Militias clash in Libya killing 13

An armed group that tried to mediate between fighting rival militias gets attacked

TRIPOLI, Libya (AFP) — At least 13 people have been killed in fighting that flared overnight between armed groups in Tripoli, emergency services said Friday, the latest violence to hit the Libyan capital in months of rising political tensions.

Gunfire could still be heard early on Friday afternoon in eastern Tripoli after it first broke out after midnight in an area of parkland, sowing terror among Tripoli residents who head there to cool off after roasting summer days.

Dozens of people were forced to seek refuge on the campus of Tripoli University and a nearby medical center.

The fighting “killed 13 people, among them three civilians including a child aged 11, and wounded 30,” the ambulance service told news channel Libya al-Ahrar.

The dead were the first civilian casualties of fighting in Tripoli since the 2020 truce.

The fighting trapped hundreds of women attending weddings in the area, including Maisa bin Issa and her sisters.

The clashes were between two armed groups with major clout in the west of the war-torn country: The Al-Radaa force and the Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade.

Several sources said one group’s detention of a fighter belonging to the other had sparked the fighting, which extended to several districts of the capital.

The fighting trapped hundreds of women attending weddings.

On Friday, another group called the 444 Brigade intervened to mediate a truce, deploying its own forces in a buffer zone before they too came under heavy fire, an AFP photographer reported.

But Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah’s spokesperson Mohamed Hamuda tweeted on Friday afternoon that Al-Radaa, which also acts as a police force, had “committed to halt combat operations” at the request of Dbeibah and the Presidential Council.