For nearly four years, the West has largely stayed on the sidelines as Libya descended into post-revolution chaos. Now the bloody beheadings of a group of Egyptian Christians at the hands of Islamic State could draw the international community back into the densely complex tangle of fighting in the oil-rich North African nation.
Egypt, seeking retribution for the cruelly cinematic execution of 21 Coptic men who had gone to Libya to work as laborers, carried out at least two waves of airstrikes Monday in neighboring Libya. The warplanes targeted what Egypt said were training camps and weapons caches belonging to a Libyan offshoot of Islamic State, which in recent months has made inroads in several parts of the country, seizing on the power vacuum left by the chaotic but so far inconclusive struggle among an array of competing militias.
At the same time, Egypt launched a diplomatic offensive, describing the Sunni Muslim militant group and its allied armed groups in Libya as a universal threat that must be confronted forcefully and not by Egypt alone. It would be a double standard, a Foreign Ministry spokesman argued, for the U.S.-led military coalition to fail to take action in Libya that is just as firm as the airstrikes it is conducting against Islamic State in its heartland, encompassing parts of Syria and Iraq.
Egypt is under attack, the spokesman, Badr Abdelatty, told reporters. But the militants of Daesh, he said, referring to the group by its Arabic acronym, also pose a direct threat to international peace and security.
In Egypt, the full horror of the mens executions, depicted in a graphic video released online late Sunday, was still sinking in on Monday. In the governorate of Minya, south of Cairo, many of the bereaved families were village neighbors. Relatives there wept as they clutched portraits of their dead loved ones. President Abdel Fattah Sisi hurried to Cairos main Coptic cathedral to offer condolences, and dispatched senior officials to attend funerary prayers in Minya.
If Egypts military reaction was swift, its diplomatic one was equally so. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, en route to New York, was given marching orders to appeal to the U.N. Security Council to act against Islamic State. Sisi also conferred by phone with Frances president, Italys prime minister, Russias foreign minister and Secretary of State John F. Kerry, the Foreign Ministry said.
Islamic States message appeared in some ways designed to galvanize a European response. In the video, staged on a Mediterranean beach outside the Libyan capital of Tripoli, the lead executioner referred boastfully to the groups foothold less than 500 miles from the shores of Europe and the symbolic center of Christianity, gleefully describing this latest killing field as south of Rome.
In Italy, the onetime colonial power in Libya, officials cited by the Associated Press said they would weigh taking part in any military intervention if one were decided upon, but that diplomacy should come first.
Italy has already borne the brunt of a massive wave of human trafficking originating in Libya, which at this point is essentially ungoverned despite having two competing governments. Thousands of would-be migrants, many of them seeking to escape the Syrian war, have died trying to make the perilous crossing to Italy.
In Libya, where the situation was dire even before Islamic State began making inroads, fighters swearing allegiance to the group have seized at least partial control of several cities, including the port of Derna, where Mondays Egyptian airstrikes took place. The group is also strong in the central coastal city of Surt, where the Egyptian workers were seized in two incidents in December and January, and the Tripoli-based Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for a deadly attack last month on a luxury hotel in the Libyan capital.
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Egypt strikes Islamic State in Libya after video of mass beheadings