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Bullet holes from recent clashes riddle an apartment building in Tripoli. Bilal Hussein/AP hide caption

Bullet holes from recent clashes riddle an apartment building in Tripoli.

There was hope in Libya and around the world for Libya after Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown four years ago.

But today, Libya is a country torn apart. There are now two competing governments, in different cities with their own parliaments and their own military.

A traveler first needs a visa from one government to land in Tripoli, then a so-called "landing permission" to fly east to the other government's territory and has to hopscotch around jihadist-controlled areas along the way.

In Tripoli, one of the capitols, an umbrella group called Libya Dawn is in charge, allied with a loose group of militias. This government wants to make its case to the world and project Libya as a safe place but the country doesn't feel safe, correspondent Leila Fadel tells NPR's Scott Simon.

"The streets empty out completely at night," Fadel says. "The main mall of the city is burned down, and honestly, you just feel scared that if something does happen, there's no one to call."

Very few diplomatic missions still operate in Tripoli, the U.S. presence is gone and the city has no centralized security force. Checkpoints are manned by masked gunmen with no clear identity, Fadel says.

In another sign of the city's slide into chaos, gunmen stormed a luxury hotel Tuesday, killing 10 people, including one American. Libya's representative to OPEC went missing Thursday; last week an Italian doctor in his 70s, who worked in a Tripoli hospital, was reported missing.

Fadel flew from Tripoli east to Baida, the unofficial second capitol, where a former general, Khalifa Hiftar, is in charge. Hiftar, who is followed by many former army officers, leads what he calls an anti-Islamist, anti-extremist operation.

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Four Years After Revolution, Libya Slides Into Chaos

But the nucleus of religious extremism present in eastern Libya since the 1990s, increasing levels of internet literacy among Libya's youth and the consistent failure of successive administrations to provide jobs, growth and security have all meant that the uptake of Islamic State-inspired dogma may well have been an ultimate inevitability.

Sanitation workers clean the debris from the entrance of Tripoli's central Corinthia Hotel (AFP/Getty Images)

That it hasn't shown itself before is only down to the nature of the Tripolitanian, who abhors the extremist lifestyle, preferring instead to don the latest fashion, order cappuccini, and admire the sea view.

Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, at least some of the five men who drove their weapons-laden car into the Corinthia's car park at 9.30 on Tuesday morning were not Libyan a Tunisian and a Sudanese among them. But Libya has not been invaded by IS elements from outside.

The young men who attacked the Corinthia hotel were undoubtedly IS-inspired, but they did not sweep into Libya on the back of Toyotas wearing balaclavas, like their counterparts in northern Iraq. Several North African nationalities have diasporas in Libya and these communities' youth are just as unemployed and disillusioned as Libyans their age, with the added dejection of being foreigners in a country they likely grew up in.

These young men's Twitter feeds and Facebook pages are the roads along which IS has invaded Libya. The weapons and expertise necessary to execute an operation of this complexity are already here legacies of a revolution fought by young men with improvised weaponry and guerrilla tactics.

The only component missing up until now has been the intent to target and harm unarmed civilians in large numbers this was the threshold crossed on Tuesday morning.

A tweet posted in the opening moments of the attack by the 'Islamic State of Libya' justified the attack as an act of revenge for the death of Abu Anas Al Libi, the alleged al-Qaeda militant snatched by US Special Forces from the streets of Tripoli in October 2013 he died in US custody in New York on January 2, apparently from advanced liver cancer.

In their pursuit of revenge against America, the men shot and wounded guests on the hotel steps before entering the building and calling a lift to take them to the upper floors, where the hotel's few remaining guests were located. A remote or a timer then exploded a pre-positioned car in front of the hotel, summoning local militia forces to the scene, though by this time, they were chasing the attackers up stairwells.

A dozen employees and guests were corralled high in the hotel. The hours-long hostage ordeal ended with four of the attackers blowing themselves up using a combination of suicide vests and hand grenades. Another was detained. Most of the hostage group was safely released, but nine of their colleagues had been killed some in the crossfire, others in cold blood.

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Libya is destined to suffer more extreme Islamist violence

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