Libya by Jacob Mundy

Author:Jacob Mundy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

The Benghazi Crucible

Questions that should have been asked in March 2011 – questions about the potentially destabilizing forces being morally endorsed and militarily empowered in Libya – were only raised in a substantive way following the events of September 11, 2012, in Benghazi. That night, two US diplomats, including the Ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, along with two US security contractors, were killed during an assault on State Department and CIA facilities.

In the weeks and months leading up to those events, Cyrenaica had already witnessed an increasing number of attacks by radical Islamists against US, British, UN, and other international targets like the Red Cross. Islamist militias had even displayed their military power in Benghazi by staging a parade in the city center amid the campaign for the upcoming elections for the General National Congress. Indeed, the level of radical Islamist activity in the east was an outcome of how the 2011 uprising emerged and proceeded. In Tripolitania, regime figures and apparatuses had been destroyed or dispersed after a long and bloody campaign, and often at the hands of Islamist militias. Cyrenaica, by contrast, had been spared a similar fate because of the large-scale defection of the core leaders and institutions in the first days of the uprising, which was then followed by the protective cover of the NATO–Arab League intervention. Whereas Islamists in the west – Tripoli in particular – faced a more fluid, dynamic, and open-ended situation, Islamists in the east confronted an entrenched, equipped, and organized elite that they opted to confront with terrorism.20

The September 11 attacks in Benghazi were initially thought to be the work of an enraged mob. Days beforehand, an inflammatory Internet video produced in the United States, one that denigrated tenets of the Islamic faith, started triggering protests throughout the Muslim world. This international unrest was undoubtedly part of the context in Benghazi, though others soon suggested that the attacks had been well planned and highly coordinated, possibly the work of a global terrorist organization like Al-Qaida. The reality was somewhere in between. The attack turned out to be the work of local jihadists. Their assault on the compound that night generated a degree of popular participation in the attack given the anti-American mood then percolating across the Islamic world.

Blame initially centered on Ansar Al-Shari‘ah, one of several avowedly Islamist militias that had coalesced to fight the Gaddafi regime in 2011. Ahmed Abu Khattala, the ostensible leader of the attack, had been a secondary figure among Cyrenaican thuwar in 2011, though his notoriety grew after being implicated in the Younis assassination.21 In the years that followed the Benghazi attacks, extensive partisan investigations in the United States were launched. Their almost exclusive, and often obsessive, focus was the role of then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the affair. In the end, these investigations proved to be little more than partisan political theater designed to undermine her 2016 bid for the US presidency.

That the 2012 assault came as a surprise to anyone was difficult

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