(Newser) – After a deadly attack last night, Libya’s parliament has relocated and will meet in a five-star Tripoli hotel. Tensions in the country have been high, with rival militias backing Prime Minister Ali Zidan and the Islamist factions in parliament that oppose him. Dozens of protesters stormed parliament yesterday, shooting guns, throwing bottles, and setting things on fire, the AP reports. A guard was killed, two lawmakers were shot, three were beaten up, and one was wounded by broken glass.
Parliament’s term ended on Feb. 7, but lawmakers voted to extend it and hold new elections in the spring, leading hundreds of protesters to demonstrate each day and demand parliament be disbanded immediately. No date for the new elections has been set, CNN reports. Yesterday’s attack was preceded by an attack on an anti-parliament sit-in; unidentified assailants set fire to a tent and then kidnapped two of the protesters. Some lawmakers think yesterday’s attack was a reaction to that incident.
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After years of controversy, Erik Prince feels betrayed by the Obama administration – and he’s looking to start a new chapter.
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Dozens of survivors awaited rescue after a boat carrying migrants capsized southeast of the Italian island Lampedusa. At least 34 people drowned. More than 300 people died when their boat sank near the same island south of Sicily about a week ago. Photo: AP
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Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was freed early Thursday after being kidnapped by armed men overnight.
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Militia kidnaps and releases Libya’s prime minister; Both sides hint at possible shutdown deal; Teen’s body was stuffed with newspapers.
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(AP) – US special forces captured a Libyan al-Qaeda leader linked to the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, seizing him outside his Tripoli home and whisking him out the country. A Navy SEAL team that swam ashore hours earlier in Somalia engaged in a fierce firefight but failed to apprehend a terrorist suspected in the recent Kenyan mall siege. “We hope that this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in the effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror,” Secretary of State John Kerry said today from Indonesia. “Members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations literally can run but they can’t hide.”
The Pentagon identified the al-Qaeda leader captured yesterday as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Abu Anas al-Libi. He has been on the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list, for his role in the 1998 US embassy bombings, since it was introduced shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. There was a $ 5 million bounty on his head. A Pentagon statement said the suspect is “lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location outside of Libya.” A senior US military official said the Tripoli raid was carried out by the US Army’s Delta Force. Libya asked the United States today for “clarifications” regarding the raid and said any Libyan should face trial in his own country.
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This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi. Gunmen in a three-car convoy seized Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader connected to the 1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa and wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade outside his house Saturday in the Libyan capital, his relatives said. (AP Photo/FBI)
This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi. Gunmen in a three-car convoy seized Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader connected to the 1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa and wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade outside his house Saturday in the Libyan capital, his relatives said. (AP Photo/FBI)
FILE – In this Dec. 8, 2008 file photo, armed al-Shabab fighters just outside Mogadishu prepare to travel into the city in pickup trucks after vowing there would be new waves of attacks against Ethiopian troops. International military forces carried out a pre-dawn strike Saturday, Oct. 5, 2013, against foreign fighters in the same southern Somalia village where U.S. Navy SEALS four years ago killed a most-wanted al-Qaida operative, officials said. The strike comes exactly two weeks after al-Shabab militants attacked Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, a four-day terrorist assault that killed at least 67 people in neighboring Kenya. Al-Shabab has a formal alliance with al-Qaida, and hundreds of foreign fighters from the U.S., Britain and Middle Eastern countries fight alongside Somali members of al-Shabab. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh, File)
Map locates Barawe, Somalia; 1c x 3 inches; 46.5 mm x 76 mm;
U.S. State Secretary John Kerry speaks to the media during a visit to a tuna packaging factory in Bali, Indonesia, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2013. Kerry said Sunday that a pair of U.S. military raids against militants in North Africa sends the message that terrorists “can run but they can’t hide.” Kerry, in Bali for an economic summit, was the highest-level administration to speak about the operations yet. (AP Photo/Pardomuan Siagian)
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U.S. special forces captured a Libyan al-Qaida leader linked to the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, seizing him outside his Tripoli home and whisking him out the country. A Navy SEAL team that swam ashore hours earlier in Somalia engaged in a fierce firefight but did not apprehend a terrorist suspected in the recent Kenyan mall siege.
