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In the intervening years, Gadhafi systematically stripped the country of its ability to self govern, installing a cult of personality where his mercurial political predilections prevailed.

In short, he was creating a state ready to fail as soon as he did.

He told me this without rancor, without grimace or smile. He spoke as someone who knows what they're talking about because they've done it. He had the precise certainty that comes from spending years experiencing Libya's equally mercurial and endlessly scheming tribes.

Libya has more than a 100 tribes -- with some spreading across the country's borders with Egypt and Tunisia -- but only a few of them hold sway politically.

Today his words haunt me. If there was ever a vision shared by former British Prime Minster Cameron and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy as they rushed NATO towards airstrikes over Libya, then it evaporated long ago.

Libya is in a mess. Three governments vie for power, multiple tribes compete for influence and a slice of the country's dwindling oil wealth, and ISIS managed to take a foothold in the city of Sirte -- Gadhafi's home town.

Like the Roman emperor Septimius Severus who diverted the treasure of his empire to build up his home town -- the splendid coastal city of Leptis Magna -- Gadhafi did the same in his own home hamlet, lavishing it with hospitals, homes, highways, and even conference centers. His fall bred a lot of resentment there, which ISIS perhaps exploited.

ISIS saw the chaos in Libya as ripe for exploitation and ideal for an expansion of their barbaric cult. Al Qaeda tried to seize the same opportunity several years earlier.

Their leader Ayman al Zawahiri sent trusted lieutenants there to establish a base.

These are roots Libya and the West can ill afford to see grow.

From an urgency to see stability and stop ISIS' growth in Libya, the United Nations hastened in a Government of National Accord (GNA) earlier this year.

The idea being that once established, the GNA as a sovereign government could call on allies to help it tackle ISIS. But from the moment the GNA's leadership arrived in Tripoli in March by boat from Tunisia, they have struggled to gain legitimacy.

They compete with the Islamist-dominated General National Congress (GNC) -- also known as the Government of National Salvation -- under Prime Minister Khalifa Ghwell.

In 2014, the GNC ousted the previous internationally recognized government -- the Council of Deputies -- that has since set up camp in the east of Libya, adding weight to fears the country could split along old regional lines -- east, west and south.

The chaos after Gadhafi's fall has also had implications for US Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton, who served as Secretary of State during this time. In 2012, a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi was attacked, killing US ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The incident also showed how difficult the situation on the ground was for foreign powers to navigate -- not least because of the clashing factions and difficulty in knowing who to trust.

In any analysis of Libya, the killing of Stephens and Clinton's subsequent emails has its biggest impact in making the world's super power more cautious and less likely to engage where it's heft in finding a solution is critical.

Libya's ultimate salvation lies in its oil. This could fund the rebuilding of the country and spread the wealth wide enough so that enough competing factions can come together to impose a peace.

In recent weeks, oil output has doubled from 250,000 barrels per day to 500,000 thousand -- far short of the Gadhafi-era production levels in excess of 1 million barrels.

But while this may look the kind of forward momentum many in the West wish to see, it masks significant complications in Libya's spiraling conflict.

The boost in oil sales came off the back of a military offensive by the de facto defense chief of the former internationally recognized government, General Khalifa Haftar.

The move makes a mockery of the UN-backed GNA's ability to lead the country, put it under their control and own the oil. Haftar had refused to back the GNA and in this development has outmaneuvered them and put further question marks against their legitimacy.

So while the oil news looks good for now, the country has many more hurdles to clear, not least the need to address the competing regional interests. Haftar's explosive territorial expansion in the east did not come out of a vacuum.

Yes, those words uttered to me by Gadhafi's envoy in the Rixos five years ago still resonate deeply.

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Where is Libya five years after Gadhafi's death? - CNN.com

EXCLUSIVE: American arms dealer Marc Turi, in his first television interview since criminal charges against him were dropped, told Fox News that the Obama administration -- with the cooperation of Hillary Clintons State Department -- tried and failed to make him the scapegoat for a 2011 covert weapons program to arm Libyan rebels that spun out of control.

I would say, 100 percent, I was victimizedto somehow discredit me, to throw me under the bus, to do whatever it took to protect their next presidential candidate, he told Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge.

The 48-year-old Arizona resident has been at the epicenter of a failed federal investigation led by the Justice Department spanning five years and costing the government an estimated $10 million or more, Turi says.

