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When Nato helped overthrow Gaddafi in 2011, there were hopes of a new beginning. A decade later, this former CIA asset runs the country – and Libya has become yet another lesson in the unintended consequences of foreign intervention
In July 2025, four of Europe’s most senior officials landed in eastern Libya for an urgent meeting. Italy’s interior minister had watched migrant arrivals surge during the previous six months. Greece’s migration chief was reeling after 2,000 people reached Crete in a single week. Malta’s home minister feared his island was next. And the EU’s migration commissioner was scrambling to rescue an agreement worth many hundreds of millions that was visibly failing to stop the boats.
Libya is a place where crises converge. Its 1,100-mile coastline, the Mediterranean’s longest, has become the main departure point for migrants heading north. Since Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in 2011, the country has been torn apart by successive civil wars. Russia, Turkey, Egypt and the UAE arm rival factions, and the contest no longer stops at Libya’s borders. From military bases in the south, Russia and the UAE funnel weapons and fighters into Sudan’s civil war, which has driven hundreds of thousands more refugees north towards Libya’s coast.
Whoever controls Libya holds leverage over Europe. Yet Libya’s political crisis is so byzantine that it confuses even experienced European officials. The country is split between two governments, one in the west and one in the east, and neither really governs. The UN and Europe recognise the Government of National Unity in Tripoli, which was formed in 2021 to oversee elections that never happened. In response, the House of Representatives, Libya’s parliament elected in 2014, appointed a rival government in the eastern city of Benghazi in 2022, though that government is not officially recognised by any country. Both administrations, in the east and west, claim national authority. Neither controls the oil, military bases or the migration routes that make Libya matter to Europe. One man does. His name is Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar is 82. His title, general commander of the Libyan National Army, a coalition of militias assembled in 2014 and later rubber stamped by the eastern parliament, does not convey the vast extent of his power. His forces hold the oilfields and export terminals across central Libya. His coastline units police the eastern shore and run the smuggling routes that feed Europe’s migration crisis. His bases host the foreign militaries feeding Sudan’s war. For Europeans confronting migration, energy insecurity and regional spillover, Haftar controls everything that matters.
The European delegation had come to Benghazi in the hope of a private audience with Haftar. Upon arrival, they learned that he had one condition. He insisted they first meet, publicly and on camera, ministers from the eastern administration that he claims to serve. Europe does not officially recognise that government. Meeting the eastern administration’s ministers would legitimise it; refusing would mean no access to Haftar. When the Europeans declined, they were denied entry. The delegation never made it past the airport lounge. The humiliation exposed Libya’s central fiction: to reach the country’s most powerful man, you must pretend he is not the country’s most powerful man.
In 2011, foreign powers intervened to overthrow Gaddafi. This is what they built. As bombs fall on Iran and the architects of yet another intervention promise that force will deliver freedom, Libya stands as the parable they refuse to read. Every intervention makes the same promise: remove the dictator and the people will be free. Libya is what happens when the dictator is removed and the people are forgotten.
For more than a decade, as Libya’s politicians fought over diplomatic recognition, Haftar was changing the facts on the ground, accumulating the oil, territory and foreign backers that constitute real power. He claims to be a servant of the eastern government – but it is a government whose ministers he approves, whose parliament his soldiers surround, and whose laws apply only when he permits. Meanwhile, the rival government in Tripoli survives on oil revenues and infrastructure that run through territory he can close at will. Both governments are officially responsible for everything, but neither has power over anything essential. This is Haftar’s system: control everything that matters, be answerable for nothing, and force everyone to pretend the arrangement does not exist.
This system is propped up from outside by foreign powers, and held together inside by enforced silence. Egypt, Russia and the UAE officially recognise the government in Tripoli. In practice, they support Haftar. The UAE bankrolls his operations and provides the weapons that enforce his authority. Egypt offers intelligence and the use of a military base inside its own territory. Russia supplies mercenaries who guard his oilfields and fight his wars. In May 2025, Vladimir Putin received Haftar at the Kremlin and offered him diplomatic protection at the UN security council. Without these patrons, Haftar’s system would collapse. With them, it is untouchable. “The foreign powers maintain the pantomime as much as Haftar does,” said Tarek Megerisi, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “They can claim to support Libya’s sovereignty while backing the man who undermines it.”
In eastern Libya no one is fooled. Haftar’s face watches from billboards across Benghazi, and hangs in government offices. In May 2025, the eastern government named a new city after him. His sons command military units, oversee reconstruction contracts, and conduct foreign meetings like heirs in waiting. Yet stating what everyone knows is dangerous. In eastern Libya, everything is monitored. “People believe Haftar’s reach has no limit,” says Hanan Salah, associate director for north Africa and the Middle East at Human Rights Watch. “His forces take someone from their home, whether a citizen or a parliamentarian, and they vanish. He controls the courts. He controls the investigations. He operates with total impunity because the international community has chosen appeasement over accountability.”
Everyone can see the reality, but no one dares say so. Haftar is Libya’s great pretender. As Jonathan Winer, a former US special envoy, told me, Haftar sees himself as “the Dune messiah, a messianic figure out of the desert who controls the fate of nations while pretending to be the instrument of the people”.
Haftar has spent 50 years closely studying how power works: beside Gaddafi as the dictator governed through committees and councils while claiming no title, in a Chadian prison camp where he made himself indispensable to captors and captives alike, as a CIA asset in Virginia who later played the CIA against the Gaddafi regime, as a failed commander in a revolution that rejected him until he outlasted everyone who did. Each experience taught him the same truth: power does not require a throne. The space between what everyone knows and what no one can say, that is where he rules.
Haftar’s political life began with betrayal. On 1 September 1969, a 25-year-old Haftar stood shoulder to shoulder with Muammar Gaddafi as one of the junior officers who overthrew King Idris, Libya’s pro-western monarch. Over the years that followed, Haftar rose through the ranks of Gaddafi’s revolutionary state, becoming one of his most trusted military commanders.
In 1986, Gaddafi promoted Haftar to colonel and sent him to command Libyan forces in neighbouring Chad. By that point, the two nations had been fighting for almost a decade, and the war had evolved into a struggle for control of smuggling routes and armed networks across the Sahel, a strategic zone linking Libya, Niger and Sudan. Gaddafi wanted the frontier secured and Haftar was the colonel he chose to do it.
The appointment ended in disaster. In March 1987, at the remote airbase of Ouadi Doum, Chadian forces backed by French and American air power routed Haftar’s army. Hundreds of Libyan soldiers were killed. Haftar and more than 1,000 of his men were captured and taken to a prison compound on the outskirts of Chad’s capital. Gaddafi had always denied any Libyan military presence in Chad, and he did not acknowledge the humiliation at Ouadi Doum. When officials raised Haftar’s name after the defeat, Gaddafi mockingly replied: “Do we have someone in the army by that name? Perhaps you mean a shepherd in the desert called Hfaytar.” Nearly two decades of loyal service, betrayed in a sentence.
For most prisoners of war, the story would have ended in that camp. For Haftar, it was merely the next stage of his education in how power works. The Reagan administration wanted Gaddafi gone, viewing Libya as a Soviet-aligned state, and the CIA had been closely following events on the ground. In Haftar, they saw a trained commander with 1,000 embittered soldiers and a grievance they could use. In the spring of 1987, US intelligence officers slipped into the prison camp, alongside a group of humanitarian inspectors. They brought food and medicine. They also brought recordings of Gaddafi’s speeches, which they played to the prisoners: their leader denying their existence, mocking them. The aim was to turn them against Gaddafi. It worked. “The Americans planted the seed,” recalled a former Libyan opposition figure based in Chad. “But it was Haftar’s wounded pride that made it grow.”
The Americans began visiting Haftar regularly, and he was on occasion permitted to leave the camp to meet with the dictator who ruled Chad, President Hissène Habré. According to former detainees and opposition figures, Haftar soon took control of food distribution, medicine and communications inside the camp, and enforced discipline among the prisoners. Survival required obedience to him.
In August 1987, Habré informed the leader of the main Libyan opposition movement in exile that Haftar and the captives wanted to join forces with them. “It was a shock,” recalled Mukhtar Murtadi, then a senior member of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL). “He had enforced Gaddafi’s system. Now he wanted to be an ally. We didn’t know how to place him, but we saw a chance to hurt the regime.”
Murtadi visited Haftar shortly afterwards. What he found unsettled him. The prison compound was a vision of suffering: barracks crammed with prisoners, 50 or 60 to a cell, the reek of sewage and sickness, men wasted by hunger and heat. And at the centre, untouched by any of it, a small villa with a porch, a kitchen and running water: Haftar’s quarters. For their meeting, Haftar emerged freshly showered, wearing a spotless white kaftan, his beard neatly trimmed. “He didn’t look like a prisoner,” Murtadi recalled. “He looked like a guest.”
