Haftar’s forces take base from militants

Libya National Army backed by air strikes liberates Jufra from Benghazi Defence Brigades, removing their threat to oilfields

Libya’s eastern army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar has captured a key desert base from militants.

Two days of fighting backed by intensive air strikes have seen the Libya National Army, which is loyal to the House of Representatives parliament in the eastern town of Tobruk, capture Jufra airbase, 500 kilometres south-west of Tripoli.

Mohamed Al Afirs, spokesman for the army, said soldiers entered the base yesterday morning to find it deserted, a day after fierce fighting near by.

The base’s capture came after the army secured the towns of Waddan, Hun and Sawkna on Thursday and Friday.

Jufra was the main base for the Benghazi Defence Brigades, a radical militia from the city of the same name.

Around the region is a complex of bases, ammunition stores and an airbase dating to the rule of the late Muammar Qaddafi, who was deposed in the 2011 revolution.

These bases were the springboard for an attack by the Brigades on the country’s biggest oil ports – Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, 250km to the north-east – on March 4.

The ports were recaptured by the army 10 days later.

The army’s Jufra offensive came after Egypt launched air strikes on militants in the region and Derna, on the northeast coast, in response to the murders of 29 Coptic Christians in Egypt’s Minya province on May 26

Cairo said it was targeting militant bases where the attackers had been trained.

Army forces attacked the area around Jufra airbase from several directions starting late on Thursday, led by an elite brigade called the Zawiya Martyrs and backed by several waves of air strikes. Army spokesman Ahmed Al Mismari said casualties from the battles had been light, with six dead from either side.

The capture of Jufra follows army victories last month in the seizure of two strategic air bases to the south-west of the country.

The offensives have given the army domination of much of the country’s interior.

The army’s loyalty to the Tobruk parliament places it in opposition to the UN-backed Government of National Accord in Tripoli.

Taking control of Jufra removes the Brigades’ threat to the oil ports and cements the parliament’s control over the ports and the Oil Crescent, home to more than two-thirds of Libya’s oil production.

The fighting has exposed the delicate tangle of factions in Libya’s complicated civil war, which began in July 2014.

The Brigades support Tripoli, and handed the two central oil ports to its control for the short time it held them in March. But Tripoli insists it has no control over the militants.

Diplomats fear the fighting will diminish the chances of peace talks between the rival regimes in Tripoli and Tobruk.

After international mediation, parliament and Tripoli agreed last month to form a commission to find a peace formula, but with the balance of the war changing in favour of parliament legislators are likely to be less willing to compromise with Tripoli.

Army leaders say they intend to expand the offensive, driving north- west towards the town of Bani Walid, where sympathetic security forces last week clashed with ISIL units outside the town.

“We will move to the west, to Bani Walid, very gradually because this is a very dangerous area,” Mr Al Mismari said.

Tripoli has not commented on the offensive in Jufra but is facing problems of its own in the capital, where militias – some pro-Government of National Accord, some backing a third rival government, the Salvation Government – fought street battles that killed 28 on May 26.

The fighting was the most serious in a string of eruptions of violence between the various militias controlling the capital as they battle for supremacy and power in the chaos that is Libya.