In late August, the top-ranking U.S. military commander in Africa toured Libya — and had a cordial meeting in Benghazi with a notorious warlord: Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter.
U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, called on Hifter, the leader of the Libyan National Army, during his series of meetings with top officials in Libya to “further cooperation” between the U.S. and that nation. Hifter “expressed a desire to expand security engagement with the U.S.” when they spoke, according to an AFRICOM press release.
Left out of the AFRICOM announcement is any mention that Hifter is a notorious “warlord,” according to members of Congress, whose LNA, which the State Department lumps in with “other nonstate actors, including foreign fighters and mercenaries,” has been accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and gross violations of human rights.
In 2019, I watched as Hifter’s forces lobbed munitions into the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, laying waste to civilian neighborhoods. Later, as I walked through the ruins of shattered homes, battered apartment buildings, and wrecked shops, the unmistakable scent of death hung in the air. That same year, Amnesty International documented indiscriminate strikes often using inaccurate weapons, in violation of the laws of war, by Hifter’s LNA. A year later, Human Rights Watch reported that fighters affiliated with Hifter “apparently tortured, summarily executed, and desecrated corpses of opposing fighters.” A U.S. State Department report on human rights in Libya, published earlier this year, noted that allegations of abuses committed by the LNA were “widespread” in 2023 and included “killings, arbitrary detention, unlawful recruitment or use of children, and torture.”
Langley’s predecessor at AFRICOM, Gen. Stephen Townsend, excoriated the LNA as a “destabilizing factor in the security of Libya” out to further its “own power and agendas.” At the time, AFRICOM said that collaboration between the LNA and mercenaries from the Russia-linked Wagner Group had “prolonged the Libyan conflict and exacerbated casualties” there. “The world heard Mr. Haftar declare he was about to unleash a new air campaign. That will be Russian mercenary pilots flying Russian-supplied aircraft to bomb Libyans,” said Townsend in 2020.
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Nick Turse is a contributing writer for The Intercept, reporting on national security and foreign policy. He is the author, most recently, of “Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan,” as well as “Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa,” and “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.” He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and Village Voice, among other publications. He has received a Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Reporting, a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Turse is a fellow at The Nation Institute and the managing editor of TomDispatch.com.