In June 1988, Haftar announced he was establishing the NFSL’s armed wing. He called it the Libyan National Army, a name he would revive decades later. It was an army without territory or a state, but the title was enough. It turned a discarded prisoner into a commander again, and gave the CIA something to recognise and support. The CIA trained Haftar and his men in guerrilla warfare in camps outside Chad’s capital, N’Djamena. In Washington, they were known as the Libyan Contras. “He had a way of commanding the space,” recalled a former NFSL member who trained with Haftar. “Tall, broad-shouldered, rigid. He made you feel he was in charge, even in a dusty tent.”
Then, in December 1990, the arrangement collapsed when a Chadian general backed by Gaddafi suddenly overthrew Habré. The Americans scrambled to extract their assets. “We got 300 of Haftar’s men on to a C-130. No bags. We cheered when the plane took off,” a former CIA officer who worked on the Libya desk told me. For the next six months, Haftar and his men were shuttled between African capitals as governments weighed American pressure against Libyan threats. Gaddafi wanted them captured.
The spectre of a CIA-trained army led by his former colonel, broadcasting into Libya, recruiting defectors, became an obsession for Gaddafi. As his paranoia grew, he sent hit squads across Europe and the Arab world to hunt opposition figures – or “stray dogs”, as he called them. Inside Libya, people vanished for a rumour or a joke. Of the more than 1,000 Libyan soldiers captured in Chad, only about 300 had made it to the US by May 1991. The rest were scattered or returned to Libya. Many were never seen again.
My father, one of Libya’s most distinguished physicists, had left Tripoli in the 1970s to complete his doctorate in England. In the universities he left behind, students were being hanged from campus gates for their politics. It defined him, and he made enemies of the regime for saying so. Growing up in the northern English city of York in the early 1990s, I spent summers with my mother in Tripoli while he remained in England. It was too dangerous for him to return.
In Tripoli, surviving depended on pretending. When a relative disappeared, my aunt told the neighbours he was on holiday. I found her sobbing in the kitchen at midnight, hands pressed over her mouth so no one would hear. At dinner, my cousin kicked me under the table when I mentioned my father’s missing friend Hussein. I learned to pretend he did not exist. Every morning, during our stays in Tripoli, a Peugeot surveillance car with tinted windows would park outside my uncle’s house. It was still there when the streetlights came on. We pretended not to see it and the men inside pretended not to watch us.
In late 1995, my mother left our home in England and flew to Tripoli for her brother’s funeral. Weeks passed, then months. We learned that she had been detained at the airport in Tripoli. Intelligence officers instructed her to tell my father to come to Libya, that they only wanted to talk. She sent the opposite message through a family friend: it’s not safe, don’t come, look after the children. She was saying goodbye. She did not know if she would see us again. She was kept under house arrest until mid-1996, when a relative bribed a senior military official to return her passport. She was given hours to leave, crossed by land into Tunisia, and flew home. We met at the airport. She was thinner than I had ever seen her. She held me for a long time, then asked me what I wanted for dinner. We talked about everything except where she had been.
Haftar would later build his own system on the same foundations: the disappearances, the silence, the pretence that nothing was wrong.
As Libyans across the west navigated these fears, Haftar was building a new life in the US. By the summer of 1991, he was living in a one-bedroom apartment at Skyline House in Falls Church, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters in Langley. He never truly settled into American life, being chauffeured between Langley meetings and community gatherings, where he appeared withdrawn and socially awkward.
Salah Elbakkoush, a Libyan dissident who lived in the same building, recalled a scene in Haftar’s apartment that characterised his American years: a former Libyan prisoner of war served them tea in silence, head bowed, just as he had in the Chad prison camp. “Here we were in suburban Virginia,” Bakoush said, “and this broken man was serving us like nothing had changed. It told me everything about Haftar. He wasn’t building a new life. He was recreating his old one.”
The CIA had resettled Haftar, but the arrangement came with expectations. “Washington was full of useless dissidents,” the former CIA officer told me. “The agency wanted more; useful intelligence from inside the country. The quid pro quo was simple: we’re glad to resettle you, but we need actionable intel from your own networks. Otherwise you’re just a burden.”
