UN SECURITY COUNCIL: NO MILITARY SOLUTION TO LIBYAN CONFLICT
UNITED NATIONS— The UN Security Council called on the Libyan National Army (LNA), led by former army chief Khalifa Hifter, to stop its advance on Tripoli amid fears of reintensified hostilities.
“(The council) called on LNA forces to halt all military movements,” said German UN Ambassador Christoph Heusgen, president of the council for April, also calling “on all forces to deescalate and halt military activity.”
Irony of intervention
“There can be no military solution to the conflict,” Heusgen quoted a statement of the council, whose permanent members include the United States, United Kingdom and France which covertly instigated the First Libyan Civil War of 2011.
The 2011 civil war resulted in the ouster and killing of then leader Moammar Ghadaffi and plunged the oil-rich nation in another civil war among dozens of warlords since 2014.
Hifter, a former Ghadaffi aide before he defected to the United States, is one of the most powerful of these warlords.
On Thursday, he ordered his troops in and around Benghazi to advance on Tripoli, the seat of a National Salvation Government that is recognized by the United Nations but controls less than a fourth of the North African country.
By Friday, Hifter’s forces had advanced into the southern outskirts of Tripoli and seized the former Tripoli International Airport, which has been abandoned since 2014.
Hifter’s move came after meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who went to Benghazi in a bid to escalate the simmering civil war.
“I leave Libya with a heavy heart and deeply concerned. I still hope it is possible to avoid a bloody confrontation in and around Tripoli,” he said on Twitter.
Hifter, 75, who casts himself as an opponent of Islamist extremism but is viewed by opponents as a new Gaddafi, was quoted by Al-Arabiya TV as telling Guterres the operation would continue until terrorism was defeated.
Dialogue in jeopardy
Aside from visiting Benghazi, Guterres had been in Tripoli this week to help organize a national reconciliation conference planned for later this month.
But that plan looked in jeopardy on Thursday as LNA forces took Gharyan, south of Tripoli, after skirmishes with forces allied to UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj.