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More than three years after the fall of strongman Muammar Qaddafi, Libya is in the midst of a bitter civil war rooted in a balance of weakness between the country’s political factions and armed groups. With a domestic landscape torn apart by competing claims to power and with interference from regional actors serving to entrench divides, restoring stability in Libya and building a unified security structure will be difficult if not impossible without broad-based political reconciliation.

Polarized Politics, Fractured Security Institutions

• After Qaddafi, Libya’s security sector evolved into a hybrid arrangement marked by loose and imbalanced cooperation between locally organized, state-sponsored armed groups and national military and police.
   
• The system broke down as political and security institutions became increasingly polarized along regional, communal, and ideological fault lines.
   
• The country is now split between two warring camps: Operation Dignity, a coalition of eastern tribes, federalists, and disaffected military units; and Operation Dawn, an alliance of Islamist forces aligned with armed groups from Misrata. Each camp lays claim to governance and legitimacy, with its own parliament, army, and prime minister.
   
• Regional backing of the two camps—with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates supporting Dignity and Qatar, Turkey, and Sudan backing Dawn—has deepened these divisions.
   
• Outside efforts to train and equip Libya’s security institutions have failed because of this polarization. There is no effective command structure; trainees have reverted to regional loyalties or are on indefinite leave because there is no military structure for them to join.

Recommendations for Libya’s Leaders and Outside Supporters

Implement a ceasefire between Operations Dignity and Dawn and secure the withdrawal of forces taking part in those campaigns. The military units of these coalitions should move out of the major cities, and those that attacked civilians or civilian facilities should be disbanded. 

Push for a transitional government that is inclusive of all factions. A face-saving power-sharing formula should encompass all politicians and include supporters of both Dignity and Dawn—if they renounce support for terrorist groups and attacks on civilian facilities.

Implement a regional pact against military interference in Libya’s affairs. Outside powers should stop equipping and funding armed groups and push their allies in Libya toward reconciliation. A September 2014 noninterference pact—including Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, and Turkey—is a promising start.

Support the development of a new Libyan security architecture, national army, and police force by harnessing local security initiatives. After a broad political pact is forged, the United States and its allies should focus on supporting a civilian-controlled defense architecture, municipality-based forces, and local disarmament and demobilization efforts.

Introduction

Libya after strongman Muammar Qaddafi is divided. Since mid-2014, the country has spiraled toward civil war. Rival armed groups are fighting for control of Tripoli’s international airport. In the east, a breakaway faction of the Libyan armed forces led by a retired general, Khalifa Hifter, is shelling Islamist armed groups in and around Benghazi. Foreign diplomats, businessmen, employees of the United Nations mission, and the staff of the U.S. embassy have evacuated. The conflict took a dangerous regional turn with air strikes against the positions of Islamist armed groups allied with the city of Misrata by Emirati aircraft flying from Egyptian military bases.

There are effectively two rival governments. One is in Tripoli, where a coalition of armed groups from Misrata and other western towns, together with Islamists, has seized the airport and ministries. The other is in Tobruk, where a newly elected Council of Representatives and a cabinet have convened, dominated by Hifter supporters and federalists. Libya’s armed forces—both official and unofficial—are essentially at war with one another, with each faction bolstered by a constellation of tribes and towns.

Libya’s armed forces—both official and unofficial—are essentially at war with one another, with each faction bolstered by a constellation of tribes and towns.

Outside observers are often tempted toward a one-dimensional reading of Libya’s turmoil. It is easy to explain Libya’s breakdown as a political struggle between Islamists and liberals: the Justice and Construction Party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and more rejectionist, jihadi factions like the Ansar al-Sharia versus the “liberals” under the National Forces Alliance. Another level of conflict seems to be regional: a contest between the towns of Zintan in the east and Misrata for economic power and political leverage in Tripoli or among federalists and their opponents in the long-marginalized east. An additional layer is made up of remnants of the old order—ex-security men, long-serving and retired officers, former Qaddafi-era technocrats—and a newer, younger cadre of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries,” often Islamists, who were exiled or imprisoned, or both, during the dictator’s rule.

