Frederic Wehrey writes:

At a mud-caked intersection this month, some hundred-and-fifty feet from the front line, a lanky militia fighter approached and then abruptly turned around when he saw me, a Westerner. I’ve been covering Libya’s conflicts for years and noticed some minor but distinctive details about his appearance: a do-rag tied around his head, an olive green tactical vest, and perhaps a certain military bearing. The Libyan commander I was with confirmed it, with a chuckle: “That’s not a Libyan look.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was inside a poured-concrete villa that served as the living quarters for a group of war-hardened Syrian fighters. Seated before me on a plush purple couch, behind a coffee table strewn with ash-trays and blown-glass decanters, was the Syrians’ leader, a thirty-four-year-old former Syrian military officer named Ahmed, and two other Syrian fighters. Numbering roughly five hundred on this section of the front, they told me they’d been in Libya several days and were part of a larger contingent of roughly two thousand Syrian militiamen that started arriving a month ago, along with Turkish military personnel. There are plans, they said, for an additional six thousand Syrian fighters.

Turkey’s military intervention in Libya, involving the deployment of Syrian fighters, is the latest chess move in a long-running civil war that followed the 2011 revolution, the NATO-led intervention, and the overthrow of the dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Since then, this oil-rich country has disintegrated into a patchwork of regions, towns, and militias sparring over power and wealth.

Foreign military support to the warring factions has only worsened the chaos. The latest round of fighting erupted on April 4 of last year, when militia forces under the Benghazi-based command of General Khalifa Haftar attacked the internationally recognized government in the capital Tripoli, the Government of National Accord, or GNA, sabotaging a UN-brokered dialogue to end the conflict in the country. Over two thousand people have died in the fighting so far, including hundreds of civilians, and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced.

Drawn to Haftar’s authoritarian and anti-Islamist leanings, a number of countries have provided him military aid: France, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and especially the United Arab Emirates, which has flown armed drones and fixed-wing aircraft on his behalf, often inflicting casualties on civilians. And in early September of last year, another potent foreign force arrived: hundreds of Russian fighters from the so-called Wagner Group, a shadowy military contracting company that is involved in several other conflicts around the globe and is reportedly linked to the Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, sometimes known as “Putin’s chef” because he has provided catering services to the Kremlin. The Wagner fighters gave a formidable edge to Haftar’s offensive against Tripoli through more precise artillery strikes and well-trained snipers. [Continue reading…]