ERDOGAN MAY SEND TROOPS TO LIBYA
Turkey seeks to counter forces backed by Russia
Turkey moved closer to a major military intervention in Libya’s escalating civil war on Thursday, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a parliamentary vote that could send troops in a matter of weeks to support the embattled government of the North African country.
Erdogan wants to counter the Russian-backed forces of the militia leader Khalifa Hifter, who have put the Libyan capital, Tripoli, under siege since April.
Tripoli residents said Thursday that the Russian support appeared to be accelerating the advance of Hifter’s forces into the city.
Although the size of the planned deployment is unclear, it would signal a far greater role for Turkey — and for Erdogan — in a chaotic war that had already become a proxy battle among regional powers.
Erdogan, whose government has supplied armored vehicles and drones to the United Nations-recognized government of Libya, said in early December that his country might send troops, too. But as recently as Wednesday, when he met with Libyan and Tunisian officials in Tunis, he also said that Turkey would intervene only at the request of the government in Tripoli.
On Thursday, he said that a request had come and that Turkey’s parliament, which his party controls, would consider it next month.
“We do not go where we are not invited. Right now, there is an invitation that we will respond to,” Erdogan told a meeting of his governing party in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. “If God permits, as soon as the Parliament opens, as the first thing to do, we will present the deployment of troops resolution to our Parliament.”
It was unclear, though, whether the Libyan government actually had formally invited Turkey to send troops. Speaking in Tunis, Libya’s interior minister, Fathi Bashagha, told reporters Thursday that the government would request help if the situation deteriorated further.
“If the situation escalates then we have the right to defend Tripoli and its residents,” Bashagha said, according to Reuters.
Since the 2011 rebellion that toppled and killed dictator Moammar Gadhafi, Libya has been battered and fragmented by factional fighting. Hifter, a former officer in Gadhafi’s military, spent years trying to overthrow him, including during a long period living in the United States.
Hifter is backed by the United Arab Emirates and by Egypt, and has received help from France.