“We hope that this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in the effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday while in Indonesia for an economic summit. “Members of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations literally can run but they can’t hide.”
The Pentagon identified the al-Qaida leader captured Saturday as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Abu Anas al-Libi. He has been on the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list since it was introduced shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. There was a $ 5 million bounty on his head.
He was indicted by a federal court in New York for his alleged role in the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, on August 7, 1998, that killed more than 220 people.
The U.S. Defense Department’s chief spokesman, George Little, said the suspect is “lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location outside of Libya.” Little’s statement did not elaborate.
In the earlier raid Saturday, the Navy SEAL team reached land near a town in southern Somalia before militants of the al-Qaida-linked terrorist group al-Shabab rose for dawn prayers, U.S. and Somali officials told The Associated Press.
The assault on a house in Barawe targeted a specific al-Qaida suspect related to the Nairobi mall attack, but the operation did not get its target, one current and one former U.S. military official told the AP.
Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the raid publicly.
Little confirmed that U.S. military personnel were involved in a counterterrorism operation against a known al-Shabab terrorist in Somalia, but did not provide details.
The leader of al-Shabab, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, also known as Ahmed Godane, claimed responsibility for the mall attack, a four-day terrorist siege that began Sept. 21 and killed at least 67 people. A Somali intelligence official said the al-Shabab leader was the U.S. target.
Kerry said the United States would “continue to try to bring people to justice in an appropriate way with hopes that ultimately these kinds of activities against everybody in the world will stop.”
American officials said there were no U.S. casualties in either the Somali or Libyan operation.
Al-Libi’s capture would represent a significant blow to what remains of the core al-Qaida organization once led by Osama bin Laden.
A senior U.S. military official said the Tripoli raid was carried out by the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, which has responsibility for counterterrorism operations in North Africa. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the operation and discussed it on condition of anonymity.
Family members said gunmen in a three-car convoy seized al-Libi outside his home in the Libyan capital. Al-Libi is believed to have returned to Libya during the 2011 civil war that led to the ouster and killing of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
His brother, Nabih, said the 49-year-old was parking outside his house early Saturday after dawn prayers, when three vehicles surrounded his vehicle. The gunmen smashed his car’s window and seized his gun before grabbing al-Libi and fleeing. The brother said al-Libi’s wife saw the kidnapping from her window and described the abductors as foreign-looking armed “commandos.”
Libya asked the United States on Sunday for “clarifications” regarding the raid and said any Libyan should face trial in his own country.
Al-Libi was believed to be a computer specialist with al-Qaida. He studied electronic and nuclear engineering, graduating from Tripoli University, and was an anti-Gadhafi activist.
He is believed to have spent time in Sudan, where bin Laden was based in the early 1990s. After bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan, al-Libi turned up in Britain in 1995 where he was granted political asylum under unclear circumstances and lived in Manchester. He was arrested by Scotland Yard in 1999, but released because of lack of evidence and later fled Britain.
The raid in Somalia came 20 years after the “Black Hawk Down” battle in Mogadishu, when a mission to capture Somali warlords in the capital went awry after militiamen shot down two U.S. helicopters. Eighteen U.S. soldiers died in the battle, which marked the beginning of the end of that U.S. military mission to try to bring stability to the nation.
Since then, U.S. military intervention has been limited to missile attacks and lightning operations by special forces.
Saturday’s operation was carried out by members of SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed in Laden in his Pakistan hideout in 2011, another senior U.S. military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.
The team ran into fiercer resistance than expected, and after a 15 minutes to 20 minute firefight, the unit’s leader decided to abort the mission and the Americans swam away, the official said. SEAL Team Six has responsibility for counterterrorism activities in the Horn of Africa.
A resident of Barawe, which is about 150 miles south of Mogadishu, said by telephone that heavy gunfire woke up residents before dawn prayers.
The U.S. forces attacked a two-story beachside house where foreign fighters lived, said an al-Shabab fighter who gave his name as Abu Mohamed and who said he had visited the scene.
Al-Shabab has a formal alliance with al-Qaida, and hundreds of men from the U.S., Britain and Middle Eastern countries fight alongside Somali members of al-Shabab.