In 1992, the CIA and NFSL began planning a coup inside Libya. Haftar was tasked with recruiting regime officers willing to defect. For more than a year, he travelled to Zurich to meet Libyan military officers who were willing to risk everything to overthrow Gaddafi. On those same trips, Haftar also, it later emerged, met secretly with Ahmad Gaddaf al-Dam, Gaddafi’s cousin and a senior regime fixer.
According to Mukhtar Murtadi and the then-leader of the NFSL, Mohamed Megareyef – both of whom worked closely with Haftar during this period – Haftar played both sides. To the Americans and the NFSL, he claimed his meetings with regime figures were intelligence gathering, part of the preparation for the coup. To Gaddafi’s people, he offered something more valuable: the names of every officer who had pledged to betray the regime. In October 1993, the coup was launched inside Libya. It failed within hours. The regime arrested hundreds of conspirators. Most were executed.
The full truth may never be known. But what followed told its own story. In 1995, Haftar received a villa in Cairo as a personal gift from Gaddafi, something he would openly admit decades later, when it no longer mattered. That same year, Haftar broke with the NFSL and founded a rival organisation, the Libyan Movement for Change and Reform. The split proved fatal to the opposition: infighting consumed what remained of the NFSL. Gaddafi had wanted the exiles divided. He got his wish.
The former CIA officer was hesitant to confirm how or if the relationship with Haftar officially ended. What is clear is that by the mid-1990s, US intelligence considered Haftar an unreliable cold-war asset with no war left to fight. But his ties to Gaddafi endured. In 2005, Gaddafi visited Haftar’s family at their villa in Cairo. Haftar was not there but in leaked audio of the meeting, Gaddafi told his eldest son that Haftar was like a brother to him.
By 2011, Haftar had lived in Virginia for two decades, long since abandoned by the CIA but still holding his US citizenship and his grievances. When the Libyan revolution erupted that February, he watched it on television. “His eyes were fixed on the TV screen,” recalled a Libyan dissident who met him at that time. In early March, Aly Abuzaakouk, a prominent dissident and later parliamentarian who had known Haftar for more than 20 years, drove him to Dulles airport for his return to Benghazi. “We hugged,” Abuzakook told me. “But the man who arrived in Libya was different from the one I dropped off. I believed he was joining the revolution, but he was going to take it over.”
When Haftar landed in Benghazi on 15 March 2011, he arrived late to a revolution that did not need him. Gaddafi still held Tripoli and the west. In the east, revolutionaries had formed a transition council: a loose coalition of defectors, lawyers and academics determined to replace military rule with civilian government. On the ground, power rested with protesters who had formed armed brigades and paid for it in blood. They distrusted career military officers, people with foreign ties and officials with old-regime baggage. Haftar embodied all three.
Within days, Haftar’s sons began approaching brigade commanders, speaking of their father’s desire to “protect the revolution”. A week later, the council’s military spokesperson announced Haftar as their new commander, without consulting the political leadership. “I control everybody,” Haftar told the New York Times that April. “The rebels and the regular army forces.” This was pure bluster: at the time, he controlled no one.
The war moved on without him. In late March, a Nato air campaign, led by Britain and France with US support, began bombing Gaddafi’s forces. In August, rebels took Tripoli. In October, Gaddafi was captured and executed. In July 2012, Libya went to the polls for the first time since 1969. Mohamed Megareyef, Haftar’s former boss in exile, was elected president of the parliament. Haftar withdrew to a farmhouse south of Tripoli. Just like in Chad, it seemed he was finished. But failure had taught him patience. “What drove him wasn’t just ideology like Gaddafi, or even just raw power,” said Mohamed Buisier, who served as Haftar’s political adviser from 2014 before breaking with him in 2016. “It was more personal than that. He wanted to know his name would be remembered in Libya’s history. Not as the defeated commander from Chad, but as the man who saved Libya.”
What followed was the collapse of the order that had rejected him. In the west, revolutionary brigades turned into militias and divided Tripoli into armed fiefdoms. In the east, judges, activists and military officers were assassinated. With armed groups operating openly under jihadist banners, the term “Islamist” became such a common accusation that it lost all meaning. It was a way to mark an enemy, whether they were a genuine jihadist or not. Meanwhile, the mood across the region was shifting. In July 2013, Egypt’s military, backed by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government. A narrative hardened: Islamists were the disease, generals the cure.
