Nureddin Sabir, Editor, Redress Information & Analysis, writes:

The United States and its Turkish NATO ally are preparing to establish a joint condominium over Libya. 

Libyan news website 218 TV reports that an unnamed senior US source told it that President Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart, the Islamist and Ottoman revivalist Recep Erdogan, have agreed to form “a joint working committee on Libya”. 

According to the US source, the committee will start its work in the next few days and will include US State Department and Turkish Foreign Ministry officials, as well as intelligence and military commanders from Turkey and the so-called Africa Command (Africom), the US force dedicated to intervening in African countries.

The joint committee “seems to be the nucleus of a new Turkish-American cooperation in Libya”, 218 said. In fact, it has been clear for some time that the US is firmly behind the Turkish intervention in aid of the unelected “Government of National Accord”, the GNA, (see this and this and this), which is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, a plethora of other Islamist and organised crime groups, in addition to Turkey and Qatar, among others. Washington, it would seem, has learned nothing from the blowbacks of its failed policy of collaboration with the so-called “Mujahidin”, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s.

As noted in previous posts, Turkish intervention to prop up the GNA militias has included bringing into Libya thousands of Syrian mercenaries and Islamist terrorists, which are now said to number about 13,000, air support through hundreds of drones, weapon supplies, as well as the deployment of Turkish naval vessels, military advisers and electronic jamming equipment. It is therefore safe to say that had it not been for this intervention the LNA would have by now liberated Tripoli and the rest of Libya. 

The US decision to endorse the Turkish intervention in aid of the Libyan Islamists and crime syndicates explains Egypt’s and the United Arab Emirates’ abandonment of the LNA. Both Egypt and the UAE are staunch and uncritical US client states which, it seems, would not cross Washington even when its policy is harmful to their own national interests. This is particularly true in the case of Egypt’s President Abd-al-Fattah al-Sisi and is nowhere better illustrated than by his policy in Libya where a victory for the Turks and their local Islamist allies could soon see Turkish troops at Libya’s border with Egypt and cross-border terrorist raids by the Muslim Brotherhood. It would appear that the unspoken deal between Sisi and Washington is that Sisi would do Washington’s bidding with no questions asked and, in return, Washington would turn a blind eye to his domestic abuses. That is also the modus operandi of the US’s relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, including rivals Qatar and the UAE.

As always, the casualties will be the people of Libya and Egypt – collateral damage in the eyes of Sisi and his American patrons.

This article first appeared in Dateline Libya, a Redress Information & Analysis page dedicated to the conflict in Libya.