Elements of all these dimensions are at play, but none of them alone has sufficient explanatory power. At its core, Libya’s violence is an intensely local affair, stemming from deeply entrenched patronage networks battling for economic resources and political power in a state afflicted by a gaping institutional vacuum and the absence of a central arbiter with a preponderance of force. In essence, the country suffers from a balance of weakness among its political factions and armed groups: no single entity can compel others to act purely through coercion, but every entity is strong enough to veto the others.

The current landscape of political polarization and the fractured security sector presents the international community with profound dilemmas. A previous approach of supporting state institutions is problematic when those institutions—whether the army, the parliament, or ministries—are effectively split between two warring factions. Similarly, a long-planned effort to train the Libyan army can only proceed after a ceasefire and a political reconciliation that produces a clearly defined road map toward the reform of security institutions.

With this in mind, the ultimate solution for Libya’s security woes lies in context-specific security solutions, a broad political pact, a constitution, and a representative government. This is an area where outsiders can lend advice and measured assistance, but where the ultimate burden must be borne by Libyans themselves.

The Armed Groups

Too often, Libya’s armed groups are thought to be outside of Libyan society and of the state. In fact, they are deeply interwoven into both.

One of Libya’s conundrums is that nearly all the armed groups claim legitimacy from their affiliation with competing organs of the weak and fractured government. Government subsidization of these groups arose from the enfeebled state of the formal army and police. Muammar Qaddafi had marginalized those forces in favor of elite units commanded by his sons, and both the army and police had largely evaporated during the revolution that overthrew Qaddafi. Bereft of a way to project its authority and police the country’s periphery and towns, Libya’s transitional authority that took power after Qaddafi—the National Transitional Council—put the armed groups on its payroll. The chief of staff of the army, minister of defense, minister of interior, and president of the outgoing General National Congress (GNC; Libya’s legislature that succeeded the National Transitional Council) have all at one time “registered” or “deputized” coalitions of armed groups. One result of these subsidies has been a mushrooming of armed groups, well beyond the number that actually fought against Qaddafi.

What has arisen then can best be described as a hybrid security order.¹ The concept is helpful in the Libyan case for describing how the “formal” forces of the army and police work in loose and often suspicious coordination with more powerful “informal” armed groups that fall under the nominal writ of the government, backed by traditional tribal and religious authorities.

The results of this arrangement in Libya have been mixed and highly dependent on location. In some homogenous communities where the armed groups enjoyed organic roots and social ties, the forces played a role akin to a local gendarmerie, performing functions like narcotics interdiction, guarding schools and hospitals, and even street maintenance. But in mixed or strategically important locales, namely Tripoli and Benghazi, they have evolved into dangerously parasitic and predatory entities, pursuing agendas that are at once criminal, political, and ideological.

Contrary to some assumptions, no one faction is blameless on this front. Islamist, Misratan, Zintani, and federalist armed groups have all used force or the threat of force to pressure the country’s elected institutions, capture smuggling, or seize strategic assets like border checkpoints, oil facilities, armories, ports, and, perhaps most importantly, airports.

This is particularly true with the Zintani and Misratan armed groups that are best known for their economic predation on the capital. Take, for instance, the notorious Qaqa Brigade, composed largely of Zintani members but based in Tripoli. Its commander, Uthman Mlegta, is a sturdy, bearded man that I met in his unit’s heavily guarded compound in western Tripoli. The hallways of Mlegta’s offices displayed a bureaucratic efficiency and formality that exceeded that of the regular defense ministry: there was a waiting room, a protocol office, and a logistics and payroll section, all clearly marked.

“We decided that our goal is to keep the capital safe,” Mlegta said in early 2012. “Once everything returns to normal we will give up our arms.” What that normalcy will look like is hard to say, especially since the brigade has become a major player in Tripoli’s criminal underworld. Officially, the Qaqa Brigade affiliated itself with the army’s chief of staff, providing border security along the country’s porous southwest frontier and guarding oil installations in the southern fields. But it is widely known as the most predatory and mafia-like of Tripoli’s armed groups.

More recently, the Qaqa Brigade became increasingly political, acting in effect as the armed wing for former prime minister Mahmoud Jibril’s party, the National Forces Alliance (Mlegta’s brother is the head of the alliance’s steering committee).² In January, Mlegta’s men threatened to shut down the elected legislature in response to a move to extend the GNC’s mandate by his archrivals, the Misratans. It was one of several near-coup attempts that heralded a dangerous new chapter in Libya’s troubled journey.³

The de facto division of turf between Zintani and Misratan armed groups, in which local militias allied with each town controlled ministries and strategic sites like airports, preserved a shaky peace marked by episodic clashes. Yet, the arrangement always carried the seeds of greater violence, particularly since the Zintani groups began using their control of Tripoli’s international airport to receive weapons from abroad. In the context of growing polarization in the GNC and the launch of General Hifter’s Operation Dignity in the east, it escalated into open fighting.

The Islamist armed groups in the east reflect that region’s longtime alienation from the center and increasing embrace of moral piety and purity.

The Islamist armed groups in the east, meanwhile, reflect that region’s longtime alienation from the center and increasing embrace of moral piety and purity. The most powerful of these bodies arose in the early days of the anti-Qaddafi uprising: the February 17 Revolutionary Martyrs’ Brigade, the Rafallah al-Sahati Companies, the Zawiya Martyrs’ Brigade, the Martyr Omar Mukhtar Brigade, the Abu Slim Martyrs’ Brigade, and the Free Libyan Martyrs’ Brigade. The restless young men of the east flocked to their ranks, drawn by the promise of an ethical code, camaraderie, adventure, and income. Few had other options. On the roster of recruits for one of these units, the Zawiya Martyrs’ Brigade, a number of prerevolutionary employment categories appeared with depressing frequency: day laborer, unemployed, mechanic, or student. Battling loyalist forces, these young men found a new purpose. And when Qaddafi fell, they found it hard to go back to what they were before.

Many now refuse to surrender arms, demobilize, and integrate into the formal security apparatus. They demand that the regular security forces first be “cleansed” of Qaddafi-era personnel. This is not simply a political imperative, but a moral one. The Islamists routinely decry state institutions as being irreparably tainted by ethically bankrupt supporters of the former regime: “Womanizers and drug addicts,” as one Islamist leader icily put it. Another precondition is the implementation of a constitution based on sharia law that protects the moral sanctity of the army. “We want an army that defends Islamic law and the people, not the taghut,” the former commander of the Rafallah al-Sahati Companies, Ismail al-Sallabi, said in November 2013, using the potent Islamic term for “tyrant.” Still, despite their distaste for Qaddafi-era institutions, these Islamists do not act entirely beyond the pale of state authority.

The Hybrid Security Sector

Nearly all the armed groups operating in Libya are affiliated with the state in some way, which has led to the establishment of a hybrid arrangement between formal and informal forces. This arrangement stems from a fateful set of policies enacted after Qaddafi’s fall, in late 2011 and early 2012, by the country’s weak and unelected transitional government, the National Transitional Council.

Bereft of a way to project its weak authority and keep order, the National Transitional Council tried to establish a measure of control over the armed groups by putting them on its payroll. The idea was to harness the manpower and firepower of the revolutionaries to fill the security void left by the nearly nonexistent police and army, the remnants of which were viewed as tainted in the postrevolutionary era by their association with Qaddafi’s rule. Most importantly, the intention behind the subsidization of armed groups was to use them to quell the increasingly frequent outbreaks of communal and ethnic fighting that were flaring up in the country.

