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Libyas official Army, Police and Oil Protection Forces have predominantly remained
under Parliaments authority while the less popular but increasingly better financed,
armed and organized Islamist led militias have sided with the Muslim Brotherhood
backed regime in Tripoli.
These Islamist groups are not content with just a share of the newly minted State, they
want to own it entirely.
From the beginning, I and my superiors urged the National Transitional Council, which
took power immediately after Gaddafis fall, to contain and counter these extremists. It
was clear that they would expand, otherwise. They now number, including UN proscribed
Ansar al-Sharia, several thousand and are increasingly shaping and leading the fight
against the elected authorities.
Initially, some in government, including civil rights lawyer and NTC spokeswoman
Salwa Buqaiqis, viewed them as fellow revolutionaries fighting the tyrant., The week
before her murder at their hands last June, however, Buqaiqis told me she had realised
that they were a real existential threat to the country.
By last summer, Libyans were trying to resolve their differences by returning to the polls
in an effort to correct an elected but broken congress. It had become partisan, an
instrument of militias demanding a purge of the countrys previous officials. However,
further to the east, a movement emerged, led by General Khalifah Hafter, which aimed to
bring together what remained of the victorious army that had helped remove Gaddafi.
Those Libyan security forces had joined the broad-based revolt only to find themselves
subsequently on the receiving end of an assassination campaign led by the Islamic
extremists.
Buqaiqis told me one week before she was killed that she hated the general, hated what
he had stood for as a former officer in the army under Gaddafi. However, he was now
the only hope of containing the militias and extremists who, following their three
consecutive losses in Libyas general and constitutional elections, were now seeking
power through force of the gun.
Hafter is not the man to lead the country; that must be done by the elected parliament and
the government it appoints. However, the army and the police, who he is helping to corral
still under the democratically appointed government, are the only organizations capable,
with the right support, of containing and ultimately defeating the Islamist militants.
A unity government is the only internationally acceptable -- or reasonable -- way forward.
That must mean a common purpose: most pressingly, the defeat of the Islamic State, reestablishing law and order and salvaging the economy.
This is something the Parliament in Tobruk could deliver but the Muslim Brotherhood-