U.S. drones attack ISIS camp in Libya

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military said Sunday that it had conducted drone strikes on an Islamic State training camp in Libya, killing 17 militants in the first U.S. airstrikes in the strife-torn North African nation since January.

A half-dozen “precision strikes” on Friday hit a training camp about 150 miles southeast of Sirte, from which militants were moving fighters in and out of the country, stockpiling weapons and equipment, and plotting and conducting attacks, the Pentagon’s Africa Command said in a statement. Three vehicles also were destroyed.

Between August and December 2016, the military carried out 495 airstrikes to drive the Islamic State out of Sirte, a coastal city that until then was an Islamic State stronghold. On Jan. 18, just before President Barack Obama left office, armed Reaper drones and two U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers attacked Islamic State training camps south of Sirte, killing more than 80 militants, including some the military said were involved in plotting terrorist attacks in Europe.

The most recent strikes underscore the major threat that the Islamic State still poses in the region, despite the heavy losses it has suffered. The militant group is believed to have several hundred fighters in Libya who have taken sanctuary in its vast ungoverned spaces to plot attacks inside and outside the country, and send fighters into neighboring countries like Tunisia.

“We’re seeing some signs of their regrouping in Libya,” Amanda Dory, the Pentagon’s top policy official for Africa until this summer, said at a Council on Foreign Relations panel discussion this month.

President Donald Trump authorized the airstrikes based on the recommendation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, an administration official said Sunday.

The Africa Command statement noted that the strikes, which military officials said separately were carried out by armed Reaper drones flying from a base in Sicily, were conducted in coordination with the government of Prime Minister Fayez Serraj of Libya.

Reda Eissa, a spokesman for the coalition of militias backed by Serraj’s Government of National Accord, said he had no information about Friday’s airstrikes. He referred queries to the government’s defense ministry, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Libya analysts said the area where the strikes took place is controlled by another major power broker in Libya’s fractious political landscape, Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a former Libyan army officer who was a major figure in the 2011 rebellion against the former Libyan dictator, Moammar Gadhafi.

The U.S. airstrikes come at a particularly chaotic moment for Libya. In the east, Haftar has strengthened his position, receiving a stream of Western ministers, including the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson.

Elsewhere, the Italian government has struck deals with smuggling militias to cut human trafficking to Europe. The capital, Tripoli, has seen sporadic violence as rival groups, including the U.N.backed unity government, jostle for supremacy.

The U.S. strikes took place in a desert region south of the oil crescent, where key ports changed hands between rival groups several times in spring.

“The strikes are the logical consequence to the change of the tactics of I.S.,” said Col. Wolfgang Pusztai, a former Austrian defense attache to Libya who follows the country closely, referring to the Islamic State. “This is to keep the pressure on them, as none of the Libyans considers the fight against I.S. as a priority.”

On Wednesday, in the latest attempt to revive Libya’s stuttering peace efforts, the U.N. envoy Ghassan Salame said he would seek to renegotiate a national political agreement signed in Morocco in December 2015. That announcement, at the United Nations in New York, acknowledged the chronic weakness of the unity government, which has dismally failed to assert its authority beyond Tripoli, yet retains the backing of the international community.

Salame said the United Nations was ready to facilitate a “security dialogue” with Libya’s many armed factions with a view to drawing them into the political process.