Wolves lost in the desert: The rise and fall of ISIS in Libya

Ahmed Sultan

On December 6, 2016, ISIS in Libya disappeared from its main stronghold inside the city of Sirte following seven months of bloody battles with the Al-Bunyan Al-Marsous forces. But after three years of hiding in the desert wasteland, the ISIS wolves returned to the front again on the anniversary of the fall of Sirte.

ISIS released a song documenting a series of terrorist operations that the group carried out during the summer months of 2019, including storming the towns of Fuqaha, Ghadwa and Sabha in southern Libya.

War of attrition

In April 2019, late ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in his last video, in which he called on his followers in Libya to follow the “war of attrition” tactics and to try to exhaust the Libyan National Army (LNA) militarily and physically through lightning attacks, confirming the end of the stage of “temporarily seizing land” and entering into a long guerrilla war.

It was only a few weeks later until the ISIS cells in the Libyan desert began implementing Baghdadi’s directions, taking advantage of the LNA’s preoccupation in the battle in Tripoli.

The ISIS Desert Brigades, established after the fall of Sirte, attacked the towns of Fuqaha and Ghadwa and took control of them for a few hours before withdrawing again to their camps in the desert. Then, the terrorist elements attacked the headquarters of the military command in the city of Sabha, temporarily taking control of the city before withdrawing again.

From April to July 2019, the Desert Brigades launched 11 attacks – two in Sabha, two in Tmassa, and one each in Fuqaha, Ghadwa, Zillah, Derna, Samnu, and Haruj, as well as a checkpoint outside Sabha, which the organization targeted with a car bomb.

Libyan ISIS’s structure

ISIS is attempting to appear as a powerful armed group capable of launching attacks, bringing down cities, and withdrawing safely.

US Air Force spokesman Col. Chris Karns said that the terrorist organization has recently returned to activity, explaining that current US estimates indicate there are about 300 ISIS terrorists roaming the Libyan desert.

Following the fall of Sirte in December 2016, Baghdadi had abolished the three territorial states ISIS had established in 2015 in Tripoli, Sirte and Barca and joined them under one state called the State of Libya.

According to a previous statement by LNA spokesman Gen. Ahmed al-Mesmari, the leader of ISIS in Libya is an Iraqi terrorist named Abu Moaz al-Tikriti.

According to a previous report by the Reference, Tikriti came to Libya with the late ISIS leader Abu Nabil al-Anbari. He had been detained at Camp Bucca in Iraq before later being released and then sent by Baghdadi with a number of ISIS leaders to open a new branch in Libya.

Tikriti participated with Anbari in the slaughter of the Egyptian Copts, and he supervised the selection of the current ISIS leaders in Libya after the formation of the new structure known as the Desert Brigades.

The organization is active mainly in remote areas within the Libyan desert, especially the Bani Walid region and the Haruj area of Jufra district, and it also has cells in the city of Sirte, the organization’s former stronghold.

Military campaigns to track ISIS remnants

The LNA launched several military campaigns to hunt down the remnants of ISIS in the Libyan desert, and its forces succeeded in discovering the terrorist organization’s camps in the Haruj region in June 2019. The terrorist organization’s operations then stopped for a period after its camps were discovered.

The organization returned to activity again in late September 2019, but US Africa Command (AFRICOM) air forces bombed a number of ISIS targets in the city of Sabha, which again weakened ISIS’s ability.

The AFRICOM leadership announced that it continues to hunt the ISIS remnants and carry out air strikes against them.

Reasons behind the collapse

According to a recent study by Aaron Zelin, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, there are three main factors behind the disintegration of ISIS’s territorial states in Libya:

1- US air strikes

The United States continues its air strikes against ISIS commanders and camps in Libya, with what US Defense Secretary Mark Esper calls a “grass-cutting” strategy, which relies on carrying out strikes against the terrorist organization from time to time to control the reins and prevent ISIS from reappearing.

AFRICOM announced the launch of a series of air strikes against ISIS, the last of which was in September, which killed 43 ISIS fighters.

2- Collapse of foreign terrorist networks

Since its beginning of ISIS in Libya, the organization has relied on foreign terrorists, especially Tunisians, Sudanese and Egyptians, but a large number of foreign ISIS elements have been killed, which has undermined the organization’s ability to gain new followers as it did in the 2014-2016 period.

3- Financial difficulties

For many years, ISIS’s Libyan branch relied on funding coming from the central organization in Syria and Iraq, but it also tried to diversify its sources of funding by imposing taxes on Libyans, as well as kidnappings and ransoms, according to a previous report by the committee tracking ISIS at the United Nations Security Council.

In the beginning of 2019, the LNA succeeded in attacking the terrorist organization’s sources of funding after attacking its camps in the Ghadwa region in southern Libya, which reduced ISIS’s ability to continue financing its terrorist operations.

ISIS’s future in Libya

According to Aaron Zelin, the terrorist organization is currently trying to rebuild itself but faces a number of difficulties, the most important being that the Libyans do not accept the extremist ideology imposed by ISIS.

Zelin noted that Libya’s tribal nature does not resemble the sectarian nature in Iraq and Syria, and therefore the organization will not be able to recover and return as long as the conditions remain the same in the countries neighboring Libya.