Turi says the Justice Department abruptly dropped the case to avoid public disclosure of the weapons program, that was designed to force the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi during the 2011 Arab Spring.

"Those transcripts from current as well as former CIA officers were classified," Turi said of the evidence. "If any of these relationships [had] been revealed it would have opened up a can of worms. There wouldn't have been any good answer for the U.S. government especially in this election year." The Justice Department faced a deadline last week to produce records to the defense.

Turi says he was specifically targeted by the Obama administration and lost everything--my family, my friends, my business, my reputation.

As Fox News has reported extensively, in 2011, the Obama administration with support from some Republican and Democratic lawmakers explored options to arm the so-called Libyan rebels during the chaotic Arab Spring but United Nations sanctions prohibited direct sales.

Turi's plan was to have the U.S. government supply conventional weapons to the Gulf nations Qatar and UAE, which would then in turn supply them to Libya. But Turi says he never sold any weapons, and he was cut out of the plan. Working with CIA, Turi said Clinton's State Department had the lead and used its own people, with weapons flowing to Libya and Syria.

"Some (weapons) may have went out under control that we had with our personnel over there and the others went to these militia. That's how they lost control over it," Turi said. "I can assure you that these operations did take place and those weapons did go in different directions."

Asked by Fox News who got the weapons -- Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Sharia, or ISIS -- Turi said: "All of them, all of them, all of them."

Turi exchanged emails in 2011 with then U.S. envoy to the Libyan opposition Chris Stevens. A day after the exchange about Turi's State Department application to sell weapons, Clinton wrote on April 8, 2011 to aide Jake Sullivan, "fyi. the idea of using private security experts to arm the opposition should be considered."

Asked if the email exchanges are connected or a coincidence, Turi said, "When you look at this timeline, none of it was a coincidence. It was all strategically managed and it had to come from her own internal circle."

Turi also told Fox News that he believes emails sent about the weapons programs were deleted by Hillary Clinton and her team because that it would have gone to an organization within the Bureau of Political Military affairs within the State Department known as PM/RSAT (Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers.) Thats where you would find Jake Sullivan, Andrew Shapiro and a number of political operatives that would have been intimately involved with this foreign policy."

The four felony counts -- which included two of arms dealing in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and two of lying on his State Department weapons application -- were dismissed last week against Turi with prejudice, meaning the government cannot come after him again on this matter.

The Justice Department decision, weeks before the election, coupled with the now public emails, cast a new light on Clinton's 2013 Benghazi testimony where she was asked about the movement of weapons by Sen. Rand Paul.

Paul: Were any of these weapons transferred to other countries. Any countries. Turkey included?

Clinton: Well, senator you'll have to direct that question to the agency that ran the annex and I will see what information is available.

Paul: You're saying you don't know?

Clinton: I don't know.

Turi first told his story to Fox News senior executive producer Pamela Browne in 2014, and since, Turi says he's lost everything to fight the Justice Department, which had no further comment beyond the publicly available court records.

"With all the resources that they were throwing at me, I knew there would have to be some type of explanation of the operation that was going terribly wrong in Libya," Turi said. "It is completely un-American...I was a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency."

Turi said he is grateful the case is over. "It really is ungodly, and unjust and unconscionable, that the entire force of the United States government came after me for a simple application. I was working for the U.S. government."

Turi added, "I never shipped anything. I never even received the contract. So all I received was an approval for $534 million to support our interests overseas. And it would have been the United States government that facilitated that operation from Qatar and UAE by way of allowing those countries to land their planes and land their ships in Libya."

Close friend and Turi adviser Robert Stryk described Turi this way to Fox News in a statement:

Marc Turi is a true patriot who served his country in the fight against Islamofascist terrorists in the Middle East. His fraudulent prosecution by Hillary Clintons associates in the Justice Department is deplorable as is the fate of the American heroes murdered in Benghazi. Our most loyal citizens deserve better."

And Turi hinted there is more to emerge on the 2012 Benghazi attacks which killed four Americans including Stevens.

"Now theres a flip side to this. Some of the operations that I was involved in, in another country for the agency has a linkage and theres a backstory to the actual buy-back program of the surface to air missiles that were shipped and mysteriously disappeared out of Benghazi," Turi said. "So we can save that for another time, but the reality is a lot of this could have exposed a number of covert operations that I dont think the American public would really want to know at this point in time.

