TRIPOLI — The American Special Operations forces expected a warm welcome when they landed at the Libyan air base where an allied militia was stationed. Instead, armed men from another militia at the base threatened to detain the commandos, forcing the Americans to evacuate.
The episode, on Dec. 14, highlighted the difficulties faced by the Obama administration as it engages in a search across Libya to find armed groups that can act as a ground force against the country’s increasingly potent branch of the Islamic State.
American and Libyan officials said that the sudden departure of the group of 20 American commandos from the Al Watiya air base last month was the result of a miscommunication between the militias stationed there. But the episode laid bare the lack of central authority in Libya, with no single government in charge and an army barely able to exert control over groups nominally under its command.
Counterterrorism officials regard the Libyan branch as the Islamic State’s most dangerous affiliate, one that is expanding its territory and continuing to mount deadly attacks, including several this month. But to stop its advance, the United States and its European allies have been forced to court unreliable allies from among a patchwork of Libyan militias that remain unaccountable, poorly organized and divided by region and tribe.
The search carries particular risks for the Obama administration, which once relied on local militias to help protect the American diplomatic compound in the northeastern city of Benghazi. They failed to provide protection when the compound was overrun by militants in September 2012, an attack that led to the deaths of the United States ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans.
Analysts also warn that any foreign effort to empower individual proxy forces could fuel new rivalries as the United Nations is trying to bring together Libya’s warring factions after years of civil war that followed the toppling of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/world/middleeast/in-libya-us-courts-unreliable-allies-to-counter-isis.html?ref=world
