• Turkey: Erdogan responds to the United States by threatening to close its Turkish bases
  • Syria.Idlib suffers a new black day of civilian bombing

A new international game is played in the eastern Mediterranean. While in Syria the army and its ally Russia violently strike the northwest, to end the last focus of an armed opposition once supported by Turkey, both foreign nations are threatening to engage in Libya. And not only them. More and more countries swirl around one of the two rival powers erect over the ruins of gadafism. Another of the so-called 'proxy' wars is coming.

"They support a warlord but we make it to the legitimate government and we accept his invitation to send troops. This is what makes him different," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan explained yesterday to the provincial delegates of his party. The president was trying to explain to his acolytes the reasons why, as soon as next month, the Grand Assembly, which dominates, plans to approve a military deployment with which Turkey seeks to gain regional weight and confront its uncomfortable neighbors , especially Greece and Cyprus.

The Government of Erdogan is, together with Qatar and Italy, one of the proclaimed supporters of the Government of National Agreement (GAN). Based in Tripoli and headed by Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj, this Administration is the only one recognized by the United Nations. Against it is called the Government of Tobruk, based on the city of the same name. His armed arm, the Libyan National Army led by Marshal Jalifa Hafter, has been trying to invade Tripoli for nine months, an offensive that has relaunched these days. Skirmishes have happened around the city, although the GAN seems to have managed to stop Hafter's first attack.

Last Saturday, after a visit from Sarraj, the Turkish Parliament approved a military agreement with the GAN that will allow the Libyan to provide equipment and military training. The motion planned to pass in January, announced by Erdogan on Thursday, will allow soldiers to be sent to fight Hafter on demand from the GAN, which has already expressed its desire to require troops if fighting in the capital is increased. Erdogan accused Hafter yesterday of being a "coup supported by several European and Arab countries , " including Russia. If the Turkish deployment materializes, Erdogan can paradoxically use just the same as Putin in intervening in Syria: having a formal invitation to do so.

Turkish footprint

But the Turkish footprint is already noticeable in Libya, especially in its skies. According to The Guardian newspaper, Bayraktar TB2 drones cross the Libyan air under the aegis of the GAN, as does a fleet of similar Wing Loong ships from the Chinese factory, provided by the United Arab Emirates to Haftar forces. The struggle in the skies, by fighting these low-cost devices, useful to sneak up and fight without putting at risk effective on the battlefield, has made Libya the first stage of one of the so-called wars of the future .

"Air power is playing a more important role and drones are very useful. We have detected a greater tendency to pursue 'soft' targets. Civilian victims are increasingly tolerated and there have been no international convictions," recalls newspaper Jalel Harchaoui , expert of the Clingendael Institute in The Hague. The academic points out several examples. Last August, a drone operated by the Emirates killed about 45 people, including numerous children, during a meeting in the southwest of the country. The ship, at the service of Hafter, executed the so-called double trap bombing, a technique commonly used by Russians in Syria that consists of hitting once, waiting for them to come to the victims and attack that point again.

"Obstacle to peace"

According to the UN, which considers such large foreign interventions in Libya "an obstacle to peace," and continues to ask the parties for a political understanding that avoids the resurgence of the armed conflict, more than a thousand people have died in the latest wave of fighting and more of 120,000 have been displaced. One of the fears is that the Libyan branch of the Islamic State, which came to rule a city the size of Sirte until its expulsion in December 2016, could exploit the situation and re-emerge in the midst of lack of control.

This was recently warned by Sarraj, who believes that Hafter's current offensive gives "terrorists the appropriate opportunity and the weather" for a resurgence. Hafter, on the other hand, was one of the battering ram in the fight against Daesh. This and his image of a non-Islamist military have earned him Western sympathies that the GAN lacks, identified with some Muslim Brotherhood criminalized in countries such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

According to his Interior Minister, Fathi Bashagha, and Western Intelligences, a thousand Russian fighters have joined the ranks of Hafter that attack Tripoli. They are neither more nor less than mercenaries of the Wagner company, the private 'mini army' of a friend of Vladimir Putin who has acted as a Russian force in those scenarios where Moscow has preferred not to confirm his presence or to account for his own casualties. Bashagha has denounced that Wagner's men have technology to disorient drones and artillery.

Putin is scheduled to visit Turkey on January 8 . It is likely that among the issues he and Erdogan dispatch are the future of Syria and Libya. Ankara will negotiate with a currency of exchange: he has just signed a controversial maritime agreement with the GAN that he does not want to give up. The newly defined seabed by both administrations, which is presumed full of gas, overlaps with those of Greece and especially Cyprus, which Turkey accuses of selling exploitation rights to third parties without its Turkish Cypriot protections. If the dreaded wars of the new year have a solution, it seems that it will be far from the western orbit.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Libya
  • Syria
  • Turkey
  • Vladimir Putin
  • Greece
  • Cyprus
  • Un
  • Russia
  • Italy
  • Islamic State
  • Egypt
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Refugees

Summit in London NATO celebrates its 70th anniversary with the largest division since the Iraq War

Refugee crisis Germany subject the reception of refugee children in Greece to a European solution

SyriaIdlib suffers a new black day of civilian bombing