Other stories have claimed the headlines in recent weeks, but what happens in Libya has potential to affect us in the UK as much as the war in Ukraine. Libya is a major staging-post for people-traffickers and a target for several groups inimical to the West. Deutsche Welle reports flare-ups between private armies in Tripoli:
In Libya this week, clashes between two rival militias left an estimated 27 people dead and over 100 more injured.
The fighting has been described as some of the worst violence in the Libyan capital for months and saw civilians trapped in their homes after shooting broke out. It is unclear as yet whether those killed and injured were combatants or civilians.
The fighting, which started late on Monday and had mostly subsided by Tuesday morning, apparently began when one militia detained a senior leader from another.
What complicates matters is that Western interests supported militias in Libya in the effort to overthrow Qaddafi, as Patrick Cockburn laid out in an article at the weekend. In an echo of what happened in Afghanistan, the leaders of those militias are now competing for power in the country. In particular, Cockburn fingers France and the US for funding Khalifa Haftar, the warlord now based in Benghazi. Consequently, official Western criticism of the violence in Libya is muted.
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