Haftar saw his opportunity. In February 2014, Haftar attempted to launch a coup, but when no troops rallied to his side, he was forced to flee to Benghazi with a warrant for his arrest. It was there that he began to build a real power base that could bring him what he wanted. Just as in the Chadian prison camp, in Benghazi Haftar saw a place full of men who felt abandoned, humiliated and excluded: former regime officers now locked out of power, armed groups that had once fought Gaddafi and were now sidelined. Haftar realised he could organise them if he found a unifying cause.
On 16 May 2014, Haftar launched Operation Dignity, declaring a “war on terror” against Islamists and reviving the Libyan National Army, the title he had first used in Chad in 1988. In Chad, the name had given the CIA a fiction to support. Now it gave Egypt and the UAE the same cover: they were not backing a warlord with militias, but an army fighting terrorism. Backed by Egyptian and Emirati airstrikes, his forces attacked jihadist factions and revolutionary brigades in Benghazi and Tripoli on the same day, plunging the country into civil war. Everyone who opposed Haftar was branded an Islamist.
Weeks later, Libya’s second parliamentary elections deepened the split. The new parliament convened in the east; the old one in Tripoli refused to disband. By the end of the year, the country had two governments, two parliaments, two claims to law, and no mechanism to replace or reconcile them. That division largely continues today.
In early 2015, Aguila Saleh, chief of the eastern parliament, used Islamic State bombings as a pretext to appoint Haftar head of the army. On paper, Haftar answered to Saleh. In reality, the parliament sat in territory his forces controlled – politicians who dissented disappeared or fled. The eastern parliament gave his militias what the NFSL once gave him in Chad: legal cover. When the UN brokered a unity government that December, it demoted the western parliament and required a confidence vote from Saleh’s. His parliament refused and appointed a rival government. The UN had not unified Libya. It had handed Haftar a veto.
The revolution had tried to build something without Haftar and failed. Now he had what he needed: an army that answered to him, a parliament that depended on him, and foreign backers – the UAE, Egypt and later Russia – invested in his survival. He would not govern or hold office, but he controlled the men who did. What he had rehearsed in Chad, refined in exile, and tested in Benghazi, was complete. The system had found its country.
Today, from an ageing Soviet-era airbase in Rajma, just outside Benghazi, Haftar runs his system. From the outside, the compound is unremarkable. Inside, it functions as the headquarters of a power that exists nowhere on paper but controls everything that matters: the oilfields, the export terminals, the parliament, the courts, the men with guns.
The foundation of his power is oil. In September 2016, Haftar’s forces seized the “oil crescent”, a 250-mile coastal strip that includes Libya’s four major export terminals. Two-thirds of Libya’s crude oil flows through these ports. Under international pressure, Haftar handed operational control back to the National Oil Corporation (NOC) in Tripoli, the only exporter the world recognises. But he kept military control of the territory, giving him extraordinary leverage. In August 2024, Aguila Saleh cautioned that replacing Libya’s central bank governor – which Haftar opposed – “may result in shutting down oil”. Meanwhile, western embassies consistently condemn any disruptions to oil flow without naming the commander whose forces control every terminal. The fiction is maintained on all sides.
From 2016 to 2019, while two governments claimed legitimacy, Haftar was courted at summits in Paris and Abu Dhabi. Despite repeated meetings with the UN-backed prime minister, Fayez al-Sarraj, Haftar dismissed all compromises. “We offered him legitimate power,” former US special envoy Jonathan Winer told me. “Control of a military council under civilian oversight, or leadership through elections if the Libyan people chose him. He just shook his head. He would not be subservient to anyone, elected or not.”
Inside Haftar’s territory, a simpler system applied. Since 2014, dissent has been classified as terrorism. A protest, a conversation, a Facebook post: any criticism can carry a death sentence. In October 2016, so many bodies were found on Al-Zayt Street on the outskirts of Benghazi, bound and shot, dumped among the rubbish, that locals renamed it “corpse street”. “When I enquired about a 16-year-old boy who’d disappeared in Benghazi in early 2016, they told me, matter of fact, that they’d murdered him for spying,” Buisier told me. “I protested – we were supposed to be building a state of institutions, of law. They looked at me like I was naive. One officer suggested I might be sympathetic to the terrorists myself.” Buisier left Haftar’s circle shortly after and returned to the US.
