Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (13 page)

The UN experts contacted more than three dozen governments to pursue reports of arms smuggling into Libya, and found significant shipments of weapons to the rebels coming from the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Serbia, Albania, and more. Someone was paying for all the weapons. With the exception of the UAE shipments, that someone was the Emir of Qatar.

Qatar’s jihadi clients had their sights on bigger prey than just Qaddafi. They were actively expanding southward into Mali, Niger, and Nigeria, and all across northern Africa.

On June 12, 2011, soldiers from Niger intercepted an armed convoy crossing the border from Libya, about eighty kilometers north of the uranium mining zone of Arlit. Several people were killed in the clash, and two SUVs full of armed fighters escaped into the desert. When the Niger authorities examined the vehicle they had captured, they discovered an insurance card issued in Benghazi in 2010. They also found forty boxes of Semtex, each containing sixteen kilograms of the deadly plastic explosive: 640 kilograms in all. In theory, it was enough to bring down one thousand commercial jetliners. The car also contained 355 detonators and $90,000 in cash.

A few days later, a Nigerien citizen named Abta Hamedi turned himself in to the authorities, saying he had been in one of the two cars that had escaped during the clash. He said that the convoy was headed to Mali, where they were planning to meet with an al Qaeda cell. “In his statement to the authorities, Abta Hamedi said that the explosives were destined for Al-Qaida in the Islamic Magreb,” the UN report states. The Semtex was produced by the Czechoslovak state company VCHZ Synthesia and came from two separate lots sold to Libya in 1977 and 1980. The UN experts later discovered a stock of Semtex boxes “piled up in the open air in a site in the desert outside the town of Gharyan,” which they considered “a potential source of the illicit trafficking.”
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The jihadis were on the march, and the NATO-led military operation against Qaddafi had opened a Pandora’s box, giving them access to arms and explosives beyond their wildest dreams. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence of U.S. policy that went virtually unmentioned by the national media, which had jumped all over President Reagan for the blowback from arming the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s.

DEFYING THE WAR POWERS ACT

In a June 15, 2011, report to Congress, the White House argued that U.S. military action in Libya, which by now had cost taxpayers $715 million, did not require congressional notification under the War Powers Act, even though American pilots continued to fly combat missions, Air Force and Air National Guard reservists were doing the bulk of the in-flight refueling for the coalition, and the United States was providing 70 percent of the coalition’s intelligence assets.

The most astonishing claim came at the end of this thirty-two-page document, in which the White House asserted that no jihadi groups were actively engaged in the fighting—at least, not alongside the TNC. It was a carefully parsed deceit.

We are not aware of any direct relationship between the TNC and al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) or any other terrorist organization. There are reports that former members of the LIFG, which had been initially formed as an anti-Qadhafi group, are present in Eastern Libya and that some of them were fighting with opposition forces on the front lines against the regime. . . . The TNC has consistently and publicly rejected terrorism and extremist influences and we have not observed any TNC support or endorsement of the LIFG.

The report goes on to make equally extraordinary claims about the secular nature of the TNC and to sweep aside the dangers posed by previously banned Islamist groups that were now supposedly participating in Libyan society.

“From public press reports, we understand that the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood has declared its support for moderate Islam, emphasized the important role of women in society-building, and formed a relief organization in Benghazi,” the report stated. Undermining these rosy statements was a classified annex that included an assessment of extremist groups in Libya, and a separate threat assessment of MANPADS, ballistic missiles, and chemical weapons in Libya.
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The claim about moderate Islam would be proven wrong fewer than six months later, once the rebels toppled Qaddafi and began to impose Sharia law on the entire country. But the denial that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups were deeply embedded in the rebel alliance was flatly contradicted by information the administration
already
possessed, starting with meetings Stevens was having with tribal chiefs and key rebels, including LIGF leader Abdelhakim Belhaj, now a top rebel commander with his own
katiba
.

If Chris Stevens had been able to look out into the crowd that stormed his villa on the night he was murdered, he would have recognized some familiar faces. He knew all the rebel leaders, all the
katibas
. And those relationships would doom him, not save him.