A U.S. official said U.S. forces disengaged after inflicting some casualties on the fighters, said the official, who was not authorized to speak by name and insisted on anonymity.
An al-Shabab official, Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu Musab, said in an audio message that the raid failed to achieve its goals.
Al-Shabab and al-Qaida have flourished in Somalia for years.
In September 2009 a daylight commando raid in Barawe killed six people, including Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of the most-wanted al-Qaida operatives in the region and an alleged plotter in the embassy bombings.
Al-Shabab later posted pictures on the Internet of what it said was U.S. military gear left behind in the raid. Pictures showed items including bullets, an ammunition magazine, a military GPS device and a smoke and flash-bang grenade used to clear rooms.
___
Dozier reported from Charlotte, N.C., Guled from Mogadishu, Somalia, and Straziuso from Nairobi, Kenya. Associated Press writers Rukmini Callimachi in Nairobi, Matthew Lee in Bali, Indonesia, Robert Burns in Washington and Esam Mohamed in Tripoli, Libya, contributed to this report.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gestures during a news conference at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) ministerial meeting in Nusa Dua, Bali island October 5, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Beawiharta
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WASHINGTON/TRIPOLI (Reuters) – After U.S. raids in Libya and Somalia that captured an Islamist wanted for bombing U.S. embassies in Africa 15 years ago, Secretary of State John Kerry warned al Qaeda they “can run but they can’t hide”.
Nazih al-Ragye, better known by the cover name Abu Anas al-Liby, was seized by U.S. forces in the Libyan capital Tripoli on Saturday, the Pentagon said. A raid on the Somali port of Barawe, a stronghold of the al Shabaab movement behind last month’s attack on a Kenyan mall, failed to take its target.
“We hope this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in its effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror,” Kerry said on Sunday in Indonesia, ahead of an Asia-Pacific summit.
“Those members of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations literally can run but they can’t hide,” Kerry said in Benoa on Bali. “We will continue to try to bring people to justice.”
Liby, a Libyan believed to be 49, has been under U.S. indictment for his alleged role in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, which killed 224 people.
The U.S. government has also been offering a $ 5 million reward for information leading to his capture, under the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program.
“As the result of a U.S. counterterrorism operation, Abu Anas al-Liby is currently lawfully detained by the U.S. military in a secure location outside of Libya,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said without elaborating.
Liby was arrested at dawn in Tripoli as he was heading home after morning prayers, a neighbor and Libyan militia sources said.
“As I was opening my house door, I saw a group of cars coming quickly from the direction of the house where al-Ragye lives. I was shocked by this movement in the early morning,” said one of his neighbors, who did not give his name. “They kidnapped him. We do not know who are they.”
Two Islamist militia sources confirmed the incident.
A year ago, CNN quoted Western intelligence sources as saying Liby had returned to his native country during the Western-backed uprising that ousted Muammar Gaddafi.
The Pentagon confirmed U.S. military personnel had been involved in an operation against what it called “a known al Shabaab terrorist,” in Somalia, but gave no more details.
Local people in Barawe and Somali security officials said troops came ashore from the Indian Ocean to attack a house near the shore used by al Shabaab fighters.
One U.S. official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the al Shabaab leader targeted in the operation was neither captured nor killed.
U.S. officials did not identify the target. They said U.S. forces, trying to avoid civilian casualties, disengaged after inflicting some al Shabaab casualties. They said no U.S. personnel were wounded or killed in the operation, which one U.S. source said was carried out by a Navy SEAL team.
SOMALIA FIREFIGHT
A Somali intelligence official said the target of the raid at Barawe, about 110 miles south of Mogadishu, was a Chechen commander, who had been wounded and his guard killed. Police said a total of seven people were killed.
Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, spokesman for al Shabaab’s military operations, told Reuters foreign forces had landed on the beach at Barawe and launched an assault at dawn that drew gunfire from rebel fighters in one of the militia’s coastal bases.
Britain and Turkey denied his suggestion that their forces had been involved in the attack and taken casualties.
Abu Musab said the attackers appeared to use silenced weapons. Al Shabaab responded with gunfire and grenades.
