Little hope for Libya’s future

SIRTE, Libya — The people living in the ruins of Sirte’s 600 Block district have waited years for help removing rubble and rebuilding homes damaged by warfare, but, despite a new Libyan government making the city its headquarters, they have little hope of change.

They live in apartments where bullet holes let in the winter cold and summer heat in shell-pocked buildings that look structurally unsound.

“Each government comes and takes photos of the damage and does nothing for us,” said Badr Omar, an English teacher who lives in two rooms behind bare concrete blocks, the front part of his home still smashed after being hit by a rocket.

Omar’s struggles, in a city that has alternately been run by nearly every powerful faction in Libya, demonstrate how the oil-rich country’s divided rulers have been less focused on governing than on fighting or exploiting state resources.

This month, as the latest political stalemate festered, one of Libya’s two rival governments set up its headquarters in Sirte, a central coastal city near where the frontline solidified after the last major conflict paused in 2020.

The establishment there of Fathi Bashagha’s parliament appointed government, which is mainly backed by eastern factions, brings a new role to a city that has suffered some of the darkest twists of Libya’s turbulent recent history.

Sirte’s most prominent son, former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, was killed there after fleeing Tripoli during a 2011 Nato-backed uprising that ousted his regime and triggered years of violence.

The road culvert where revolutionaries found, beat and shot him, near the hotel where Bashagha stays, has been blocked with debris to discourage visits from Gaddafi’s many loyalists in Sirte and now lies covered in trash and overgrown with weeds.

REUTERS Badr Omar, an English teacher, stands in the ruins of his apartment in the 600 Block district of Sirte, Libya, that was damaged by fighting, on June 16.