Is Libya the Next Somalia?

kiwi wrote:

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Established and coherent oppositin in Libyan war is a good joke of yours. Have you forgotten Yunis assassination?

Thank you for making my point for me. The opposition did not disintegrate into squabbling factions after Younis’ murder because it was well established and coherent.

Also, that so well organised, fair and free elections took place with so few incidents so shortly after the fall of the regime, against all regional and tribal differences and by a relatively weak central government could only have been done with a coherent opposition.

The relative calm in Libya today, a country not a year ago still in the middle of a civil war, is only explainable with a coherent rebel movement. Iraq took eight years to get that far, Afghanistan is still in turmoil, Somalia is just now managing to quieten down 15 years after its uprising and Yemen is still struggling.

Jibril was so scared not to die accidentally he was almost not present in Libya.

BS. The man proved he had balls when he defected at a time when it was still very unclear how the uprising was going to develop. You needed courage to defy such an insanely vengeful scumbag like Gaddhafi who went to extremes to take revenge on his enemies and Libyan dissidents to the point of blowing up civilian passenger planes, torpedoing civilian ocean going liners, blowing up bars and discothèques in other countries, supporting terrorist movements with supplies of explosives, weapons and training and even invading neighbouring countries.

Hiftar and Belhaj working together?

Evidently otherwise there wouldn’t have been much progress at ousting scumbag Gaddhafi.

For how many days Jalil had to wait to be permitted to come to "liberated" Tripoli?

As far as I remember the NTC had to wait in Benghazi because the capitol was for weeks still infected by Gaddhafi’s mercenary snipers. In fact I know this from my personal contacts in Tripoli who told me that still weeks after the fall of Tripoli it was still often very dangerous to walk along certain streets. Many Libyans will tell you that the numbers of innocent civilians indiscriminately killed by Gaddhafi’s snipers during the conflict must be a thousand times higher than any civilian deaths caused by NATO bombing.

Misurata gangs refused to fight together even with the Benghazi ones.

The reason was because at first they had different command structures that made coherence in battle difficult. Later, after more training, they fought together very well in Sirte und Bani Walid.

Zintanis were left behind with guns and ammo, Sarkosy had to paraschute them.

BS. You should know by now that maliciously twisting history doesn’t work with me. Zintani rebels made the biggest advances on Tripoli eventually encircling the capitol while the Misurata brigades were still stuck around Basra.

How many brigades recently claimed for compensation? 1.300? As I said, a good one, almost as good as a "national revolution against a dictator".

1300 sounds like quite a plausible number to me. The sizes of these brigades varied from between 10 to over 100 men. That would be a standing army of at least 70 000 men under arms. A respectable amount for such a small population and proof of it being a popular uprising.

Btw, another 5 people were killed in Mizdah after an attack on a military base in the town on Friday. Murderers from Al-Qaqaa Battalion were at the scene, again.

Well, that must have made your day then. Why else mention it?

who drove Libya to this situation?

Oliver Cromwell wrote:

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That is the point i am making,so the West should keep out of these countries and let the people sort it out,but people like Clinton can't help themselves every time she opens her mouth its to threaten someone,they have been threatening Iran for about three years,it won't take much to start something off in the Gulf that will get out of hand.

I think we are in mutual agreement here, at least as far as Western involvement is concerned. What Clinton and also the UN are demanding of the Assad regime is impossible to fulfil and they all know it. You can’t expect the regime to stop fighting while the rebels are allowed to carry on with their aggressions.

I’m no friend of Assad, he is a dictator that has often used repressive means to quell dissent, but at least his regime is relatively benign in comparison to Gaddhafi or Saddam Hussein and he more or less guaranteed a stable country in a turbulent region. Where there was good reason for hope of better governance in Libya after the fall of Gaddhafi this is very doubtful in the case of Syria. I for one would plead for the devil I know rather than the devil I don’t.

The one thing I do have massively against Assad is that he’s proven himself a complete imbecile at handling the present crisis to the point of being unworthy to rule any country. He entirely underestimated the power of the Arab Spring although he had had more than enough opportunities to see for himself what was happening.

He went and antagonised exactly those parts of the population that were predestined to carry the Arab Spring in Syria. He ostracized the Sunni members of the regular army to the point of many defecting and forming their own armed opposition. He agreed to talks about introducing more democracy at the same time sending unencrypted e-mails to his wife showing that he had no intention of doing such a thing.

He angered his one time friend, Turkey, with his unsolicited attacks on towns sending thousands of Syrian refugees over the boarder for Turkey to deal with in a region already full of sectarian tensions. He angered the Turks even further by offering the Syrian Kurds autonomy, something he knows Turkey can never tolerate. And the list grows longer.

All the same, the West should listen to Russia, stay out and let things develop. Nobody can stop the carnage anyway. And anyhow we have enough of our own problems to solve without the problems of others to deal with as well.

Ali wrote:

who drove Libya to this situation?

