Mediaboss Marketing

TRIPOLI, Libya Dragging deeply on a cigarette and swirling his espresso dregs, the curly-haired young militiaman offered up a vivid account of the battles he and fellow rebels waged to bring down dictator Moammar Kadafi days of blazing bombardment, thirsty desert nights.

Then he voiced his dismay at the chokehold those same armed groups now maintain on Libya.

"We fought so hard to make a new country," said the 28-year-old of Libyan extraction who left Britain to join the revolution that swept this North African nation in 2011. "Now it's all about money. Money and guns."

The rebel groups that worked together to oust Kadafi have fragmented into rivalrous factions whose outsized collective power has sapped Libya's oil wealth, turned a nascent government structure to tatters and ushered in a grim cycle of assassinations, abductions and firefights in the streets.

International attention tends to focus on the most audacious acts of militias, such as the abduction in October of the prime minister, the storming of various government ministries and last month's bid to illicitly sell $36 million worth of oil. The tanker used by the militia was intercepted by U.S. Navy SEALs and handed over to the Libyan government.

But it is their cumulative daily actions that have cemented the grip of armed factions. With control of nearly all the country's major military and industrial installations, observers say, the groups engage in arms smuggling on an epic scale, extort staggering protection payments from businesses and regularly engage in turf wars that send scrambling anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when the shooting starts.

The main armed factions number in the dozens but splinter groups run to the hundreds, holding sway over economic, political and social life. Their encampments dot the capital. Weaponry is on brazen display in a central Tripoli marketplace. Behind one luxury hotel, truck-mounted antiaircraft guns line a vacant lot like taxi touts hustling for fares.

Some of the groups have been nominally integrated into the weak central government, their allegiance proffered in the manner of a gangland offer that can't be refused. Drawing government pay but answering to their own commanders, the militias in effect control oil fields and hospitals, ports and prisons and even Tripoli's international airport, the main gateway to the outside world.

A powerful militia from Zintan recently commandeered a planeload of weapons intended for Libya's military, a government official said, an account confirmed by several others with knowledge of the incident. The Zintanis, they said, brought trucks onto the tarmac of the Tripoli airport, offloaded the arms and drove away.

"They do whatever they please, and their guns speak for them," said the middle-aged bureaucrat whose government job at the airport forces him to work alongside members of the militia from Zintan, a major town in Libya's western mountains. "Whatever they want, they will get."

Excerpt from:
Libya remains in the grip of rivalrous rebel factions