These mobilizations took place a few days after the visit of the Italian ambassador to Libya, Giuseppe Buccino, to the airport to follow up on the maintenance works carried out by the consortium of Italian companies “Aeneas”, which he planned to complete during the year 2024. , and welcomed “the encouraging progress of the work started last February”.
Once the airport, located south of the capital, Tripoli, is completed, it will be able to serve more than 6.5 million passengers per year, after the completion of the construction of two terminals on an area of ​​30,000 square meters, one local and one international, in addition to the completion of all other facilities, and its maintenance work has been interrupted several times since 2014, due to the conflicts in the country.
militia alliances
The spark for the crisis began after the assignment of the “111 militia” and the so-called “management support force” to secure the airport, and both groups are directly affiliated with the militia belonging to the city of Misrata, Abd al-Salam al-Zoubi, who was not liked by other armed groups, according to the sources.
The ‘Stability Support’ militia, led by Abd al-Ghani al-Kakli, has allied itself with armed groups in the towns of Zintan and al-Zawiya, where their convoys have arrived in the past few hours on the road to the airport , before parking in the vicinity “Camp 77”.
While the Radaa militia and “Brigade 444” have agreed to coordinate on this file, their forces being stationed in the Qasr Bin Ghashir area, hundreds of meters from the airport, and although they are both The most powerful armed groups on the scene, the differences between them on the background of detention of elements make them the most fragile alliance, according to sources indicating that each side is waiting for the opportunity to take control of the airport.
Disclaimer Muhammad Al-Haddad
The Chief of the General Staff of the Presidential Council, Lieutenant General Muhammad al-Haddad, hinted at these tensions, during a meeting of the outgoing government led by Abdul Hamid al-Dabaiba, where he declared that the security situation around Tripoli is “out of control”.
In his speech, Al-Haddad addressed the “problem of parallel formations of the army and the police”, the crisis of “armed youth”, and the need to reintegrate them and push them to disarm, pointing to the lack of discipline in these parallel formations. training while trying to play the role of the security services, and seeking to provide them with means in any way whatsoever.
airport cake
The militias are currently vying for the ‘cake’ of securing the Italian coalition responsible for airport maintenance work, then securing the vital facility itself, and the resulting revenue and rewards to benefit the group who can win, as indicated by Libyan political scientist Muhammad Qashout, as tensions increased in this region with the start of business.
However, the reasons for the conflict do not depend solely on the material side, since there is a party represented by the Radaa militia, which does not want Tripoli airport to resume work, because it would lose a point of strategic strength, which is that it controls Mitiga International Airport, which is the only airport that serves Greater Tripoli, according to Qashout, which will cause it to lose its great influence, which it cannot accept.
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