Gaddafi warned of Islamists’ rise
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi issued a prophetic warning to former British prime minister Tony Blair that Islamist militants would attack Europe if his regime imploded, newly released transcripts disclose.
Gaddafi made the prediction in two phone calls to Blair in February 2011 – just weeks before a coalition carried out air strikes against government forces in Libya, and eight months before he was beaten to death by a mob.
Blair contacted the Libyan dictator ‘‘in a personal capacity’’ to make a last-ditch attempt to persuade him to stand aside. Gaddafi insisted that he was justified in defending the north African nation from sleeper al Qaeda terrorist cells that were terrorising Libyans.
In the first of two calls on February 25, Gaddafi urged Blair to warn world leaders about jihadist militants in the country who, he said, could not be reasoned with and wanted to control the Mediterranean. They would then attack Europe, he warned.
‘‘We are not fighting them, they are attacking us,’’ he said. ‘‘An organisation has laid down sleeping cells in North Africa. Called the al Qaeda Organisation in North Africa. They have managed to get arms and terrify people. People can’t leave their homes . . . it’s a jihad situation.’’
In a second conversation later that day, the Libyan leader repeated his warning that the militants had their sights set beyond his own country.
He said: ‘‘Damage will be on the Med, Europe and the whole world. These armed groups are using the [Libyan] situation as a justification. We shall fight them.’’
Transcripts of the calls were published yesterday by the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, which is investigating the British government’s foreign policy surrounding the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime.
Crispin Blunt, the chairman of the committee, suggested that Gaddafi’s warnings might have been ‘‘wrongly ignored’’ because he was usually ‘‘delusional’’ about foreign affairs.
‘‘The evidence that the committee has taken so far in this inquiry suggests that Western policy-makers were rather less perceptive than Gaddafi about the risks of intervention for both the Libyan people and the Western interests,’’ Blunt said.
Since Gaddafi’s overthrow, much of Libya has fallen into the control of jihadists linked to Islamic State. Isis terrorists have been responsible for a spate of terror incidents in Europe.
Blair visited Gaddafi at least six times after leaving Downing Street in 2007.
In the phone calls, he urged Gaddafi to find a bolthole while constitutional reforms were put in place.
‘‘If you have a safe place to go, you should go there, because this will not end peacefully and there has to be a process of change,’’ the former prime minister said.
A massive truck bomb exploded near a police base in the western Libyan town of Zliten yesterday, killing at least 60 policemen and wounding around 200 others.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but an Isis affiliate has been trying to gain a foothold in Zliten, spreading westward from its central stronghold in the city of Sirte.