By 2019, Haftar had racked up $25bn in debt, funding his army through unofficial bonds, commercial bank loans and even Russian-printed dinars circulating in his territory. He needed the central bank in Tripoli to open its vaults. And on 4 April 2019, he launched a full assault to capture Tripoli. The Trump administration had effectively authorised the move: the national security adviser, John Bolton, told him to act “quickly” if he wanted to seize the capital and unify the country under his control. Days after the assault began, Trump himself called to praise Haftar’s “counterterrorism” efforts. By the summer, Russian mercenaries had joined Haftar’s ground forces, transforming what had been conceived as a lightning coup into a protracted siege.
After years of fruitless peace talks, Haftar had finally abandoned the diplomatic charade entirely. That July, Benghazi MP Seham Sergiwa appeared on a pro-Haftar television channel to urge dialogue over war. Her broadcast was cut mid-sentence. That night, gunmen dragged her from her home and spray-painted “the army is a red line” on the building. She hasn’t been seen since, and her family suspect she was taken by forces loyal to Haftar.
Ultimately, Haftar’s assault on Tripoli failed. In late 2019 Turkey intervened on behalf of the UN-backed government to try to force Haftar to negotiate for peace. The following month, at a conference in Berlin convened to end the war, as world leaders were waiting to announce the agreement, Haftar was nowhere to be found. He had gone to take a nap. “It wasn’t fatigue,” the former UN envoy Stephanie Williams told me. “It was theatre, designed to show that he operated outside the rules.” No agreement was reached.
In late 2020, the UN brokered a ceasefire to end the war. The deal required that Haftar place his forces under civilian command. Again, he refused. Elections were promised for December 2021. After disputes over candidate eligibility and electoral laws, they collapsed. None have been held since, and the country has returned to division.
Haftar’s financial grip has only tightened. In late 2024, officials at the central bank in Tripoli discovered nearly 10bn new dinars in circulation bearing serial numbers that did not exist in their system. Counterfeit notes had flooded the economy from the east. The scheme helped finance Haftar’s forces, paid debts incurred to his Russian mercenaries. The counterfeit notes circulated as real currency in eastern Libya and were traded for US dollars on the hidden market – giving Moscow access to hard currency from which it had been cut off by western sanctions since the invasion of Ukraine. The central bank faced a choice: expose the fraud and trigger another financial crisis, or absorb the loss in silence. “We knew exactly where the notes came from,” said a central bank insider. “But saying so would mean confrontation, and confrontation means the oil stops, and the dinar loses more value. So we absorbed them and said nothing. That is how institutions survive in Libya. You accept what you cannot confront.”
In October 2025, the counterfeit notes were withdrawn quietly, written into the bank’s books, and Haftar’s wealth grew. “It’s easier to deal with a lie you can manage,” a former western official told me, “than a truth you can’t fix.”
Now 82, Haftar faces the ultimate quandary of his creation: how to transfer power in a system that depends on institutions that function only because no one admits who controls them. What happens when the man behind the pretence is gone?
Observers agree that Haftar would like to secure his legacy through his children. “His eyes would light up when he introduced you to his sons,” Williams, the former UN envoy, recalled. According to those who knew the family, one son held a special place. “Saddam was always his favourite,” Buisier told me. “Maybe because he most closely reflected his father’s stature and bearing.”
Haftar’s sons have divided the system between them, ahead of what is rumoured to be a year of succession. Saddam, appointed deputy commander-in-chief in August 2025, is the heir apparent, commanding the most powerful of his father’s brigades. Khaled serves as chief of staff, keeping his father’s army in check. Belkacem, an engineer turned businessman, directs billions in reconstruction contracts to rebuild cities destroyed by his father’s wars. Al-Siddiq, a poet, manages tribal politics through reconciliation commissions that promise peace and forgiveness but do not deliver them. Okba oversees the cryptocurrency and AI sector. Each holds a title. None holds elected office. The succession has been rehearsed so openly it barely qualifies as a secret. According to recent reporting, even US diplomats are now involved in discussions about a deal to unify Libya’s rival governments with Saddam as its president.
But Haftar built his system for one man, not five. His sons must divide what their father never shared – territory, money, mercenaries, an economy stitched together with counterfeit currency – in a fractured Libya where a rival government commands its own militias and foreign backers. Gaddafi groomed his sons for decades, gave them an ideology to recite, however hollow, and they were still tearing at each other before the revolution swept them away. Haftar’s sons have no creed to share, only the pragmatism of survival. Gaddafi claimed to preside over a system of popular rule. Haftar’s system claims nothing except silent assent.
