Opinion

Memories of the fall of Tripoli 13 years ago and the striking similarities to what is going on today


August 22, 2024

Two Libyan flags at Martyrs square in Tripoli, Libya [Getty]

by Dr Mustafa Fetouri
MFetouri

13 years ago, on 20 August, 2011, the fall of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, began. It was not a swift end to the battle for the capital and the seat of power in a country already at war with itself. It was not slow, either. Rebels fighting under the umbrella collation led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) were surrounding the city while their propaganda machine in Doha, Washington, Paris and London kept propagating one message: “Gaddafi forces have encircled the capital with rockets and, at the right moment, they will press a button and Tripoli is gone.” None of that happened, and Gaddafi himself only left Tripoli at the end of August, days after his own relative, Major-General Al-Barani Ashkal in charge of defending the capital, said to have betrayed him and let the rebels in without a fight.

But, to many people, Tripoli had already fallen a day earlier, when many loudspeakers in mosques began to blare out the call to prayer as if it were Eid. However, the voices were not of the well-known Libyan muezzins, nor were their accents Libyan. They sounded strange, instilling fear instead of reassuring people, as they are supposed to. In between calls for prayer, they would play pre-recorded hymns which were completely alien to Libya’s songs of praise and culture of worshipping. In later years, we would learn that those hymns were actually those of Al-Qaeda and Daesh—something the about-to-end Gaddafi regime shielded Libyans from, for years.

READ: France-UK campaign to oust Gaddafi from Libya a disaster, says spy chief

However, the desperate population in the even more desperate city missed the connotation such anthems carry. They were ushering in more extreme Islamic context in everyday life that people were not used to under the former regime. In later years, Daesh itself will find its way into Tripoli.

Capitals in civil wars usually fall with a bang, when one side prevails over the other. We have seen this in Beirut, Baghdad, Mogadishu after that and Addis Ababa, long after. But not in Tripoli. The city appeared as if it was mesmerised, somehow.

The worst thing wars do to people is make them mean and selfish. The daily pressures of life and the threats it amplifies suppressed the usual traits associated with the Libyan personality, like helping out, generosity, sharing and self-sacrifices.

Tripoli’s fall came like the slow death of a city that was once vibrant and full of life, but has grown desperate every day. All basics of life had disappeared and prices of the little available had skyrocketed. Fuel, for example, was rationed and it would take two days of queuing in front of the few gas stations that stayed open. Brawls and fights would break out among desperate motorists. Cooking gas was nowhere to be found and, when found, a cylinder would be ten times the usual price of less than half a dollar.

NATO provided air cover while the rebels pushed forward on the ground, controlling new neighbourhoods everyday, but not the entire city. What happened was, really, the city fell in a kind of incremental way: everyday an armed militia would appear in a district gaining control, and so on.

Desperate to find out what was happening, on August 20 I left home, heading to the Rixos Hotel, some five kilometres westwards. The night before, and again that morning, we had no power, no internet and sporadic access to the mobile phone networks. The Rixos has been the media centre for the government where my friend, spokesman Dr. Moussa Ibrahim, his wife and child lived and worked. All foreign journalists covering the war also camped in same hotel, where Mr. Ibrahim would make his announcements in excellent English and, sometimes, in a very emotional way.

Less than a hundred meters from my house is the National Number Network; it is the computer nerve of the country’s population register of all Libyans, their identities, families and everything else relating to a person, whether Libyan or not. The place was closed and its usually jammed car park was empty. A seemingly innocent unarmed young chap was sitting on a black swivel-chair facing the burning sun. I asked him what he was doing. He said “I am guarding the place. Nobody is here.”

Around the corner, a few more meters as I turned westwards, a group of kids as young as eleven years old, had erected a roadblock. It was no more than a pile of bricks and a few discarded construction steel bars. At least two of the kids had a Kalashnikovs! I asked the older one, about fifteen years old, what they were doing. He said “we are guarding the neighbourhood.” Along the short road, I counted five more similar road blocks, but no Kalashnikovs.

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It was a hot and very humid Ramadan day; I was fasting and walking under the scorching sun was going to be hard, but I was determined to find out what happened to friends and colleagues at the Rixos. I was there the previous night after Iftar, and everything seemed normal, but today things had dramatically changed. Weeks earlier, I got an ID card allowing me to enter the hotel where power and internet access were guaranteed. I frequent the place almost every night to see friends, chat and, sometimes, send my reports to the outside world. A few friends were there, including a couple of foreign journalist who came to cover the war.

I never got to the hotel, as fighting around it was on going and never knew what happened to my friends, until weeks later.

Tripoli those days was waiting for the unknown, just as it does now as more sporadic clashes are more frequent inside the capital. The country has been in chaos since NATO bombed it 13 years ago, helping to topple the Gaddafi government and, ultimately, murdering him.

Nowadays, the country is divided under two governments controlling parts of its vast territories. For NATO, it is “a mission accomplished”, despite the fact that Libya today is an almost divided country, has no sovereignty, its people struggle to feed their families, its freedom scene is far worse than it was under Gaddafi and the country has not had elections for the last ten years—a country where militias still roam almost freely, while they are paid by the government in Tripoli.

For Tripoli, the mood of waiting for the unknown goes on. Many think war is coming, while others try to make the best of the moment, hardly paying attention to what the corrupt and overstaying politicians ever say.

The fall of Tripoli represented the first NATO war in North Africa, after France was defeated in Algeria, decades before. But it does not mean it is the last as the biggest military alliance in human history grows into a more exclusive club and ever more aggressive.