"The Libyan City Of Sirte Is Becoming A Stronghold..." Topic

… For The Islamic State.

"Iraqi commanders have been arriving from Syria, and the first public beheadings have started. The local radio stations no longer play music but instead extol the greatness of the Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

When the Libyan arm of the Islamic State first raised the group's black flag over the coastal city of Surt almost one year ago, it was just a bunch of local militants trying to look tough.

Today Surt is an actively managed colony of the central Islamic State, crowded with foreign fighters from around the region, according to residents, local militia leaders and hostages recently released from the city's main prison.

"The entire Islamic State government there is from abroad — they are the ones who are calling the shots," said Nuri al-Mangoush, the head of a trucking company based here in Misurata, about 65 miles west of the Islamic State's territory around Surt. Many of its employees live in Surt, and five were jailed there recently…"

Full article here
link

The Libyan government and military are too fragmented to drive out the Islamic State from this part of the country. What will be needed will be a joint Libyan-Egyptian-NATO-U.S. military intervention. Unfortunately …. Egypt is focused on their insurgency in the Sinai, Europe is militarily weak and unwilling to intervene into Libya again, and 2016 is a U.S. election year …

Amicalement
Armand

within is tragedy…this is a good new for me..because this imminent peril will force (i hope) the Italian goverment to jump up his ass and decide what to do with his, up to this date, akward and irrespnsablle foreign policy..I remenber that, during the Eighties..a sudden obsolete innocuos rocket launched by Ghedaffi on the Island of Lampedusa not too far from Lybian coast ..allarmed the Italian politicians as a pack of monkeys suddenly detecting of predator climbing the tree where they were resting…

I have to say, from the perspective of anyone running a defense company, the idea of deposing all these strongmen and turning a giant swath of the planet into a perpetual warzone might be shaping up as a *brilliant* business move… Of course, for everyone else, particularly the people who live there, it's an unmitigated disaster.

This also demonstrates that even in the 21st century, new states can arise simply by showing up somewhere with a small band of dedicated men, and then waving a flag around. "You keep what you kill."

The Libyan "Government" and forces are like so many in the region. After the Arab Spring … which turn out to be more like an Arab "Fall" in many cases. Many/Most of the leadership and military are not only ineffective, polarized, and corrupt, etc. … Are unable to do anything to fix the situations.

From there they will spread first to the rest of Libya and then the rest of Northern Africa.