Fox News asked the State Department about Turis allegations, and whether no weapons reached extremists groups on Clintons watch. A spokesperson said they would check.

Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.

Pamela K. Browne is Senior Executive Producer at the FOX News Channel (FNC) and is Director of Long-Form Series and Specials. Her journalism has been recognized with several awards. Browne first joined FOX in 1997 to launch the news magazine Fox Files and later, War Stories.

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Arms dealer says administration made him scapegoat on Libya ...

On Sept. 1, 1969, 27-year-old Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi deposed the king and revolutionized the country, making it a pro-Arabic, anti-Western, Islamic republic with socialist leanings. It was also rabidly anti-Israeli. A notorious firebrand, Qaddafi aligned himself with dictators, such as Uganda's Idi Amin, and fostered anti-Western terrorism.

On Aug. 19, 1981, two U.S. Navy F-14s shot down two Soviet-made SU-22s of the Libyan air force that had attacked them in air space above the Gulf of Sidra. On March 24, 1986, U.S. and Libyan forces skirmished in the Gulf of Sidra, and two Libyan patrol boats were sunk. Qaddafi's troops also supported rebels in Chad but suffered major military reverses in 1987. A two-year-old U.S. covert policy to destabilize the Libyan government ended in failure in Dec. 1990.

On Dec. 21, 1988, a Boeing 747 exploded in flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, the result of a terrorist bomb, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 on the ground. This and other acts of terrorism, including the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986 and the downing of a French UTA airliner in 1989 that killed 170, turned Libya into a pariah in the eyes of the West. Two Libyan intelligence agents were indicted in the Lockerbie bombing, but Qaddafi refused to hand them over, leading to UN-approved trade and air traffic embargoes in 1992. In 1999, Libya finally surrendered the two men, who were tried in the Netherlands in 20002001. One was found guilty of mass murder; the other defendant was found innocent. Libya had hoped its fainthearted cooperation would lead to suspended sanctions, which had severely affected the Libyan economy. The UN did suspend its sanctions, but they were not formally removed for another four years, not until Sept. 2003, when Libya finally admitted its guilt in the Lockerbie bombing and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the victims' families. In 2004, Libya also agreed to compensate the families of the victims of the UTA airliner bombing ($170 million) and the Berlin disco bombing ($35 million).

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Libya: Maps, History, Geography, Government, Culture, Facts ...

Faced with a shrinking grip throughout the country, ISIS fighters are stepping up their assaults on Libyan forces by deploying lethal IEDs.

The terror group is also increasing the number of suicide attacks and snipers in a bid to hamper soldiers loyal to the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli.

One doctor explained that ISIS fighters are trying to make sure those targets -- if they don't die -- at least will not be able to fight again.

"The snipers attack usually the spine here. They choose to fire at the spine because brain injury and heart injury if he survived, he's going to fight again," says Nabeel Aqoub, a doctor working in Sirte.

The ongoing offensive against ISIS will prove a litmus test for the new Tripoli government, which along with American air support, is fighting to bring prosperity to the post-Arab Spring state where President Barack Obama committed what he himself called the worst mistake of his presidency -- not preparing for the aftermath of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi's removal.

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said fighters for the terror group are now trapped in Sirte.

"With the support of our air strikes those forces, those GNA-aligned forces have now cornered ISIL in one small section of the city of Sirte and I expect that they'll eliminate any remaining opposition shortly," Carter told reporters Wednesday, using another acronym for ISIS.

Once home to Gadhafi, the sprawling Mediterranean city fell to extremists in the chaos that followed the 2011 revolution. That chaos created a vacuum that ISIS quickly took advantage of, flooding the city with foreign fighters in 2014 and regenerating it as the group's largest stronghold outside Iraq and Syria.

It became a key base of operations for the organization, a place from where it carried out the gruesome mass beheadings of Egyptian Coptic Christians in February 2015 and filmed it for the world to watch. And five months later launched an operation to kill 38 tourists on a sun-drenched beach in neighboring Tunisia.

In June, US officials estimated there were 4,000 to 6,000 ISIS militants in the country.

But as the international community and Libyans worked to free Sirte, thousands of civilians abandoned their homes, leaving the city largely deserted.

Misrata, the city to the west of Sirte, took in those who fled the reign of terror and earlier this year began fighting an enemy they were woefully unprepared to defeat. But when the US began providing air support in August, the tide turned and ISIS's defenses were breached.

