Experts are explaining why Libya’s neighbors are rightfully worried after the announcement of a Turkish military deployment in the North African country.
Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Sunday evening, announced that he was dispatching Turkish soldiers to Libya, in accordance with the green light given by Parliament last week. The main onjective of this intervention is to rescue the regime of Prime Minister, Fayez al-Sarraj recognized by the international community, but contest by a coalition of political and military forces led by Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the leader of the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army (ANL) based in the eastern city of Benghazi.
Hafter, using sometimes violent and expeditious methods, aspires to become Libya’s strong man and is actively supported by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, three countries fiercely hostile to the new ambitions shown these past few years by Turkey in the Arab and Muslim world.
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This Turkish military deployment to Libya follows several recent statements by the Turkish president announcing his readiness to support the Saraj government, should the latter request it. It mainly follows the signing at the end of last November in Istanbul of an agreement on military, security and maritime cooperation between Turkey and the Saraj government, which allows the latter to call on Turkey for military support.
According to Ankara, this agreement is supposed to “strengthen relationns between the two armies.” “We will protect the rights of Libya and Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean,” said Erdogan in the wake of the signing of this agreement on Turkish television, adding: “We are more than ready to provide all the necessary support to Libya.”
According to political scientist, Jalel Hachraoui, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for International Relations in The Hague, interviewed by APA, this intervention has circumstantial reasons.
“Turkey found in 2019 that Western diplomacy, European in particular, was excessively subject to their friendship with the Gulf States, notably the United Arab Emirates, which seeks total supremacy in Libya,” he explains. According to him, Europeans and the Gulf States, which would have failed militarily in Libya lacked pragmatism, an opportunity Turkey is eager to make the most of.
“Seeing a non-Arab, non-Western, anti-European non-Arab state arriving and asserting an openly visible military presence in Libya constitutes a kind of humiliation for Europeans,” Jalel Hachraoui said.
Turkey’s interest in Libya is not new, said Algerian defense and security journalist, Akram Kharief. In his view, Turkey and Libya have historical ties going back to the Ottoman era, when this vast country in North Africa was a province of the Ottoman Empire. The two countries have also been linked by important commercial ties for several years.
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“Since the uprising in Libya against the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Turkey has come very close to the local Muslim Brotherhood in Libya. Through this proximity, Erdogan, who aims to extend Turkish influence where possible, creates a major alliance in the inter-Libyan game, the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood being one of the key supporters of the Saraj government, which can also serve him internally. He escaped a coup. By intervening in Libya, he is trying to reinforce his power as much as possible and a victory in this country would be for him a triumph that he will not hesitate to exploit for internal political ends,” Hachraoui further said.
The Turkish military intervention, which is severely criticized by a large part of the international community, especially by the UN and the African Union, is followed with great concern by the North African and Sahelian neighbors of Libya. “Securing a stable and unified country with the attributes of a strong state can help reduce arms trafficking and prevent the development of withdrawal areas for the armed groups roaming the Sahel. Libya’s stability is therefore very important for its neighbors. It is therefore normal that they are worried about the possible consequences of a military intervention of which no one can predict the outcome,” Akram Kharief went on.
For Jalel Hachraoui, these concerns are legitimate too, especially since the Turkish intervention in Libya can provoke the entry into war of the other foreign powers backing Marshal Haftar, namely Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also the United Arab Emirates, whose military involvement is notorious, with in particular frequent air strikes in favor of their favorite. “The inter-Libyan conflict has already deeply divided the country. Seeing Libya become the battleground for over-equipped armies of countries like Turkey or the Emirates, for example, will only worsen the situation and may cause a rush of actors from all walks of life, including jihadist groups. They are already present in the country and in the neighboring Sahel and they could quickly be tempted to make Libya a new refuge, but also a major territory of jihad, as they did in Syria and Iraq before the fall of the self-proclaimed Caliphate of ISIS between 2014 and 2019,” Hachraoui warns.
FTK/te/fss/abj/APA