SOMETHING odd is happening in Libya. The international community is censuring the Libyan government, which it recognizes as legitimate, for attacking terrorists. Libya is split as a result of an election in June 2014 in which Islamist parties were roundly defeated. The Muslim Brotherhood, calling themselves Libya Dawn, then seized the capital Tripoli. As a result the newly-elected parliament was forced to meet in Tobruk, far away in the east of the country and the government that it appointed works out of Beida, another eastern town. The low-level civil war between the two sides created a vacuum into which Daesh (so-called IS) has moved. Together with Al-Qaeda offshoot, Ansar Al-Sharia, also branded a terror group by the United Nations, Daesh first sought to take over the country's second city Benghazi in the east. For over a year gunmen shot down serving and retired members of the security forces, judges, civil society activists and anyone else who criticized them. In September 2012 they also murdered US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues at the American Benghazi consulate. Then a retired general, Khalifa Hafter led a disparate group of army officers and militiamen and drove the terrorists out of a large part of the city. However, the western area, including the main and a smaller port, are still in the hands of terrorists, who are replenished and supported by hard-line Muslim Brotherhood members in Libya Dawn areas, particularly Misrata. Hafter has been vowing for the last 18 months that he is finally going to drive the terrorists out of the city. But successive, highly publicized operations, have fizzled out. Hafter's Libyan army troops are have not so far proved good at sustained house-to-house fighting. The latest, Operation Doom, which began this week, currently seems more about airstrikes on the abandoned buildings in which the terrorists are hiding, than actual hand-to-and fighting. Yet Operation Doom has been condemned by ambassadors from the EU, US, Turkey and Morocco who say, without producing evidence, that Hafter is targeting civilians. Meanwhile, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya says Hafter and the government are jeopardizing a proposed deal to end the civil war and form a unity government. There is preamble to that draft agreement, which is far from being a done deal. This includes the promise that once it is signed, the international community will help the new unity government combat Daesh terrorists, who besides their part of Benghazi, now control some 300 kms of coast on either side of the port of Sirte, in the middle of the country. The oddity is that Hafter is not attacking the government's Libya Dawn rivals but groups whom the UN itself ranks as terrorists. Rather than blast this move, the international community should surely be supporting it, if not actually taking a frontline role as it is in Iraq and Syria. Government supporters are drawing two alarming conclusions from this reaction. The first is that if Hafter's Operation Doom is endangering the peace process, it is because UNSMIL knows that elements within the rebel Libya Dawn movement are actively involved in supporting Daesh and Ansar Al-Sharia. The second, almost incredible conclusion, is that for whatever reason, UNSMIL and the ambassadors of all the governments that accused Operation Doom of targeting civilians, have chosen to back the Muslim Brotherhood over the elected government which they all profess to recognize.
