In late August, the top-ranking U.S. military commander in Africa toured Libya — and had a cordial meeting in Benghazi with a notorious warlord: Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter.
U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, called on Hifter, the leader of the Libyan National Army, during his series of meetings with top officials in Libya to “further cooperation” between the U.S. and that nation. Hifter “expressed a desire to expand security engagement with the U.S.” when they spoke, according to an AFRICOM press release.
Left out of the AFRICOM announcement is any mention that Hifter is a notorious “warlord,” according to members of Congress, whose LNA, which the State Department lumps in with “other nonstate actors, including foreign fighters and mercenaries,” has been accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and gross violations of human rights.
In 2019, I watched as Hifter’s forces lobbed munitions into the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, laying waste to civilian neighborhoods. Later, as I walked through the ruins of shattered homes, battered apartment buildings, and wrecked shops, the unmistakable scent of death hung in the air. That same year, Amnesty International documented indiscriminate strikes often using inaccurate weapons, in violation of the laws of war, by Hifter’s LNA. A year later, Human Rights Watch reported that fighters affiliated with Hifter “apparently tortured, summarily executed, and desecrated corpses of opposing fighters.” A U.S. State Department report on human rights in Libya, published earlier this year, noted that allegations of abuses committed by the LNA were “widespread” in 2023 and included “killings, arbitrary detention, unlawful recruitment or use of children, and torture.”
Langley’s predecessor at AFRICOM, Gen. Stephen Townsend, excoriated the LNA as a “destabilizing factor in the security of Libya” out to further its “own power and agendas.” At the time, AFRICOM said that collaboration between the LNA and mercenaries from the Russia-linked Wagner Group had “prolonged the Libyan conflict and exacerbated casualties” there. “The world heard Mr. Haftar declare he was about to unleash a new air campaign. That will be Russian mercenary pilots flying Russian-supplied aircraft to bomb Libyans,” said Townsend in 2020.
But Langley has embraced Hifter, treating him in a similar fashion to members of Libya’s legitimate government in Tripoli. He met with Hifter on a tour in the fall of 2023, as well. When asked about Langley’s response to Hifter’s request for closer ties with the U.S., AFRICOM refused to comment. “We do not have any additional information for you outside of the information provided in the press release,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept.
Langley’s visit was the latest chapter in America’s on-again, off-again relationship with Hifter. Once a favorite of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, Hifter joined a U.S.-backed group of dissidents seeking to topple his former patron in the late 1980s. After their coup plans imploded, the CIA evacuated Hifter and 350 of his men to the United States in 1991, where he was granted citizenship and lived in suburban Virginia for the next 20 years.
A 2011 revolution and NATO intervention, including U.S. airstrikes, toppled Gaddafi and plunged Libya into chaos from which it has never fully emerged. In the years that followed, Hifter renewed his long-dormant project to seize power in his homeland.
In 2014, railing against the Libyan central government’s failure to beat back terrorists, Hifter announced a military coup that quickly evaporated. But the warlord’s fortunes changed after he launched a campaign to clear the eastern half of the country of Islamist militant groups like Ansar al-Sharia, which conducted the 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Hifter forged a reputation for attacking terrorist groups, but critics questioned his commitment and effectiveness, casting his activities as a cultivated effort to curry favor, including with the United States.
Over the years, Hifter’s LNA has been backed by Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2019, a State Department official told The Intercept the U.S. had not aided Hifter’s forces, but retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa from 2015 to 2017, said that under Obsidian Lotus — a so-called 127e program that allows the U.S. to use foreign troops on U.S.-directed missions targeting America’s enemies to achieve America’s aims — U.S. commandos trained and equipped more than 100 Libyan proxies. Those forces, according to three Libyan military sources and a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, became elite troops within Hifter’s LNA. In 2020, Bolduc described Hifter as a “guy that we could trust.”
By the late 2010s, Hifter’s LNA increasingly controlled the east of the country, while the U.N.-backed central government held the west. On April 2, 2019, Gen. Stephen Townsend, then the incoming AFRICOM commander, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Hifter’s LNA and other paramilitary groups constituted a grave risk to Libya’s stability.
Days later, Hifter ordered his forces to take the capital. “Use your weapons only against those who prefer to confront and fight you,” he commanded, promising, “Anyone who stays at home will be safe.”
“Safe” hardly describes the scores of displaced people I met as Hifter’s forces rained rockets, missiles, and artillery shells on their neighborhoods.
The State Department acknowledged questions from The Intercept about the nature of the U.S. government’s current relationship with Hifter but did not respond prior to publication.
During his visit to Libya, Langley also met with Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dabaiba, President of the Presidential Council Mohamed Menfi, and Lt. Gen. Mohamed al-Haddad, the chief of the general staff of the Libyan Armed Forces.