Over time, most of the armed groups subordinated themselves to the chief of staff and Ministry of Defense. Many joined the Libya Shield Force, which acted as the country’s army, and the Preventative Security Apparatus, a counterintelligence and investigative service that arose in the early days of the revolution to root out Qaddafi loyalists. Others joined the Ministry of Interior’s Supreme Security Committee (SSC), which roughly approximated the functions of the police. The SSC was always stronger in Tripoli than in other areas. Because entire armed groups joined the SSC and Shield forces, the new structures essentially preserved the cohesion and parochial outlook of the armed groups, albeit under the cover of the state.

By all accounts, the impact of this hybrid arrangement has been mixed, if not negative for Libya’s stability and its fragile democracy. The government subsidized both the Libya Shield and the SSC, which had the undesirable effect of swelling the size of the armed groups that made up the bulk of the forces as young men flocked to their ranks, drawn by the promise of a steady salary that far exceeded that of the police and army.

Effectively deputized by the government and flush with funds, the armed groups were even more emboldened to pursue agendas that were increasingly political and self-serving. At best the Libya Shield and SSC structures were ways for the Libyan government to purchase firepower when needed to quell crises. But the new structures took on a life of their own, stymieing efforts to build up the regular army. Libyans refer to these forces as a shadow security state, a parallel army, and, even worse, a reincarnation of the dreaded “popular” and “revolutionary” committees that terrorized the country under Qaddafi.

Both the regular armed forces and the police have taken a backseat to the Libya Shield, the SSC, and several other paramilitaries—a system that mirrors the arrangement that existed in the twilight years of Qaddafi’s rule. Then, the army and police had ceded control of operational tasks to, respectively, the security battalions commanded by Qaddafi’s sons and the internal security service that answered directly to Qaddafi’s office.

In many parts of the country, it is the armed groups, not the army, that control defense ministries, barracks, bases, and ammunition depots.

Today, Libya’s formal armed forces are extremely ill-equipped, poorly trained, and bloated at the senior ranks. In many parts of the country, it is the armed groups, not the army, that control defense ministries, barracks, bases, and ammunition depots. The police force fares slightly better, but it is still unequipped to handle more difficult and hazardous policing tasks.

For the most part, the regular forces and the armed groups operate in two parallel tracks. There have been a few instances of truly mixed units in which the members of the armed groups and regular army forces are fully integrated. But in most cases, the relationship between the two sides is marked by ambivalence, hostility, and a lack of coordination. The regular army frequently has hostile relations with the Libya Shield and other paramilitaries. The senior army officers regard the Libya Shield as an ill-disciplined, highly politicized, and Islamist group. Meanwhile, the Libya Shield sees the regular army as a hollow, corrupt, and top-heavy force. The SSC’s relationship with the police is marked by similar distrust; the police are seen as incompetent and tainted by the legacy of affiliation with the Qaddafi regime. For their part, the police see the SSC forces, like the Shield units, as unruly, ideological, and criminal.

These new hybrid security formations, the Libya Shield and the SSC, developed an arsonist-and-fireman approach to Libya’s security: they justified their continued utility and existence to the fragile government on the basis of their ability to handle neighborhood security, catch drug smugglers, and quell outbreaks of communal and ethnic fighting in the country’s far-flung provinces. But in many cases, the members of these Shield and SSC forces, and other “registered” armed groups were worsening the country’s instability by either being directly involved in criminal activity or fighting as partisans in the conflicts they were meant to subdue.

The Libya Shield Force: The Shadow Armies

Many Libyans point to the Libya Shield project as the original sin of the National Transitional Council; a Faustian bargain that sent the country spinning on a downward trajectory. “The Shields are a Frankenstein,” lamented one senior official.

Powerful commanders of the revolutionary armed groups undertook the Shield project as a way to resist incorporation into the regular Libyan army, which they loathed for its association with the old regime. Libya’s transitional government placed the Shield forces under the authority of the chief of staff of the army, General Yousef Mangoush. Without its own army and police, the government deployed the Libya Shield to quell ethnic and tribal fighting across the country. The Shield forces acted, in the words of one Western adviser, as “Libya’s fire brigades.”

In the past two years, the Libya Shield has become a shadow army that has rapidly eclipsed the power of the regular forces. The monthly government salary for a Shield member exceeds that of a regular policeman and army recruit, giving the members of the armed groups or would-be recruits little incentive to join the government’s formal forces. In other instances, double- and triple-dipping occurs: because of the system of unregulated, direct payments to commanders of armed groups and the absence of an effective registration system, a young man might be a member of a Shield, his local armed group that had been subsumed under the Shield but still operated independently, and the police all at the same time.

Organizationally, there are twelve Shield divisions arrayed across the country. Each Shield division is aligned with a particular region.

On the official organizational charts, the divisions are commanded by a regular Libyan army officer, usually a colonel. In reality, though, the commander of an armed formation whose men comprise the Shield division calls the shots.

The most damning defect of this system is that the Shield preserves the structure and cohesion of the armed groups. The heads of the individual armed formations are free to pursue their own agendas—whether ideological, regional, or criminal—while operating as a commander in the Libya Shield, using the official writ of the government as cover. This has been particularly destabilizing in the case of the ongoing fighting between Zintani and Misratan armed groups in the capital.

The individual Shield divisions comprise the young men of the towns and provinces where they are garrisoned, and they reflect the parochial agendas and outlooks of those regions. The Center Shield, for example, is largely Misratan, and the Benghazi-based Libya Shield One has an eastern Islamist hue, along with a strong tribal component. In some cases, an entire Shield division is simply an armed group that has changed its affiliation; this is the case of the Libya Shield Seven, which is composed of the Rafallah al-Sahati Companies.⁴

The sizes of the divisions vary, but they usually have no more than 1,000 members—a limit that reflects the neighborhood and municipal origins of the armed formations and their inability, for a variety of personal and turf-related reasons, to merge into larger structures.⁵ Disagreements and fissures are common. New Shield divisions have emerged in response to personality conflicts among their commanders.

In mid-2012, a Misrata-based Shield commander, Colonel Salem Joha, put forward a proposal to convert the Libya Shield into a more regular, formal branch of the military. Joha is a legendary figure in Misratan circles. A former artillery officer, he led the defense of the city during its epic siege by Qaddafi forces. After the war, he won plaudits from all factions for being pragmatic and uncommonly nonpartisan about the future path of Libya’s security sector.

He spoke optimistically in the summer of 2012 about the ways in which his plan would erode the autonomy of the armed groups. Shield members would act, in effect, as the country’s reserve military force, training for one month a year and receiving, in turn, a monthly stipend and medical benefits for themselves and their families. Soldiers would serve in locally garrisoned units close to their hometowns on two-year contracts. Recruits would join as individuals, not as part of an armed formation. Collecting the country’s arms was an integral part of the plan: the armed groups would hand over their heavy weaponry—artillery, tanks, Soviet-era GRAD rockets, recoilless rifles—to the Shield forces. The government would buy back medium-sized weaponry like 14.5- and 23-millimeter antiaircraft guns, along with MILAN and KORNET antitank missiles—the staples of the 2011 revolution. Those weapons stores would be kept in regional “military zones” overseen by local Shield commanders.⁶

In all earnestness, Joha intended for the Shield’s transition to a reserve force to break up the armed groups and their political backers, the local military councils in Libya’s towns that were established during and after the revolution to coordinate the armed groups and advocate for their members at the national level. “There’s no need for them anymore,” he said. “They were a product of war. Now they are a shadow government and they need to disappear.”

But it was hard not to see the plan as a way to preserve the prerogatives of the armed groups and position the Libya Shield as a parallel structure to the national army—and as a hedge against an unfavorable political situation in Tripoli. The fact that the reserve plan originated in Misrata is not surprising, given that town’s go-it-alone reputation, powerful armed groups, and claim to the mantle of the revolution. “Misrata will start this initiative,” Joha stated, “and we are confident that other cities will follow.”

