The Burning Shores by Frederic Wehrey

Author:Frederic Wehrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

9

“THIS IS DIGNITY”

GENERAL KHALIFA HIFTAR SEEMED CONFIDENT when I went to see him one day in June 2014.

Three years after his failed bid to lead the Libyan revolution, he was back on the scene. Demonstrators throughout the country cheered him as a hero, and his visage appeared on newspaper pages and television screens across the region and the globe. Foreign patrons would soon ply him with weapons. It was by any measure a remarkable turnaround for the septuagenarian officer whom many in Libya had only months before written off as an also-ran.

But he had good reasons to be paranoid. Weeks earlier, a car laden with explosives had crashed into a villa outside Benghazi where he was holding a meeting, killing three of his soldiers. It was hardly the first attempt on his life. So when I went to see him, I expected tight security.

Hiftar had set up the field command for his self-styled Libyan National Army in the farm country east of Benghazi, where the terra rosa soil nourishes tracts of barley and almond trees. Entering an old army base, I passed a derelict helicopter leaning oddly to one side. Inside, bodyguards with bull-pup assault rifles escorted me through a scanner and an invasive pat-down. They asked me to leave my belt and my shoes behind while I conducted the interview. “That’s total Qadhafi-style,” a Libyan friend later joked when I told him of the security gauntlet. He meant it in more ways than one, I would learn.

Then, just before they ushered me in to see the general, they decided to take away my pen and notepad, handing me instead a few sheets of paper and a pencil.

* * *

I’D NOT HEARD anything from General Hiftar since late 2011 and early 2012 when he’d suffered a string of embarrassing setbacks. He’d tried to have himself appointed as the chief of staff and later minister of defense but been rejected. His men had raided a Tripoli hotel used by the NTC, searching for millions of dinars supposedly stashed away by Qadhafi. They fought gun battles with Zintani militias near the airport, and his oldest son, Saddam, had been wounded in the leg during a bank melee. When it was all over, Hiftar was run out of town and all but disappeared from view.

Then, on February 14, 2014, he surfaced. Dressed in his army uniform, he appeared on television announcing the suspension of the elected parliament, the General National Congress. He called on Libyans to come out and support him, but they didn’t, shrugging off his stunt as an “electronic coup” or the “coup that wasn’t.” How could you mount a coup, they wondered, when you didn’t have an army? It seemed yet another failed bid by the aging general.

But Hiftar wasn’t finished.

Far from exiting the stage, Hiftar started quietly building support, tapping into multiple grievances, the most potent of which were anti-Islamist sentiment, eastern feelings of exclusion, and the desire for security in chaotic Benghazi. In early 2014, he started recruiting

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