Libya

Bottom Line: ISIS maintains a strong presence in Libya and remains a potent regional threat, despite domestic and international efforts to oust the group from […] More

Leaving the courtroom after a long day of closing arguments in the recent trial of Ahmed Abu Khattala, I felt something all too rare these […] More

Imagine a multi-pronged, low intensity conflict. It’s been dragging on for five or so years. Sometimes this faction gains ground. Sometimes that. Or maybe it’s […] More

Political instability continues to plague Libya as the country is mired in its sixth year of conflict following the 2011 Arab Spring. In July, two […] More

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 […] More

To put it mildly, circumstances on the ground in Libya are complicated. Mired in a state of conflict since former head of state Muammar Gaddafi […] More

That Libya is a mess is beyond doubt, but who is actually trying to resolve the conflict is a harder question to answer. U.S. President […] More

The Cipher Brief’s Bennett Seftel sat down with Mohamed Eljarh, former political consultant to the Libyan Mission to the European Union, to discuss the ongoing […] More

In 2012, after returning from an overseas tour of duty, I was assigned as the senior National Clandestine Service representative to the Central Intelligence Agency’s […] More

Fighting jihadi groups has been compared more than once to whack-a-mole. You thump a group here and it pops up there. You thump it again […] More

With coalition forces concentrating efforts against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the militant group continues to fester in Libya with the government struggling to battle […] More

Libya’s UN-brokered Government of National Unity (GNA) has so far failed to unite the country’s competing regional and tribal factions and, by early June, the […] More

The UN-backed Government of National Accord’s Misratan-led Bunyan Al Marsus operation room made significant gains against IS this week, advancing to within 30km Sirte. So […] More

Three interlinked conflict dynamics are discernible from last week’s developments on the ground: 1) increased lawlessness and militia rivalry in Tripoli and the western region; […] More

Five years after the Arab Spring, enough dust has settled to allow for a clear analysis of U.S. policy in Libya at the time of […] More

Libya’s failure to build a democratic, stable, constitutional, and sovereign government in the wake of the anti-Gadhafi uprisings in 2011 has not been the fault […] More

With Germany’s chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2016, OSCE is back in business after a 15-year slumber. The […] More

The attacks carried out by Islamic State (ISIS) on the Ras Lanuf and Sidra oil export terminals this year have demonstrated definitively that the jihadist […] More