THE MURDER OF GENERAL ABDELFATTAH YOUNIS

General Abdelfattah Younis was a big catch for the rebel team. After his defection in Benghazi at the start of the insurrection, General Younis was appointed chief of staff of the rebel forces and injected a degree of order and professionalism into their disparate ranks that had been sorely missing. A member of the large and closely knit Obeidi tribe in Benghazi, General Younis was well liked and regularly toured rebel positions in his camouflage uniform; his charismatic presence alone seemed sufficient to boost the moral of the fighters.

At every meeting he had with Special Envoy Chris Stevens, he begged the American to deliver heavy weapons to the rebels, who were under siege in Misrata. He wanted armed helicopters, antitank rockets, and SAMs. At one of these meetings, at the end of April 2011, he claimed that Qaddafi was planning to use chemical weapons against the rebels.

“He will fight up to the final drop of his blood,” Younis said. “He has been offered chances to leave and he refused them all. Most probably he will be killed or commit suicide. Unfortunately he still has about 25 per cent of his chemical weapons, which he might use as he’s in a desperate situation. He always says: ‘You will love me or I will kill you.’ ”
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This was coming from a man who had spent the past forty-two years at Qaddafi’s side, so, even if he was exaggerating Qaddafi’s chemical weapons arsenal—which Stevens knew the Americans had destroyed—his psychological evaluation of Qaddafi was sobering.
Stevens
urged the State Department to formally recognize the TNC as the legitimate government of Libya, a milestone they reached on July 15, thanks in good measure to the moderating presence of General Younis in the rebel camp.

On July 28, 2011, the TNC summoned Younis to Benghazi, following the inconclusive fourth battle for the control of Brega, an important oil port on the coast road leading to Benghazi. Council leader Mustapha Abdul-Jalil reportedly accused General Younis of secret contacts with the Qaddafi camp, which he claimed was the only thing that explained the lackluster performance of the troops under Younis’ command at Brega.

A convoy of
technicals
, pickups armed with twin-tube anti-aircraft guns and other weapons, screeched to a halt in front of General Younis’ headquarters near the front lines at two in the morning, and told the guards they had been sent by the TNC to escort the general back to Benghazi. He wasn’t overly concerned, since they said that they belonged to the 17th February Martyrs Brigade, a unit that was under his command. According to family members, they showed Younis an arrest warrant signed by a judge and by Ali Essawi, the deputy head of the council.

The arrest was a well-coordinated affair, not some fly-by-night venture. Before getting into the armored SUV escorted by the gun trucks, he contacted his family to say that he had called Essawi, who confirmed that the warrant was legitimate.
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Later, when he was named the chief suspect in Younis’ murder, Essawi denied it. “I never signed any decision relating to Abdel Fattah Younis,” he told a Libyan television reporter.
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As they headed toward Benghazi, the general’s escort swelled into a huge posse of men who blocked side roads and sent word ahead of them so the gates at the checkpoints stood open and they could pass without stopping.

When the TNC announced his murder on July 28, they initially claimed his convoy had been ambushed during a moment of lax security along the road. But family members say that an eyewitness saw the general enter the Garyounis Military Camp on the outskirts of Benghazi, where he was questioned by four judges and eventually released. A Special Forces officer who was at the compound said that two men from the 17th February Martyrs Brigade team escorting the general opened fire from their car with automatic weapons as they were leaving the camp. “The men’s leader was shouting ‘Don’t do it!’ but they shot Younis and his two aides, and took the bodies in their car and drove away,” the officer said.
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The murderers later burned the bodies of the three men—a sign of ultimate disrespect in Islam—and dumped them in a grassy field not far from the general’s home on the outskirts of Benghazi.

Who ordered the rebel militiamen to murder their own military chief? A member of his Obeidi tribe told reporters that the general had lots of enemies within the TNC leadership. Suspicions subsequently fell on TNC president Mustapha Abdul-Jalil, who was detained for questioning after the revolution but ultimately released.

