As the fighting ramps up, civilians have become trapped in the crossfire of Libya’s messy proxy war

With no choice over their own destiny, Bel Trew writes, the people are increasingly struggling amid the shifting tectonic plates of a fraught political landscape and reports of rampant rights abuses

People shop at a vegetable market in the eastern Libyan port city of Benghazi (AFP/Getty)

Khalifa Haftar’s plan to march on Tripoli sounded somewhat fantastical given we were sitting over 1000km along the coast from Libya’s capital city in his Marj base, east of Benghazi.

It was 2014. It had taken weeks of negotiations to get the tight-lipped renegade general to agree to meet. The summons eventually came in the middle of the night. We drove for hours through kidnappers’ territory with a revolver in the front seat. The septuagenarian former resident of Virginia, US, held court like a monarch. Behind him a TV screen glowed with images of his offensive in Benghazi.

Back then, Libya was really a domestic turf war between squabbling local militias. Just a few days after the interview with Haftar, Islamist brigades in Tripoli would begin their own “Libya Dawn” offensive that propped up a short-lived administration.