Reporters - Libya: Infernal trap

Libya has been in turmoil since the 2011 revolution that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Since then, the country has only experienced chaos. There was the 2014 war between Khalifa Haftar and Islamist militias, which had been joined by Western militias. Then the 2016 war, against the Islamic State organization. And now, this new war between East and West.

The conflict has been raging for eight months with abandoned houses on the battlefield. In the west, there is no organized army. So there are a multitude of militias fighting - brigades, often composed of very young men who fight in T-shirts and flip-flops with weapons seized from Muammar Gaddafi at the time of the revolution.

Drone war

Their days are punctuated by fighting on the ground with very little strategic progress and folds when the fear of a drone strike is too urgent. According to the United Nations, Libya has become the largest theater of drones in the world, with more than 1,000 strikes since the beginning of the conflict.

In this chaos, nearly a million migrants survive, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa.

The Calvary of Migrants

Our team witnessed an interception of 126 people off the coast of Libya - men, women and children who will be brought back to Libya for their utter despair. The majority will return to a detention center where, they testify, they are mistreated.

Our reporters managed to negotiate access to the center of Zliten, east of Tripoli, where some men have been imprisoned for months without ever seeing the light of day. They give testimony of torture and abuse, ill-treatment that is getting worse with this escalating war. A rare dive in the heart of the Libyan chaos.

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