"This has to stop. Libyan natural resources belong to all Libyans."

Now on the verge of victory in Sirte, those who chose to stay say they have grown tired of the perpetual wars and the toll it's taking. They want peace for the next generation.

"All of us, we hope to finish today before yesterday. We are tired from 2011, war after war. We lost a lot of people," says Waleed Mohammed, another doctor based in Sirte. "If the patient dies it's okay but the problem is the handicap. And most of them are teenagers. All of them young active people in our community."

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Sirte: The final stand for ISIS in Libya? - CNN.com

The United Kingdom and France led the international intervention in Libya in 2011 with the aim of protecting civilians from forces loyal to then-leader Moammar Gadhafi.

But Britain's Foreign Affairs Committee found that the Cameron-led government "failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element."

"The consequence was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal (warfare), humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations and the growth of ISIL in North Africa," the report said, using an alternative name for the ISIS militant group, which has gained control of parts of Libya.

The committee found that Britain's policies on Libya that had intended to protect civilians had instead "drifted towards regime change and was not underpinned by strategy to support and shape post-Gadhafi Libya."

"This report determines that UK policy in Libya before and since the intervention of March 2011 was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the country and the situation," said the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, MP Crispin Blunt, in a statement.

"The UK's actions in Libya were part of an ill-conceived intervention, the results of which are still playing out today."

He said "other political options were available" and might have come at a lower cost to both Libya and the United Kingdom. He added that there was a "lack of understanding of the institutional capacity of the country" that "stymied Libya's progress in establishing security on the ground."

The committee said it had spoken to all key figures in the decision to intervene in Libya except for Cameron, who declined to take part in the inquiry, citing "the pressures on his diary," adding that other members of government had provided the information needed, the report said.

The report said Cameron "was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy," despite establishing a National Security Council.

It pointed out that when Cameron sought and received parliamentary approval for the intervention, he assured it was not aimed at regime change.

"In April 2011, however, he signed a joint letter with United States President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy setting out their collective pursuit of 'a future without (Gadhafi),'" the report said,

But a spokesperson for Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office told CNN that the decision to intervene in Libya "was an international one, called for by the Arab League and authorized by the United Nations Security Council."

The FCO spokesperson said Gadhafi "was unpredictable, and he had the means and motivation to carry out his threats. His actions could not be ignored, and required decisive and collective international action ... we stayed within the United Nations mandate to protect civilians."

The inquiry, which took evidence from key figures -- including former Prime Minister Tony Blair, military chiefs and academics -- said the United Kingdom's policy decision followed those made in France, which "led the international community in advancing the case for military intervention in Libya," in which the United States became involved and played a key role.

The international intervention, which followed an attempted uprising during the Arab Spring, paved the way for the removal of Gadhafi, who was eventually killed by the side of a road by supporters of the de facto government.

But his death gave way to chaos, including inter-ethnic and tribal rivalries, that saw the country break down into city states, many of those with competing militias, CNN International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson said.

"But the most damning indictment that Libyans level against the international community is that it turned its back on Libya after Gadhafi was killed," he said.

The political upheaval created a vacuum for militant groups such as ISIS, which has taken advantage of the country's weakened institutions to spread its influence and strongholds beyond Syria and Iraq.

Libya's current internationally recognized government has struggled to quell the chaos and keep its grip on power. In 2014, Islamist militias forced the internationally recognized government to flee the capital Tripoli. They took refuge in the east of the country.

The country has also become a gateway to Europe for migrants, many from sub-Sahara Africa, who have used the country to escape over the mostly open borders and reach the Mediterranean.

Oil production in resource-dependent Libya has dived since the intervention, the economy suffering a double blow as world oil prices plunge.

The World Bank has reported that Libya generated $41.14 billion GDP in 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, and that the average Libyan's annual income decreased from $12,250 in 2010 to $7,820.

Libya is likely to experience a budget deficit of some 60% of GDP in 2016, the report said.

The FCO spokesperson said "four decades of [Gadhafi] misrule" had inevitably left Libya facing "huge challenges," but that the UK was working to support the internationally-recognized Government of National Accord.

"We have allocated 10 million ($13.2 million) this year to help the new government to restore stability, rebuild the economy, defeat Daesh [ISIS] and tackle the criminal gangs that threaten the security of Libyans and exploit illegal migrants."

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Britain's Libya intervention based on slippery intel ...