Egypt Armed Haftar's War For A Decade Now Wants a Seat in Tripoli

Twelve years. That is how long Egypt kept its embassy in Tripoli shut, and that is how long Libyans lived with the consequences of a foreign government that preferred a warlord to a ballot box. Now the doors are open again. Cairo calls it normalization. Libyans should call it what it is: a government that spent a decade picking sides in a country it had no right to divide, and now wants to be invited to the table it helped overturn.

Let us be precise about what happened. Egypt closed its Tripoli mission in 2014, when militia fighting engulfed the capital and diplomatic staff were pulled out. Within a year, Cairo was no longer a bystander. In February 2015, Egyptian warplanes struck targets in Derna after the Islamic State group released a video of Egyptian Christians being murdered on a Libyan beach. Egypt was entitled to grieve its citizens. It was not entitled to bomb a foreign city and call it counterterrorism without the consent of the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. Those strikes set a pattern that would define the next decade.

That pattern was alignment with Khalifa Haftar, the eastern commander whose Libyan National Army launched an assault on Tripoli in April 2019. Haftar's offensive killed thousands, displaced more than 100,000 people by UN estimates, and turned residential neighborhoods into kill zones. Egypt provided political cover, diplomatic protection and, according to UN Panel of Experts reporting on Libya, material support that flowed in violation of the UN arms embargo. The Panel's findings also documented the involvement of the United Arab Emirates, which supplied drones and air defence systems to Haftar's forces, and Russian private military personnel from the Wagner network operating on the front lines. Every one of these actors claimed to be stabilizing Libya. Every one of them made Libya less stable.

In June 2020, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi drew what he called a red line around Sirte and Jufra, warning that Egypt would intervene militarily if forces aligned with the Tripoli government advanced past it. Think about that. A foreign head of state declared a line across a sovereign country's territory and dared its elected government to cross it. Libya's own parliament, its own people, its own democratic institutions had no vote in that decision. Sisi's line was not a defence of Libyan sovereignty. It was an assertion that Libya's future would be negotiated in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, Moscow and Ankara, and never in Benghazi or Tripoli by Libyans themselves.

Who else is in the room? Turkey deployed military advisers, drone operators and Syrian mercenaries to prop up the Tripoli government, and it signed maritime and security agreements that serve Ankara's interests more than Libya's. Russia is present through Wagner. The UAE is present through its aerial and logistical network. Egypt is present through its border, its airspace and its money. Libya has become a buffet of foreign ambitions, and the bill is being paid by ordinary Libyans who cannot charge their phones for more than a few hours a day in many towns and who watch oil revenues vanish into patronage networks run by men who answer to foreign capitals.

We have seen this script before. A continent carved up by outsiders, a country fractured to suit their interests, a people told that stability requires one more strongman. Africa did not reject the scramble of the nineteenth century to accept a second one in the twenty-first, dressed in drones and development loans instead of gunboats. Libya is the proof of what happens when a continent's governance is outsourced.

So what should happen now? First, the African Union must stop hiding behind process and name the obvious. The AU has a Peace and Security Council with the mandate to act on unconstitutional interference. It should demand, in public and in writing, that every foreign state with troops, mercenaries, aircraft or arms inside Libya withdraw them on a verified timetable. Second, the UN Security Council must enforce its own arms embargo with sanctions that carry real cost, not the carefully worded statements that have been issued for years while weapons kept flowing. Third, the Libyan people deserve a binding election timetable backed by independent electoral commissions, the kind of institutions that worked in Ghana in 2000 and in Senegal in 2024, when citizens refused to accept a leader's attempt to postpone a vote and the courts and the street held the line together.

Africa also has working models. Botswana built a prosperous, stable democracy on a foundation of transparent mineral revenue management, an independent judiciary and a civil service that answers to law rather than to a clan. Mauritius shows what open markets, property rights and accountable institutions can do for a small state surrounded by bigger ambitions. Libya has oil, a young population and a diaspora that has built businesses and universities across the world. What it lacks is a state that its own people can trust to protect their property, their votes and their children. That is the reform agenda. Not another military line drawn on a map by a foreign general.

Libyan civil society, from the municipal councils in Misrata and Zawiya to the women's groups in Benghazi who have documented disappearances for years, should be given a seat in every negotiation about Libya's future. The private sector should be freed from the protection rackets that turn trade routes into tolls. And foreign governments that claim to respect democracy should be asked a simple question by their own citizens: if you believe in elections, why did you fund the man who cancelled them?

Egypt's embassy reopening is being framed as a diplomatic milestone. For the families in Tripoli who buried relatives during the 2019 assault, it is an insult. For the young Libyans who have never seen a national election they could trust, it is another reminder that their country is still treated as a chess piece. Do not let anyone tell you this is about "stability." Stability built on a warlord and a foreign army is just a pause before the next war.

So here is what we demand. Egypt must publicly withdraw its support for military solutions in Libya and commit to backing an elected, civilian-led process. The UAE, Russia, Turkey and every other outside power with forces or arms in Libya must leave. The African Union must put its name on a withdrawal timetable. The UN Security Council must enforce its embargo. And Libyans must be the ones who decide who governs them, through a vote that no general, no minister and no foreign capital can cancel.

We have been patient long enough. Libya's future is not Cairo's to reopen or close.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA