Libyan Unity Remains Out of Reach

More than six years after the Arab Spring reverberated across the Middle East and North Africa, the Libyan people still face a seemingly insurmountable challenge of piecing their fractured country back together. Warring militias and an expanding terrorist threat have wreaked havoc on the country. Libya’s two most prominent leaders who represent competing factions, Fayez Sarraj, the head of Libya’s UN-brokered Government of National Accord (GNA), and Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar, the head of the Libyan National Army, recently agreed to a countrywide ceasefire and to hold presidential elections in early 2018 during a July 25 meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris. But the path towards reconciliation in Libya remains elusive.

This was the second time that Sarraj and Haftar met in the last three months, having gotten together in Abu Dhabi in May. While in Paris, the rival leaders acknowledged that only a political solution would end Libya’s civil war and that all militias in the country must be brought under the reins of a national army controlled by the government.