Egypt, UAE strike Islamists’ targets in Libya

After two years of introspection and confusion, the moderate forces in the Arab world have begun to assert themselves. In July 2013 the Egyptian military removed the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi from power in Egypt, and launched a broad, and at times brutal, campaign to finish off the Muslim Brotherhood and extinguish political Islam as a meaningful force in Egyptian life.

Egypt’s growing pressure on and isolation of Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has been an integral element of the new Egyptian government’s determined campaign against political Islam.

Saudi Arabia led the Gulf States to sever their diplomatic ties with Qatar, and took other steps to isolate the tiny pro-Islamist sheikhdom.

The airstrikes by Egypt and UAE against Libya’s Islamist militias are thus an intensification of the regional campaign, led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, to confront and defeat the Qatar- and Turkey-supported Islamist forces in the region.

The United States, for its part, has been conducting airstrikes against ISIS forces in Iraq, and will soon begin to strike ISIS targets in Syria. The United States has also been attacking Islamists’ targets in Yemen.

Still, the Times reports that U.S. diplomats were angry with Egypt and the UAE over the airstrikes in Libya, saying the strikes could further inflame the conflict among the different militias and factions in the country at a time when the UN and Western powers are trying to reach peaceful end to the chaos.

“We don’t see this as constructive at all,” one senior American official told the paper.

U.S. officials said that Qatar has already provided weapons and support to different Islamist forces inside Libya, so the strikes by Egypt and UAE represent a move away from proxy wars, in which regional powers engage in a competition with each other by supporting local allies, to direct involvement in Libya by these regional powers.

President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and other officials vigorously denied any Egyptian involvement in the airstrikes, although the denials were carefully and elliptically worded.

The UAE has not officially commented, but yesterday (Monday) an Emirati state newspaper printed a statement from Anwar Gargash, minister of state for foreign affairs, calling questions about a UAE role “an escape” from the recent election in Libya which the Islamists lost – and election which showed, he said, a desire for “stability” and a rejection of the Islamists. The Islamists, Gargash wrote, “wanted to use the cloak of religion to achieve its [political Islam’s] political objectives,” and “the people discovered its lies and failures.”

American officials told the Times that Egypt had provided bases from which the strikes were launched, and that the UAE, whose air force is regarded as one of the best in the region thanks to American aid and training, provided the pilots, warplanes, and aerial refueling planes.

The first strikes occurred before dawn a week ago, and the second series of airstrikes took place south of Tripoli early on Saturday, hitting rocket launchers, military vehicles, and a warehouse controlled by Islamist militia.

Analysts say the second series of strikes may have been an attempt to thwart the capture of the Tripoli airport by Islamist militia (see “Islamists seize Tripoli’s airport, announce new government,” HSNW, 25 August 2014).

Initially, a renegade anti-Islamist militia led by former general Khalifa Hifter claimed responsibility for the attack (Hifter’s militia has its own air force, after several Libyan air force units defected with their planes to join him), but statements by Hifter’s spokespeople were contradictory, and analysts said that the strikes were beyond his militia’s capabilities.

The American officials told the Times that last week’s strikes were not the first time that Egypt and the UAE had joined forces to strike Islamist targets inside Libya. In recent months, a commando unit consisting mostly of UAE soldiers operating out of Egypt had destroyed an Islamist camp in eastern Libya without detection.

Former Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa two weeks ago warned that if the power of the Islamists in Libya was not kept in check, Egypt would have to intervene militarily in order to protect Egypt’s national security. Some of the passages in his statement implied that such intervention had already taken place.

American officials told the Times that the success of that earlier raid on the Islamist compound inside Libya may have encouraged Egypt and the UAE to believe they could carry off the airstrikes without detection. Or the audacity of the attack “may reflect the vehemence of their [Egypt’s and the UAE’s] determination to hold back or stamp out political Islam,” the senior American officials said.