The head of the Libyan Presidential Council, Mohamed El-Menfi, said that the Libyans are waiting for the African Union to support the mechanism and plans to remove mercenaries and foreign forces from Libya.
During his speech at the African Union summit yesterday, Saturday, in the Ethiopian capital (Addis Ababa), Al-Manfi affirmed the call of the Libyan parties to facilitate reaching a consensus that leads to free, fair and acceptable elections, and avoids the country entering into a new crisis.
He also called on the President of the Libyan Presidential Council to support the holding of the reconciliation conference in Libya and to benefit from similar African experiences, pointing to the establishment of a High Commission for National Reconciliation months ago.
And last November, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya announced that the Libyan Joint Military Committee (5+5) had reached an agreement in Cairo to establish an effective communication and coordination mechanism to remove fighters, mercenaries and foreign forces.
Prior to that, the “Berlin 2” conference last June stressed the need to withdraw all mercenaries and foreign forces from Libya without delay, and to implement the full terms of the ceasefire agreement signed in October 2020 in Geneva, which is the same position expressed by the Council of Ministers. International security unanimously.
The agreement stipulated the withdrawal of mercenaries from Libya within 90 days, but a year after the signing of the agreement, only a limited number of mercenaries withdrew, according to what was confirmed by Libyan Foreign Minister Najla al-Manqush last October.
It is estimated that there are thousands of mercenaries in Libya, including Chadians and Sudanese, as well as members of the Russian Wagner Group, and these fought within the forces of retired Major General Khalifa Haftar in the attack on Tripoli and other areas in the Libyan west between April 2019 and June 2020.