Prepping to invade europe... Look what Hillary has done!
Post-Gadhafi Libya now a jihadist springboard backed by Iran, Qatar, Sudan and Turkey
Special to WorldTribune.com
By Yossef Bodansky, Senior Editor, Global Information System / Defense & Foreign Affairs
The consolidation of a self-proclaimed Caliphate in eastern Libya provides the jihadist camp with springboard into Africa and southern Europe.
That strategic thrust, supported strongly by Qatar, Sudan, Iran, and Turkey, has already begun, and highlights the transformation of the takfiri jihadist movements, the Muslim Brothers (Ikhwan), and many of the former Al Qaida movements.
Rome now a target: Security forces have bee deployed at selected sites due to terror threats from ISIL. / Winston Ross / Newsweek
Rome now a target: Security forces have bee deployed at selected sites due to terror threats from ISIL. / Winston Ross / Newsweek
Although jihadist forces occupied Tripoli in October 2011 — as a direct result of the Western military intervention which helped bring down the Moammar al-Gadhafi Administration in Libya — they failed to consolidate power and focus on all-Islamist causes. Subsequently, Libya sank into the still-escalating fratricidal fighting between a myriad of militias and localized forces.
Starting early 2014, the jihad-sponsoring states have capitalized on the building chaos in order to transform jihadist-held parts of Libya into secure springboards for the spread of takfiri jihadism into both western Africa and southern Europe.
By early 2015, Libya no longer existed as a viable state, having morphed, at least for the time being, into a web of small fiefdoms fighting each other.
Libyan jihadists affiliated with global entities, foreign jihadists, and jihad-sponsoring states played a decisive role in the victory of the Libyan uprising and the toppling of the Gadhafi Government in 2011.
While NATO airpower was instrumental in destroying Gadhafi’s military machine, the jihadist camp was decisive in seizing power on the ground to the detriment of Libya’s myriad of indigenous tribes and clans. These contradictions are at the crux of the fratricidal fighting throughout the area of what once was Libya, and adjacent regions.
As background Iran, Sudan, and their proxies — mainly the Hamas and the Hizbullah — were the first jihadist entities on the ground in eastern Libya in 2011, both helping the anti-Gadhafi upsurge and finding out how they could benefit from the prevailing chaos.
A few Iranian and Sudanese officers had already arrived in Benghazi from Sudan in the third week of February 2011, and met with Libyan senior officers who had defected to the rebels.
In March 2011, the IRGC established a high-level command center in Benghazi. IRGC Brig.-Gen. Mehdi Rabbani — a close confidant of Quds Forces commander Qassem Soleimani and the deputy commander of the IRGC Tharallah Base in Tehran — was nominated the commander of the Libyan operation. (In December 2012, Rabbani was promoted IRGC Deputy Chief of Operations and put in charge of such key issues as the defense of the Persian Gulf.)
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