The New York Times quoted an unnamed U.S. security official as saying that the Barawe raid was planned a week and a half ago in response to the al Shabaab assault on a Nairobi shopping mall last month in which at least 67 people died.
“It was prompted by the Westgate attack,” the official said.
Barawe residents said fighting erupted at about 3 a.m. on Saturday (midnight GMT).
“We were awoken by heavy gunfire last night, we thought an al Shabaab base at the beach was captured,” Sumira Nur told Reuters from Barawe by telephone. “We also heard sounds of shells, but we do not know where they landed,” she added.
The New York Times quoted a Somali government official as saying that the government “was pre-informed about the attack”.
In 2009, helicopter-borne U.S. special forces killed senior al Qaeda militant Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a raid in southern Somalia. Nabhan was suspected of building the bomb that killed 15 people at an Israeli-owned hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002.
The United States has used drones to kill fighters in Somalia in the past. In January 2012, members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs rescued two aid workers after killing their nine kidnappers.
Shabaab leader Ahmed Godane, also known as Mukhtar Abu al-Zubayr, has described the Nairobi mall attack as retaliation for Kenya’s incursion in October 2011 into southern Somalia to crush the insurgents. It has raised concern in the West over the operations of Shabaab in the region.
(Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Bali, Phil Stewart, Warren Strobel and David Brunnstrom in Washington and Feisal Omar and Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu; Writing by David Brunnstrom and Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi. Gunmen in a three-car convoy seized Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader connected to the 1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa and wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade outside his house Saturday in the Libyan capital, his relatives said. (AP Photo/FBI)
This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi. Gunmen in a three-car convoy seized Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader connected to the 1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa and wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade outside his house Saturday in the Libyan capital, his relatives said. (AP Photo/FBI)
FILE – In this Dec. 8, 2008 file photo, armed al-Shabab fighters just outside Mogadishu prepare to travel into the city in pickup trucks after vowing there would be new waves of attacks against Ethiopian troops. International military forces carried out a pre-dawn strike Saturday, Oct. 5, 2013, against foreign fighters in the same southern Somalia village where U.S. Navy SEALS four years ago killed a most-wanted al-Qaida operative, officials said. The strike comes exactly two weeks after al-Shabab militants attacked Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, a four-day terrorist assault that killed at least 67 people in neighboring Kenya. Al-Shabab has a formal alliance with al-Qaida, and hundreds of foreign fighters from the U.S., Britain and Middle Eastern countries fight alongside Somali members of al-Shabab. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh, File)
Map locates Barawe, Somalia; 1c x 3 inches; 46.5 mm x 76 mm;
U.S. State Secretary John Kerry speaks to the media during a visit to a tuna packaging factory in Bali, Indonesia, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2013. Kerry said Sunday that a pair of U.S. military raids against militants in North Africa sends the message that terrorists “can run but they can’t hide.” Kerry, in Bali for an economic summit, was the highest-level administration to speak about the operations yet. (AP Photo/Pardomuan Siagian)
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U.S. special forces captured a Libyan al-Qaida leader linked to the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, seizing him outside his Tripoli home and whisking him out the country. A Navy SEAL team that swam ashore hours earlier in Somalia engaged in a fierce firefight but did not apprehend a terrorist suspected in the recent Kenyan mall siege.
“We hope that this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in the effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday while in Indonesia for an economic summit. “Members of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations literally can run but they can’t hide.”
The Pentagon identified the al-Qaida leader captured Saturday as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Abu Anas al-Libi. He has been on the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list since it was introduced shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. There was a $ 5 million bounty on his head.
He was indicted by a federal court in New York for his alleged role in the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, on August 7, 1998, that killed more than 220 people.
The U.S. Defense Department’s chief spokesman, George Little, said the suspect is “lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location outside of Libya.” Little’s statement did not elaborate.
In the earlier raid Saturday, the Navy SEAL team reached land near a town in southern Somalia before militants of the al-Qaida-linked terrorist group al-Shabab rose for dawn prayers, U.S. and Somali officials told The Associated Press.
The assault on a house in Barawe targeted a specific al-Qaida suspect related to the Nairobi mall attack, but the operation did not get its target, one current and one former U.S. military official told the AP.
Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the raid publicly.
Little confirmed that U.S. military personnel were involved in a counterterrorism operation against a known al-Shabab terrorist in Somalia, but did not provide details.
The leader of al-Shabab, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, also known as Ahmed Godane, claimed responsibility for the mall attack, a four-day terrorist siege that began Sept. 21 and killed at least 67 people. A Somali intelligence official said the al-Shabab leader was the U.S. target.
Kerry said the United States would “continue to try to bring people to justice in an appropriate way with hopes that ultimately these kinds of activities against everybody in the world will stop.”
American officials said there were no U.S. casualties in either the Somali or Libyan operation.
Al-Libi’s capture would represent a significant blow to what remains of the core al-Qaida organization once led by Osama bin Laden.
A senior U.S. military official said the Tripoli raid was carried out by the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, which has responsibility for counterterrorism operations in North Africa. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the operation and discussed it on condition of anonymity.
Family members said gunmen in a three-car convoy seized al-Libi outside his home in the Libyan capital. Al-Libi is believed to have returned to Libya during the 2011 civil war that led to the ouster and killing of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
His brother, Nabih, said the 49-year-old was parking outside his house early Saturday after dawn prayers, when three vehicles surrounded his vehicle. The gunmen smashed his car’s window and seized his gun before grabbing al-Libi and fleeing. The brother said al-Libi’s wife saw the kidnapping from her window and described the abductors as foreign-looking armed “commandos.”
Libya asked the United States on Sunday for “clarifications” regarding the raid and said any Libyan should face trial in his own country.
Al-Libi was believed to be a computer specialist with al-Qaida. He studied electronic and nuclear engineering, graduating from Tripoli University, and was an anti-Gadhafi activist.
He is believed to have spent time in Sudan, where bin Laden was based in the early 1990s. After bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan, al-Libi turned up in Britain in 1995 where he was granted political asylum under unclear circumstances and lived in Manchester. He was arrested by Scotland Yard in 1999, but released because of lack of evidence and later fled Britain.
The raid in Somalia came 20 years after the “Black Hawk Down” battle in Mogadishu, when a mission to capture Somali warlords in the capital went awry after militiamen shot down two U.S. helicopters. Eighteen U.S. soldiers died in the battle, which marked the beginning of the end of that U.S. military mission to try to bring stability to the nation.
Since then, U.S. military intervention has been limited to missile attacks and lightning operations by special forces.
Saturday’s operation was carried out by members of SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed in Laden in his Pakistan hideout in 2011, another senior U.S. military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.
The team ran into fiercer resistance than expected, and after a 15 minutes to 20 minute firefight, the unit’s leader decided to abort the mission and the Americans swam away, the official said. SEAL Team Six has responsibility for counterterrorism activities in the Horn of Africa.
A resident of Barawe, which is about 150 miles south of Mogadishu, said by telephone that heavy gunfire woke up residents before dawn prayers.
The U.S. forces attacked a two-story beachside house where foreign fighters lived, said an al-Shabab fighter who gave his name as Abu Mohamed and who said he had visited the scene.
Al-Shabab has a formal alliance with al-Qaida, and hundreds of men from the U.S., Britain and Middle Eastern countries fight alongside Somali members of al-Shabab.
A U.S. official said U.S. forces disengaged after inflicting some casualties on the fighters, said the official, who was not authorized to speak by name and insisted on anonymity.
An al-Shabab official, Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu Musab, said in an audio message that the raid failed to achieve its goals.
Al-Shabab and al-Qaida have flourished in Somalia for years.
In September 2009 a daylight commando raid in Barawe killed six people, including Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of the most-wanted al-Qaida operatives in the region and an alleged plotter in the embassy bombings.
Al-Shabab later posted pictures on the Internet of what it said was U.S. military gear left behind in the raid. Pictures showed items including bullets, an ammunition magazine, a military GPS device and a smoke and flash-bang grenade used to clear rooms.
___
Dozier reported from Charlotte, N.C., Guled from Mogadishu, Somalia, and Straziuso from Nairobi, Kenya. Associated Press writers Rukmini Callimachi in Nairobi, Matthew Lee in Bali, Indonesia, Robert Burns in Washington and Esam Mohamed in Tripoli, Libya, contributed to this report.
