The UN expressed its concern regarding the Lybia confrontation, BBC reported. The UN ad G7 leaders have called on General Haftar’s forces to stop all military action, which could lead to another civil war in the fragile North African region.
While Lybian strongman Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) head west towards the country’s capital of Tripoli in a challenge to the internationally-recognised National Accord government, the international organizations like the UN and G7 call for peace. The latest developments in Lybia edges closer to chaos, say the experts, while Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini called for peace, saying: “I hope that people, acting out of economic or business self-interest, are not looking for a military solution, which would be devastating.”
According to the critics, the 75-year-old General Khalifa Haftar is a new version of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The Lybian strongman becomes very dangerous because insists on the military solution to the conflict in Lybia that is on the brink of the civil war. Christoph Heusgen, president of the UN Security Council, said that LNA forces should halt all military movements. Now, Lybia needs a diplomatic solution of the complex situation, that is why is so important to de-escalate and halt military activity. “There can be no military solution to the conflict,” Heusgen concluded.
G7 supports UN chief’s calls to peace in Lybia
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres met General Haftar and said afterwards: “I leave Libya with a heavy heart and deeply concerned. I still hope it is possible to avoid a bloody confrontation in and around Tripoli.”
The G7 top officials backed the UNSC’s decision to urge all involved parties to immediately halt all military activity and movements toward Tripoli. Any military activity is hindering prospects for the UN-led political process, putting civilians in danger, and prolonging the suffering of the Libyan people.
There were clashes at the international airport on the city’s outskirts, which had been abandoned since 2014 but there are conflicting reports as to whether it is controlled by government forces or by Mr Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA).
Who is General Haftar?
Khalifa Haftar, 75, has presented himself as an opponent of Islamic extremism while critics see him as a new version of dictator Gaddafi.
Mr Haftar was a one-time officer in the army of Libya’s former ruler Muammar Gaddafi. But a coup plot against the leader prompted two decades of exile in Virginia before he returned to Libya after Gaddafi was violently overthrown in 2011. Post-Gaddafi Libya was a kaleidoscope of factions, sects and groups jostling for control and Mr Haftar built himself up as a warlord in the country’s east.
Three years after Ghaddafi’s death, he gathered former soldiers and they took the eastern city of Benghazi three years later. This year he took the oilfields in the south. On Thursday they defeated forces allied to UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj to take Gharyan, about 50 miles south of Tripoli and have now reached the coastal city’s outskirts.
