Remember how Obama pushed the US and NATO to intervene in Libya back in 2011 under the auspices of humanitarian aid? Remember how we then helped take out Qaddafi?
The country has been a terrorist hell hole since and it’s just getting worse:
On May 18, 141 people were killed after clashes broke out at the Brak al-Shati airbase between the Libyan National Army (LNA) and a rival Third Force militia loyal to the UN-backed government.
Based on witness testimonies, Human Rights Watch said “soldiers from the 13th Battalion aligned with the GNA Defense Ministry attacked the base… and executed troops from the 12th Battalion of the Libyan National Army (LNA).”
The soldiers were executed by gun shots to the head, HRW said. It added that some corpses, which also included civilians, had their arms bound while others were disfigured in a manner which suggested their heads had been run over by a vehicle.
The country descended into chaos following the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and has long been divided between the Tobruk-based parliament and the UN-backed government in Tripoli.
Moscow says the new spiral of violence threatens to undermine the fragile peace deal which was reached earlier this month between the head of Libya’s UN-backed government Fayez al-Sarraj and general Khalifa Haftar, head of the LNA.
The attack on the airbase “looks like a deliberate provocation, intended to disrupt the May 2 Abu Dhabi agreements between the leaders of Libya’s east and west and to reduce to zero the emerging prospects for the intra-Libyan settlement in general.”
The power vacuum in the country, which emerged after the disastrous NATO-led military intervention in 2011, has been exploited by terrorist groups. These include Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS, ISIL) offshoots who have been lending support to some of the extremist factions within the country.
Observers have expressed concern that the May 18 massacre and ongoing clashes at the airbase may lead to more bloodshed which could escalate into a full scale civil war.
This isn’t war, this is slaughter. And it is Obama’s legacy in Libya.
This is why the Middle East needs dictators so badly, because without them even more people die in civil wars that never seem to end.