A year after ISIS left, battered and ‘dead’ Libyan city struggles to revive itself
SIRTE, Libya: At one end of Al Nahda Street, three families with small children live in a shell-pocked townhouse with an unexploded bomb embedded in its roof. At the other end, an old man has spent weeks eating one meal a day. He is on the edge of begging.
In between them extends a landscape of obliterated houses, charred cars, mangled steel and other detritus of war. On a recent morning, that’s where Mahmoud Ameesh was sifting through the rubble of his son’s home, searching for firewood. The roof had collapsed. The front doors were broken and unhinged, much like the lives of the residents.
“My entire family was born on this street,” said Ameesh, eyes welling with tears.
Libyan militias, aided by US Special Forces and airstrikes, drove out Islamic State militants from their stronghold of Sirte in December 2016, ending their brutal rule and aspirations for an alternate capital in North Africa. A year later, this sprawling coastal city remains deeply scarred physically and psychologically.
Whole neighbourhoods are flattened. Thousands of families have yet to return. Many who have come back are renting in half- destroyed buildings. Schools and hospitals are partially functioning, as are businesses. Streets are covered in garbage. The smell melds with the stench from sewers that don’t work.
Skeletons in rotting clothes still lie in the wreckage, posing risks of disease. And death still lurks in land mines undiscovered in the debris.
“All they cared about was liberating Sirte,” said Salah Mohamed, a taxi driver who lives on the townhouse’s top floor, directly under the bomb. “They didn’t care about the aftermath.”
Although they no longer control significant territory in Libya, the Islamic State affiliate has staged suicide bombings and attacked pro- government checkpoints this year. American and Libyan intelligence officials say the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is seeking to regroup in areas south of Sirte.
The ambitions of the Islamic State in Libya will shape the country’s trajectory over the months and years to come, especially as the group seeks alternative havens following its recent defeats in Syria and Iraq. The factors that abetted its rise initially in Libya - insecurity, weak government, tribal tensions, and the abundance of weapons and competing armed groups - are still strong.
Deepening the resentment in Sirte are a plunging economy and rising prices. The fragile UN-backed government, one of three contesting for influence in the country, is struggling even to pay its own employees’ salaries. “We have been forgotten,” said Mustafa Ali, a local aid worker whose home was destroyed.
There is also a sense that their neglect owes as much to Libya’s divisive past. This is the hometown of the late dictator Moammar Gaddafi, and many local tribes were his staunch loyalists. That history has marginalised the population, said residents and local officials.
The militias who control Sirte are from Misrata, among the first to revolt against Gaddafi in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. These militias remain suspicious, accusing many here of collaborating with the Islamic State extremists.
“They think that the people of Sirte wanted Daesh to stay,” Ali added, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
Six years ago, Ameesh’s house was destroyed for the first time.
It was the fall of 2011, and Gaddafi had fled to Sirte from Tripoli. Fierce battles broke out between his loyalists and mostly Misratan rebel forces. Gaddafi and his son were killed, their bodies were taken to Misrata, 150 miles west of here, and displayed in a freezer container.
By then, Ameesh had fled to Misrata with his wife and large family. When they returned, his house had burned to the ground.
He owned a jewellery shop, among other businesses. Over the next three years, he rebuilt the house.
The Islamic State affiliate emerged after the revolution, exploiting the power vacuum to become the group’s most muscular branch outside the Middle East. While the city’s links to Gaddafi made it a symbolic target, it was also a strategic one: Sirte is nestled in the petroleum crescent, home to much of Libya’s vast oil and gas reserves.
With support from local Islamist militants and Gaddafi’s tribal loyalists who felt disenfranchised, the Islamic State was in control of Sirte by the summer of 2015. They forced men to grow beards and women to wear head-to-toe black abayas. Cigarettes and alcohol were forbidden. Religious police enforced the new dictates.
One day, they caught Ameesh outside the mosque at prayer time. He was locked up in a room for a few hours before being released with a warning, he recalled. “You’ll be executed in Zaafran Square next time,” one militant said, referring to a roundabout where ISIS held public crucifixions and forced residents to watch. Then, one of Ameesh’s sons was taken into custody in the spring of 2016. The militants ordered him to join their fold.
But Ameesh contacted influential tribal elders and they managed to have him released.
“I decided to leave with my family quickly,” said Ameesh, who took his family again to Misrata.