As Qaddafi’s interior minister, Abdul-Jalil had been instrumental in the release of Islamist prisoners under the rehab program sponsored by Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi. General Younis was at odds with his pro-Islamist views. Soon after General Younis was killed, Abdul-Jalil named former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group leader Abdelhakim Belhaj head of the Tripoli Military Council, essentially making him General Younis’ replacement. So much for the White House and State Department fiction, which influential members of Congress, such as Senator John McCain, lapped up, that the rebels had no relationship to the LIFG or other al Qaeda–affiliated groups.

The Islamists blamed General Younis for the massacre of some 1,200 LIFG members in Abu Selim prison in 1996, when he was Qaddafi’s interior minister. The Qataris also hated General Younis because they saw him as the biggest obstacle to their plans to stack the rebel council with the Islamists that they had bought and paid for.

TNC Finance Minister Ali Tarhouni announced that the general had been murdered by renegade members of the Abu Obeida al-Jarrah Brigade, the
katiba
that the TNC had sent to Breda to bring the general in for questioning. “So secretive is the Abu Obeida al-Jarrah Brigade—said to be one of at least 30 semi-independent militias operating in the east of the country—that until yesterday few in the rebel capital had ever heard of it,” the
Daily Telegraph
reported at the time of his murder.

And just what happened to this shadowy
katiba
, run by an Islamist named Ahmed Abu Khattala, now accused by a TNC minister of murdering the rebel military chief? The TNC put them in charge of internal security in Benghazi, essentially operating as a secret police force. It was a pretty extraordinary turn of events, embarrassing for the rebels, and embarrassing for their Western supporters.

“Some rebel fighters say privately admit that the Islamists are stronger than is generally admitted,” the
Telegraph
reported.
30
One of the Abu Selim inmates who managed to escape the prison massacre was Abu Khattala himself. He later joined forces with former Guantánamo inmates in Ansar al-Sharia, the
katiba
that claimed responsibility for the attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. The Justice Department indicted him eleven months later for his role in the September 11, 2012, attacks.

Norman Benotman, a former LIFG member who recanted the use of violence and became a go-to analyst of the rebels from his perch in London, said the Abu Obeida brigade was one of many independent revolutionaries operating outside the command structure set up by General Younis. Benotman claimed the LIFG had disbanded in August 2009 but regrouped when the anti-Qaddafi uprising began, now calling itself
Al-Haraka Al-Islamiya Al-Libya Lit-Tahghir
, the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change. “Are there Islamists and jihadists in Libya? Yes, of course,” he said. “But they use the term ‘jihad’ as a ‘just war’ for their homeland, not as a transnational crusade.” They had joined the TNC and “accept the idea of a new democratic Libya,” he claimed.
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A Library of Congress report, “Al Qaeda in Libya,” identified the murder of General Younis as a seminal event that empowered the Islamists inside the TNC. “Abdelhakim Belhaj, former LIFG emir, was appointed by the TNC’s president as the military commander of Tripoli, controlling the twenty-thousand-strong Tripoli Military Council (TMC). Later, with his political ally, Ali Sallabi, a prominent cleric with links to the international branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, he forced the resignation of Mahmoud Jibril, the former TNC chief executive, whom they probably perceived as too secular. These two Islamist leaders are expected to play a major role in the new Libya, partly because of the support they are believed to enjoy from Qatar,” the report states.
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A pro-Qaddafi website claimed that protesters critical of the feckless TNC investigation into the general’s assassination were pointing fingers at Qatar for keeping the truth from coming out. “What is the capital of Libya: Tripoli or Doha?” one banner read. During a protest, angry young men burned the Qatar flag flying at the Tibesti Hotel, widely viewed as the seat of Qatar in Benghazi.
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Of course, until early June 2011, it was also the seat of the U.S. government’s special envoy, Chris Stevens.

“General Younis was the one person who could have steered the Libyan revolution in a different direction,” former CIA clandestine service officer John Maguire told me. “As the father of Libyan special forces, he would have been a rallying point with credibility for the post-Qaddafi stabilization effort. He would have kept the Muslim Brotherhood at arm’s length, and kept the arms system under control.”