May 22 marked a sad day for the residents of Manchester, England as a bomb exploded outside an Ariana Grande music concert at the Manchester Arena just as the show finished and young teenage fans — mostly girls — were filing out. Unbeknownst to them they were walking straight into a death trap. At least 23 innocent people were killed and 59 were injured in one of the worst terrorist attacks on British soil in recent years.
The suicide bomber, a man named Salman Abedi, was the son of refugees from Libya, a war-torn country that former President Obama saw fit to attack in 2011, helping to overthrow and kill former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. While Gaddafi was not the perfect leader of his people — he usurped his country of vast oil wealth and was only sharing it with citizens on an erratic basis — his rule marked a high point for average family income in the North African nation (Libya quickly became Africa’s richest state) as well as in other categories such as infant mortality and local government participation.
There was free health care, free electricity and interest-free loans for all Libyan citizens. Gaddafi boasted that the average inhabitant in his nation prospered under his regime. But ultimately, Gaddafi lost power as an opposition movement to his rule gained popularity in the midst of the Arab Spring movement that started to sweep the Middle East in 2011. Even though Libya was functionally a democracy, Gaddafi tolerated no significant opposition to his rule and was known for brutality toward his enemies.
At the same time, compared to other Middle Eastern and North African despots such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir or Tunisia’s Zine Ben Ali, Gaddafi was more open to peace, rights for his people and a Pan-African political body that would have brought more respect and autonomy to the region he ruled in.
Gaddafi had committed to ridding his country of weapons of mass destruction and was ecstatic when the U.S. State Department finally took Libya off its list of terrorist nations in 2006. Gaddafi had begun to host Western business executives looking to do business in his country after a pause of some 26 years.
But in 2011, the Arab Spring movement began in earnest. Opposition leaders took their cues from Britain, France and ultimately the United States, with a strong push from ex-President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — who explicitly rejected an offer that would have let Gaddafi broker a deal for peace.
These opposition leaders, such as Abdelhakim Belhadj — a man Senator John McCain called “a heroic freedom fighter” — gained logistical and tactical support for their revolution that ultimately forced Gaddafi from power. American reconnaissance planes and drones helped target Gaddafi’s convoy as he fled in vain toward the southern region of Libya, where he hoped a network of supporters would give him refuge. In the end, he never made it out of his hometown of Sirte, and he and his son Mo’tassim were killed as they attempted to hide from rebel forces based at the nearby stronghold of Bani Walid.
In the wake of Gaddafi’s death, things went from bad to worse in Libya. The man the West has called the legitimate new leader of Libya, Fayaz Sarraj, has failed to stabilize the country or to stop the overwhelming flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Europe (which Gaddafi had successfully managed prior to his overthrow).
In his place, another opposition leader, Khalifa Haftar, who spent at least 20 years living practically next door to CIA headquarters in Virginia, has declared that he seeks to run Libya as a secular state.
In the meantime, there have been running battles between forces loyal to Sarraj and troops under Haftar’s command. Thousands of civilians have died in the chaos as neither faction has been able to claim enough of the country’s infrastructure or popular support to take control over former government institutions such as the Central Bank or the nation’s petroleum facilities.
Some of the power vacuum created by Sarraj has been filled by some 5,000 reported members of ISIS that have flooded into the country. The man Senator McCain called a freedom fighter in 2011, Abdelhakim Belhadj, became the point man for ISIS in Libya. ISIS now has enough of a presence there that some American officials are concerned that it could be a new home base for the group. As it stands, intelligence reports have stated that ISIS sees Libya as a staging ground and plotting point for European attacks.
Back in the UK, investigators looking into the Manchester bombing have uncovered a network of terrorists in and around the city. The South Manchester neighborhood where Abedi lived has been termed one of the world’s densest Libyan expatriate communities.
The terror threat level in the UK remains at “critical” as police have made a number of arrests and set off a controlled explosion outside a home that was raided. Abedi’s older brother Ismail and 24-year-old cousin Abdallah Forjani have been arrested. Abedi’s 18-year-old younger brother Hashim and father Ramadan Abedi, who had praised extreme terrorist groups on social media, have been detained in the Libyan capital of Tripoli by counterterrorism forces there.
A spokesman for these forces said the elder Abedi belongs to a Salafist jihad group that has links to ISIS and al-Qaeda. In 2012, Abedi’s father posted a picture of Hashim wearing an American t-shirt and brandishing a machine gun. “Hashim lion… training,” read the caption his father had written.
The spokesman said that Hashim was aware of his brother’s plan for the attack. “We have evidence that he is involved in Daesh [ISIS] with his brother. We have been following him for more than one month and a half. He was in contact with his brother, and he knew about the attack.” The spokesman indicated that Abedi’s father Ramadan was still being interrogated.
UK investigators have said the sophistication of the bomb Abedi carried points to a network that he must have been part of. Abedi was known to be a “slow learner,” which some analysts suggest made him an easy target for a larger group with an agenda. In fact, investigators say that the bomb Abedi carried had a “fail-safe” mechanism soldered to it that would have allowed an associate to set the device off had Abedi “chickened out.”
As for Abedi himself, apparently, he was in Libya for three weeks prior to the bombing attack. One can only speculate that he may have been “saying goodbye” to family members before committing his heinous act. Some terror analysts say he also may have been getting final training from ISIS operatives. After all, he was a UK citizen and thus was allowed to return to his home country, whereas ISIS fighters are not likely to make it to the UK unless they came from that country in the first place.
All in all, the mess that Obama and Clinton left behind in Libya has cost the lives of thousands of innocent people, both in that country and now in Britain. It seems that Obama didn’t learn the lesson of former Secretary of State and Army General Colin Powell, who once said, “If you break a country, you own it.”
As regards to Libya, this broken state doesn’t appear to be getting closer to being fixed anytime soon.
