke about meeting in Tripoli during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

When asked if he had been contacted by British authorities about his son, who was reportedly known to the U.K. security services before Mondays bombing of a pop concert in Manchester, northwest England,Ramadan Abedi answered No.

The fasting month starts this weekend. I was really shocked when I saw the news, I still dont believe it,he said in Libyas capital.

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My son was as religious as any child who opens his eyes in a religious family, said Ramadan Abedi, who arrived in the U.K. from his native Libya in the 1990s and stayed until 2008. As we were discussing news of similar attacks earlier, he was always against those attacks, saying theres no religious justification for them. I dont understand how hed have become involved in an attack that led to the killing of children.

Salman Abedi made frequent trips to visit his family in Libya, his father said, and was in the country last week, where he had told his mother he intended to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

My son was supposed to be with us for Ramadan, but he told us he was going to do Umrah, via the U.K., and thats why he left,he said, using the term for a lesser pilgrimage to Mecca that can be undertaken at any time of the year.

Until now my son is a suspect, and the authorities havent come up with a final conclusion, Ramadan Abedi, who was born in 1965, said in the interview, insisting on his sons innocence. Every father knows his son and his thoughts, my son does not have extremist thoughts.

Abedi was first revealed as the attacker on Tuesday by CBS in the U.S., prompting U.K. police to put out a statement saying speculation was unhelpful and potentially damaging to the investigation. The U.K. later confirmed his identity. British Home Secretary Amber Rudd later criticized U.S. officials for the initial leaks in an usually blunt rebuke.

On Wednesday, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told a television interviewer that Abedi had traveled to Syria and had Islamic State links.

Islamic State claimed the Manchester attack in a short message in Arabic and Englishposted on the online messaging service Telegram and picked up by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant websites. It did not give any details about the attacker, or how the blast was carried out, leading some analysts to question the extent of the militant groups involvement.

Ramadan Abedi said he served as a security officer during Muammar Qaddafis rule before being accused by the regime of links to extremist groups, accusations he strongly denies. He left for the U.K. in 1993, returning to Libya in 2008, where he was joined by most of his family after the ouster of Qaddafi in the 2011 revolution. Salman and one brother stayed in the U.K. to finish their studies.

Libya descended into turmoil after the NATO-backed uprising that ousted Qaddafi in 2011, with myriad armed groups -- some of them Islamist -- and two administrations vying for influence.

I was working with homeland security, under Qaddafi, the father said. I know the dangers of those extremist groups, and I was raising my children to make them aware of those groups.

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Father and Brother of Manchester Bomber Arrested in Libya ...