Libya foes step up air war as ground battle stalls

TRIPOLI: Libya’s rival forces have taken their battle for Tripoli to the skies as fighting stalls on the ground, alarming UN envoy Ghassan Salame who has stepped up calls for a truce. More than 1,000 people have been killed since commander Khalifa Haftar launched an offensive on April 4 to take the capital, but there have been no major breakthroughs on the battlefield.

Fighters loyal to the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) have kept Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) at bay on the southern outskirts of the city. “The inability of both one camp and the other to make military progress... is pushing them to rethink their military tactics,” said Khaled al-Montasser, a professor at Tripoli University. Montasser said that the two sides were now targeting each other’s “rear bases, supply centres and troop concentrations”.

With the front lines largely static, both sides are resorting to strikes using warplanes and drones supplied by their foreign supporters to span the large distances between populated centres. The LNA said it carried out strikes over the weekend on 10 targets, including a military academy in Misrata, some 200 kilometers east of the capital. Five doctors were killed in the air raids, according to the GNA. The raids came after air strikes Friday on Haftar’s strategic air base of Al-Jufra, 650 kilometers south of Tripoli. Its fall would severely degrade the LNA assault. — AFP