In the end, the plan collapsed due to opposition both in Misrata and across Libya’s broader political spectrum. In large part this occurred because Joha’s project violated a fundamental tenet of the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration canon: it tried to collect the armed groups’ weapons before a broad-based political consensus was reached. Joha also faced increasing harassment and threats of violence from Misratan hardliners who opposed his inclusive approach. He departed the country to serve as Libya’s defense attaché in the United Arab Emirates. What the Joha episode shows is that deeply engrained political rifts have frustrated even the most promising, nonpartisan plans and perpetuate the parallel, hybrid structure.

The Shield divisions have since taken on their own momentum, presenting themselves as the indispensable pillar of Libya’s transition. The Libya Shield Four, for example, cast doubt on the idea that there is a viable alternative to the Libya Shield in the absence of a “strong, respectable army with a clear, true military creed that all Libyans trust.”⁷ Other statements implied that the Shield forces were protecting the fragile army, with commanders warning they would move against anyone who approaches air force bases, camps, or army headquarters.⁸ But critics argue otherwise. “The Shields actually enlarged the gap between rebels and soldiers,” noted one observer.

In nearly all cases in which Shield divisions were sent to ease fighting, they were not acting as the neutral arbiters of the state but rather as active partisans. The Libya Shield One sent to the southern oasis town of Kufra to quell fighting between the Zway and the Tabu ended up inflaming tensions even more—its deputy commander Hafiz al-Aghuri was a Zway tribesman. To break the siege of eastern oil facilities by the militant federalist leader Ibrahim al-Jathran, the government dispatched the Center Shield, but that division’s Misratan composition caused it to be perceived by easterners as an invading force from Misrata, raising fears of a broader civil war.⁹

The Supreme Security Committee: Revolutionary Enforcers

A similar degree of partisanship informed the Shield’s counterpart in the Ministry of Interior, the Supreme Security Committee. The force was formed in October 2011 as an effort to secure Tripoli from postrevolutionary chaos and, allegedly, threats from Qaddafi-era holdouts. A December 2011 decision by the minister of interior provided the SSC with the formal authority for investigations and arrests.¹⁰ It quickly evolved into a national structure, with branches in major cities. There are reportedly 70 armed groups strewn across Tripoli, with “support companies, forces, and divisions”—Saraya Isnad, Quwwat Isnad, and Firaq Isnad—drawn from Tripoli’s diverse neighborhoods and reflecting those areas’ political orientation and family structures.

Outside of Tripoli, the balance of control between the SSC divisions, unaffiliated groups, regular police, the army, and the Libya Shield varies tremendously according to locale. In Benghazi, for instance, the SSC is now largely nonexistent, having vacated the city after the September 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost.¹¹

Despite these differences, like the Libya Shield, the SSC’s structure may prove tough to disentangle and disband. Hashim Bishr, the commander of the Tripoli branch of the SSC, illustrated why. An Islamist who originally trained as a librarian and in information sciences, Bishr said he wants nothing more than to see the SSC project terminated and its members integrated into the regular police. “A lot of SSC don’t want to work in security,” he said in 2013. But there were few opportunities for them, given the absence of a viable police force, the sparse job market, and Libya’s unsettled politics.

Although the SSC had been partially dismantled on paper by mid-2014, with roughly 80,000 members having been transferred to the police, in practice it remains deeply entrenched.¹² It is marked by byzantine chains of command and competition between local and national branches. The national branches exert little control over component town and neighborhood units. Bishr angrily recalled several instances in which the Tripoli branch of the SSC had been working at cross-purposes with the national committee on a missing person investigation; the national branch was providing leads to the SSC’s Saraya and Firaq units in the city without informing him. Meanwhile, the Saraya and Firaq units do not recognize the national structure’s authority.

For most serious tasks—high-risk arrests, counternarcotics operations, or investigations—the poorly staffed an