Misrata Brotherhood resigns: Maneuver or recognition of organization’s fall in Libya?

Ahmed Adel

The Brotherhood in Libya, supported by Turkey and Qatar, is experiencing a state of division, threatening its disintegration, against the backdrop of differences between its branches and leaders. The group’s members in the city of Misrata announced their collective resignation from the terrorist organization.

In a statement posted on Facebook on Wednesday, October 21, the members who resigned confirmed that this step means dissolving the organization in Misrata. They referred to what they described as “the procrastination of the group’s leadership and its obstruction of implementing the reviews and corrections reached by the group’s members at their tenth conference held in 2015.”

The resigned members emphasized that the temporal context in which the group arose and the temporal development in the environment and reality necessitated a re-reading, review and correction of the scene, which was not achieved by them.

The resignation came about two months after Brotherhood members in the city of Zawiya also resigned, deciding to dissolve the branch in the city after realizing their decline in popularity.

Fatal blow to Erdogan’s project

The dissolution of the Brotherhood in Misrata constitutes a blow to the project of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who intervened militarily in western Libya in support of the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli in order to save the Brotherhood from collapsing after the Libyan National Army (LNA) approached Tripoli months after a military operation it launched in April 2019 to liberate the capital from extremist militias.

The LNA’s general command asserts that the GNA is merely a political front for the terrorist Brotherhood, while has strengthened its influence in western Libya through armed militias that practice intimidation and bullying against opponents and the residents in the region.

Confusing the Turkish plan

The dissolution of the Brotherhood in Misrata, which was one of the main strongholds of militant groups that spearheaded the GNA’s military operations against the LNA, brings confusion to the Turkish plan in the region and scatters Erdogan’s cards. The declared dispute between the Brotherhood’s branch in Misrata and the leadership in Tripoli, in addition to its head terrorist mufti, Sadiq al-Ghariani, in Istanbul, highlights the internal divisions that the organization is keen to hide so that the resignation does not extend to its other branches.

This resignation coincides with Libyans’ growing popular discontent with the Brotherhood organization, as the degree of support for the group’s policies inside the country has decreased, especially in its main strongholds in the west of the country. Residents realized that the terrorist organizations only seek their own interests and to control the government.