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In this Wednesday, March 18, 2015 photo, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, Libya's top army chief, speaks during an interview with the Associated Press in al-Marj, Libya. Hifter warned Europe of Islamic State militants' infiltration to its territories through the ...
Libyan army chief warns of Islamic State spread to Europe if Libya gets no aid
AL-MARJ, Libya — Libya's army chief, Gen.
Khalifa Hifter, warned in an interview with The Associated Press on
Thursday that Europe will face infiltration by Islamic State group
militants from Libya if the West fails to support his forces with arms
and ammunition.
The Islamic State group has seized control
of at least two cities along Libya's long Mediterranean coastline and
has a strong presence in several others, its first major expansion from
its base in Syria and Iraq. In a sign of the group's reach, it claimed
responsibility on Thursday for an attack a day earlier on a museum in
neighboring Tunisia that killed 23 people, mostly foreign tourists.
The militants have been able to expand by
taking advantage of the chaos in Libya, where rival governments are
fighting for power. The elected government, which is internationally
recognized and which Hifter backs, was driven out of the capital,
Tripoli, last year and has been relegated to the small eastern city of
Tobruk and other nearby towns. A bloc of Islamist parties, backed by
militias, has set up its own government in Tripoli.
Hifter, once a top general of Moammar
Gadhafi before turning against him decades ago, is a controversial
figure. Supporters see him as the country's savior from Islamic
militants, while opponents accuse him of seeking to grab power on behalf
of supporters of Gadhafi's former regime, which was ousted in 2011. He
was recently named military chief by the Tobruk-based parliament, and
spoke to the AP in one of his eastern strongholds, al-Marj, where he has
wide tribal support.
He said his forces need backing from the West against the Islamic State group.
"We want weapons and ammunition only. We have the men. The army is increasing in number every day," he said.
He warned that IS militants will "spread in
even the European countries if (the West) doesn't offer real help to
the Libyan people, especially the Libyan army." The extremists, he said,
"will head with the illegal migrants to Europe, where corruption and
destruction will spread just like Libya. But there it will be hard to
confront them."
The number of Islamic State militants has
grown to an estimated 7,000 to 7,500, Hifter said, including fighters
from African, Arab and Middle Eastern countries trained in Syria.
Libya's elected government has appealed to
the U.N. Security Council to lift an arms embargo and facilitate its
request for dozens of fighter jets, tanks and other weapons it says it
needs to fight the Islamic State group.
The chaos in Libya is complicated because multiple conflicts are intertwined.
Over the past year, Hifter's troops have
been fighting his main Libyan rivals, the Libya Dawn militia and other
allied militias that back the Tripoli-based Islamist government. On
Thursday, his warplanes hit Tripoli's only functioning airport, the
Matiga air base, damaging the tarmac.
Army spokesman Ahmed al-Mesmari said the
base was being used to move militant fighters and weapons, an allegation
the Tripoli-based government denies. Troops under Hifter's command also
fought Thursday with Libya Dawn militiamen outside of Zawiya, some 25
miles (40 kilometers) west of Tripoli.
The yearlong violence has displaced
hundreds of thousands of Libyans, and has prompted the mass flight of
foreign workers and the closure of embassies.
At the same time, the Islamic State has
entered the fray, taking control of the coastal cities of Darna and
Sirte and spreading its influence to others, including the western city
of Sebratha, the most active launching point for illegal migrants
heading to Europe.
It has carried out attacks targeting hotels
housing foreigners in Tripoli, overrun oil fields and kidnapped foreign
workers. Last month, it released a video of a mass beheading of
Egyptian Christians kidnapped from Sirte.
The Islamic State group is fighting both
rival governments: It is battling Libya Dawn outside of Sirte and has
been targeted by Hifter's warplanes in Darna, prompting retaliatory
suicide attacks by the extremists against the elected government.
In Libya's second-biggest city, Benghazi,
Hifter's forces have been fighting IS fighters and a mix of other
Islamic militant groups for months in battles that have repeatedly seen
gruesome beheadings of his soldiers by IS militants.
Hifter accuses the Tripoli government and
its allied militias of helping the Islamic State extremists, a claim
they deny. Speaking to the AP, he also accused Qatar and Turkey of
facilitating transit of IS fighters to and from Libya, a claim both
countries deny.
Hifter said the Islamic State group had set
its sights on Libya because "it is an oil country, with a small
population, a vast country (where it is) easy to spread ... Libya's
resources of oil, gas, gold and uranium could be used (to finance) their
movement."
He said his forces were making progress against the militants in Benghazi.
"Benghazi is not simple," he said. "We tried to push them out of the city and we curbed most of them."
But in addition to the guerrilla fighting,
the extremists are resorting to what he called a "war of tunnels" in
Benghazi, in which government and residential buildings are being
connected via underground tunnels.
"We can't declare that the city is 100
percent secure ... until after searching all the buildings, especially
the government buildings," he said.
The battle against the militants has brought Hifter back into prominence in Libya after a long and controversial career.
In the 1969 coup that toppled Libya's
monarch and brought Gadhafi to power, Hifter provided crucial backing
for Gadhafi by taking over Tripoli's Matiga air base. He rose in the
ranks to become head of Gadhafi's military, but was tainted by a
disastrous defeat in a war against neighboring Chad in the 1980s. He was
captured and, when the war ended in 1987, he defected, turning against
the Gadhafi regime and eventually fleeing to the United States.
Living in exile in Virginia, he became
commander of the armed wing of an opposition group, the Libyan National
Salvation Front, and orchestrated a couple of failed coup attempts
against Gadhafi before breaking with the group. In interviews with Arab
media in the 1990s, he described himself as building an armed force with
U.S. assistance to topple Gadhafi and his associates. A 1996
Congressional Research Service report suggested that the United States
provided money and training to the National Salvation Front.
Hifter returned to Libya during the 2011 civil war that led to Gadhafi's ouster and death.
In earlier interviews, including one with
the AP last year, he insisted that he does not seek power for himself
but rather a road map in which Libya would be governed by a presidential
council for a year until new civilian leadership emerges.
"If we wanted power, nothing would prevent us. But we want a civilian state," he said at the time.
However, during Wednesday's interview,
Hifter didn't outright deny aspiring to a future political role. Asked
if he would run should a presidential vote be held in Libya, he gave
only a vague response.
"We are not in a situation to talk politics. When the time of politics comes, that will be the time to talk" he said.
"Our eyes are all on the terrorists, wherever they are," he added.
Michael reported from Cairo.
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