Diplomats in Libya have confirmed a Russian woman sparked an attack on her country’s embassy in Tripoli. A former weight lifter had been in Libya since 2011 after heading there to fight on the side of Muammar Gaddafi in the civil war.
While in Libya Ekaterina Uztyuzhaninova gained notoriety as a political activist. Using the pen name Katya Cyaegha she became one of the most vocal and passionate members of the online community supporting Col. Gaddafi.
Ustyuzhaninova is known to have been an accomplished weight lifter and won a number of competitions in Russia and participated in several international events.
“She is not a bad person, but she wasn’t completely stable since some tragic events in her life,” Dmitry Ershov, who met her when he was looking for people to work as journalists in wartime Libya. He told Life News. “She wanted to go to Libya, but not for journalistic work. She supported the image of Muammar Gaddafi. Not his regime, but his image.”
At the peak of the Libyan conflict, ‘Cyaegha’ raised money to fund her one-woman expeditionary force. She travelled to Libya through Tunisia, saying that her goal was “to help Gaddafi or die for him”.
She managed to publish a number of reports of her exploits in Tripoli, which by that time was taken by the ‘rats’ – the derogatory name she used for the opposition forces. The messages were full of disdain for Gaddafi’s enemies and showed Cyaegha’s disregard for her personal safety.
“Some guy threatened me with an assault rifle and even shot in the ground next to my feet. But when he saw that I’m not afraid and have a knife, he ran away with his ass forward,” one of her first reports said.
“Cthulhian brain-f*ckedness beats Arab effrontery,” it added in a reference to Cyaegha’s nickname, which is borrowed from a deity feathered in horror fiction of Cthulhu Mythos.
The self declared mercenary fell on hard times after the fall of Gaddafi. His supporters had to do a whip round to pay her $ 2000 hotel bill, and buy her an air ticket home. She was reportedly kept ‘under house arrest’ at the Russia’s embassy at the time out of fear of being thrown to a debtor’s prison.
It’s not clear what she did since then or whether she did return to her home city of Novosibirsk, as some online reports claimed, or stayed in Libya. One of her friends in the pro-Gaddafi community says she received an e-mail from Cyaegha about a week ago, which seems to show that she was preparing for some drastic action.
“I know I will die in combat,” the message says. “There’s nothing bad about it. There is no heaven, life is short and the only sense a person may give to it is if some god or demon chooses to use him. And will then throw like a used condom.”
“This is war, and people get killed at war. I hope I’ll manage to give the rats as much sh*t as my body and mind can do,” the text goes.
Cyaegha’s supposed letter says that her 2011 pro-Gaddafi activism was “something more mystical that reposting news”.
“It is still alive. It is calling us back. But if I start telling you, you will thing I am totally out of my mind.”
Source: London Telegraph
The explosive plan was drawn up at the highest levels of the British Government as fears mounted over how to remove the dictator during the Libyan conflict.
Image – Wikimedia Commons
Andrew Mitchell, the then International Development Secretary, was dispatched to build covert contacts with the controversial regime in Equatorial Guinea.
The plan was never executed as Gaddafi was killed in October 2011, although there has always been speculation that this happened as he was leaving the country.
The details of the Gaddafi exit strategy are disclosed in In It Together by Matthew d’Ancona. The book, which will be serialised in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph this weekend is based on interviews with key Government figures and discloses hitherto unknown details about the key moments for the Coalition.
President George W. Bush receives a tour of nuclear material surrendered by Libya and flown to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a U.S. facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on July 12, 2004.
Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images
President George W. Bush receives a tour of nuclear material surrendered by Libya and flown to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a U.S. facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on July 12, 2004.
Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images
When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, one of the broader goals was to send a strong deterrent message to other dictators who might have weapons of mass destruction (even if Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein didn’t).
Recent events in Syria show that President Bashar Assad didn’t heed the warning. But Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi did.
Apparently fearing he might be next on the U.S. list of doomed dictators, Gadhafi stepped forward in December 2003 and announced he was giving up the country’s substantial stocks of chemical weapons. He also agreed to disband a nuclear program that was still at a relatively modest level.
