Islamist terrorists target children in Benghazi while the West and UN look on
By Nureddin Sabir
Editor, Redress Information & Analysis
Islamist terrorists have committed yet another heinous crime in Benghazi, Libya’s second city.
On 21 November they detonated a car bomb in one of the city’s busiest streets near the main, Al-Jalaa hospital.
The explosion took place at 1:30pm, exactly the time when children were returning home from school. At least three children were killed and 20 other people injured.
A recent series of car bombings in the city had been claimed by the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group and the so-called Benghazi Revolutionaries Shura Council (BRSC).
The BRSC consists of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Sharia group, the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Libya Shield 1 militia, and several other terrorist outfits, including the 17 February Martyrs Brigade, the Rafallah al-Sahati Brigade, Jaysh al-Mujahidin and the Brega Martyrs Brigade.
In May 2014 the Libyan National Army (LNA), led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, launched Operation Dignity against the IS and the BRSC in Benghazi and elsewhere in the eastern province of Cyrenaica. In February 2016 the army succeeded in pushing the terrorists out of much of Benghazi.
At present, the remaining IS and BRSC terrorists are holed up in the small port of Ganfouda, south-west of central Benghazi, where they are using their families as human shields to deter a final onslaught by the LNA.
Map showing Ganfouda, south-west of Benghazi
It is thought that the 21 November attack on the schoolchildren had been carried out by agents working for the terrorists besieged in Ganfouda.
Much fuss has been made in the Western media and among official circles about a Western-supported joint operation by Islamist and organised-crime groups called “Solid Structure” (Al-Bunyan al-Marsoos in Arabic), which aims to oust the IS from its stronghold in the central town of Sirte.
Operation “Solid Structure” is superficially sponsored by the United Nations-brokered and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated “Government of National Accord”, which is based in a disused naval station in Tripoli and whose writ does not go beyond the offices it occupies, and has been supported by occasional US air strikes on Sirte. The operation is in essence a turf war between Islamist terrorists: on one side there is Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and organised-crime groups from the town of Misrata, and on the other there is the IS.
In fact, the LNA is the only force in Libya fighting the Islamist terrorists – all Islamist terrorists, not just the IS – who have sprung up throughout the country since the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in October 2011.
Despite this, the UN, the US and its European satellite states continue to insist on keeping an arms embargo on the LNA while publicly claiming to be committed to fighting terrorism.
As in Syria, in Libya the UN and the Western powers have allied themselves with one type of Islamist terrorists – the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and its clones – against another type of Islamist terrorists, the IS.