U.N. teams were sent in and dismantled Libyan facilities on site. Components from the nuclear plants were flown to a U.S. nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and destroyed there.
This entire operation received limited attention at the time and was overshadowed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it has suddenly become relevant given Syria’s apparent willingness to relinquish chemical weapons that it never explicitly acknowledged having in the past.
It Isn’t Quick Or Easy
Lesson No. 1 is that dismantling a chemical weapons program is a laborious process, even when a country like Libya is cooperating and is at peace, as Libya was at the time.
After years of work, the Libyan arsenal was still being taken apart when an uprising against Gadhafi broke out in early 2011. This forced the U.N. inspection unit, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, to suspend its efforts.
In November 2011, shortly after Gadhafi was ousted and killed, the interim government that replaced him announced it had found a “previously undeclared chemical weapons stockpile” that included several hundred munitions loaded with mustard gas, Foreign Policy reported.
“The destruction of those weapons was halted because of a technical malfunction at the disposal facility and is still not complete. Nine years after vowing to get rid of its weapons, Libya has destroyed barely half of its total mustard gas stockpile and just 40 percent of its stores of chemical weapons precursor elements,” Foreign Policy noted.
After Gadhafi gave up his weapons, he was rewarded with better relations with the West. However, he felt he received far less than he was promised, and he was ultimately ousted in a NATO bombing campaign that greatly helped the rebels fighting him.
Reviewing Gadhafi’s experience, dictators may see it as a reason to cling to, rather than give up, weapons of mass destruction.
Syria’s Stockpile
Syria’s chemical weapons program would likely be even harder to take apart than Libya’s. Syria is embroiled in civil war, it’s stockpile is believed to be much larger than Libya’s, and it’s production and storage facilities are believed to be scattered among dozens of sites round the country.
“The known sites are actually in zones of conflict where the battle lines are changing literally on a day-to-day basis,” Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, told Morning Edition.
To further complicate matters, the Syrian government keeps moving the chemical weapons around, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this year.
The Pentagon has estimated that it would take 75,000 U.S. troops in Syria to take full control of the country’s chemical weapons. By comparison, the U.S. has 60,000 troops in all of Afghanistan. And President Obama, in his speech to the nation on Tuesday evening, reiterated he will not send American forces into Syria.
“None of this is mission impossible. But it is certainly not easy. It isn’t quick and it requires a lot of transparency and cooperation,” Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Morning Edition.
Syria has one of the world’s largest chemical weapons arsenals, which includes traditional chemical agents, such as mustard gas, and more modern agents, such as sarin, and persistent nerve agents, such as VX, according to the International Center for Counter-Terrorism, which is based in Israel.
“Syria has accumulated since the 1980s a stockpile of approximately 1,000 tons of chemical weapons, stored in some 50 different cities, mostly located in the northern part of the country close to the Turkish border,” the group added in a report released this week.
This has set off alarm bells, raising worries that the Syrian government could lose control of the arsenal. However, the center noted that it would probably be difficult for non-experts to use the Syrian weapons. Most of Syria’s chemical weapons are “stored as two separate ingredients that must be combined before lethal use, making it hard for its detonation by non-professional elements.”
Syria’s Secrecy
Until recently, Syria had never acknowledged possessing chemical weapons. Syria now admits having them, yet denies using them. The U.S. and others say Syrian government forces have unleashed the weapons on multiple occasions, including an Aug. 21 attack near Damascus that killed more than 1,400 people.
U.N. weapons inspectors happened to be in Syria on Aug. 21 to investigate reports of chemical weapons attacks months earlier. When the inspectors asked to visit the Damascus sites, the Assad government resisted for four days before granting permission.
The historic secrecy surrounding the program raises doubts about how forthcoming Syria might be if the United Nations were to ask for a full accounting of its chemical weapons program, as Russia, Syria’s ally, has proposed.
“There are a lot of complications in this proposal,” said Smithson of the Monterey Institute. “Assad has not told the truth about his chemical arsenal. He has already interfered with inspections. So to assume the declaration that the Assad government would be making is going to be accurate is really to take a leap of faith.”