Gaddahfi and his mad sons.

Ditto Dog wrote:

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Thank you for making my point for me...
...Well, that must have made your day then. Why else mention it?

Why to mention continuous killings of Libyan people by Libyan people? Maybe to remind you there were times Libya was the reachest of African countries supporting its neighbours by the money and saving its wealth in the West banks and other assets. There were times nobody would imagine separation of the country into at least three independent states. There were times nobody expected Lebanonisation of Libya. There were times to negotiate. There were times not to allow anybody from the outside to bomb and kill.
- Al-Dahra (Tripoli), three killed during a clash between two separate gangs
- A car explosion, Tripoli again
- Gharyan, at least 5 people killed during a clash, heavy weapons used.
Is this a country you remember from your motorbike trip?

Ditto Dog wrote:

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Exactly. Aleppo came far too early for the rebels. They simply don’t have the assets yet to keep such a city. The ones not stupid enough to play heroes will probably just withdraw out of the city and disappear into the countryside and gather strength again to fight another day. This is not about which side has the stronger army it’s about which side has more resolve, determination, patience and tenacity.
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Yep, Assad has evidently made this misguided decision out of pure despair. Another nail in his coffin I suppose. Turkey will simply not tolerate Syrian Kurds having any autonomy and this is why they are now threatening to march into Syria and occupy the border regions. And believe me, Turkey has the will, the resources and the backing to pull off such a thing.
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BS. You’re badly informed. It’s a well know fact that the core of the Syrian rebel forces consists mainly of defectors from the regular Syrian army and is growing in new defectors by the day. They number in their tens of thousands compared to the few hundred foreign fighters from Libya and elsewhere. Even Russia acknowledges that.
And not only Al-Jazeera was showing rag tag Libyan fighters at the start of the Libyan uprising. The whole of the international press was showing them, simply because there were no well trained foreign professional fighters to film. Keep to the truth will you instead of spewing stale and long ago disproved BS.

You´ve got your core of Syrian rebels in here: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/uk...
I like that statement: "Not a Syrian in sight," he added. "This wasn't what I had expected."

And here, you can see what tactics Syrian freedom fighters use: http://www.youtube.com/watch...

kiwi wrote:

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You´ve got your core of Syrian rebels in here: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/world/uk...
I like that statement: "Not a Syrian in sight," he added. "This wasn't what I had expected."

Yes, foreign fighters in Syria. And your point is?

So they're British because one of them spoke with a British accent. Sure, but it could also be the guys lived for a while in the UK, maybe as students, and acquired the accent while learning English. Either way who cares, they’re foreign fighters no matter where they come from.

kiwi wrote:

And here, you can see what tactics Syrian freedom fighters use: http://www.youtube.com/watch...

Typical Kiwi again finds some footage marked “al-Qaeda in Syria” and believes it blindly. Exchange the sound with a bit of gangsta rap and tag it with “Gangstas hit the shit in Chicago” and you’d probably believe that too. Actually it real does look like some dudes in Chicago.

You hit the nail on the head. Gangsters. As if carbon printed from Libya last year.

kiwi wrote:

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Why to mention continuous killings of Libyan people by Libyan people?

Strikes me as quite a morbid pastime. You evidently enjoy collecting bad news.

Maybe to remind you there were times Libya was the reachest of African countries supporting its neighbours by the money and saving its wealth in the West banks and other assets.

“supporting its neighbours” Why then? Can’t these neighbours support themselves like any self-respecting countries?

There were times nobody would imagine separation of the country into at least three independent states.

Where did you get that BS from? There is talk of a Libyan federation. That is entirely different from breaking up into independent states.

There were times nobody expected Lebanonisation of Libya. There were times to negotiate. There were times not to allow anybody from the outside to bomb and kill.

BS! Negotiating with Gaddhafi would have meant having to trust the deceitful scumbag. Who would have been that stupid?

- Al-Dahra (Tripoli), three killed during a clash between two separate gangs
- A car explosion, Tripoli again
- Gharyan, at least 5 people killed during a clash, heavy weapons used.
Is this a country you remember from your motorbike trip?

Yes, and it was far worse. I was in Tripoli when the uprising started in February stuck in my hotel for three days waiting for the shooting to stop. It didn’t stop and after being told that government troops were planning to go in to clear the city of rebels and the fighting might get far worse I decided to make a dash for the Tunisian border on my motorcycle.

The drive through Tripoli was a nightmare. The streets were almost empty of traffic apart from a few crazy people running around shouting wildly and a few speeding cars. I could still hear shooting in the distance that I was trying not to get nearer to.

A block of offices on the way had had most of its windows smashed and there was smoke coming out of them. In front was broken office furniture laying around in the gutter and loads of loose paper flying around in the wind. What really put the shits up me was when I then saw the bodies among the wrecked furniture and then even more bodies in a side street. That’s when I decided to concentrate more on getting the hell out of the place in one piece.

I’ve experienced a lot of crap on my travels, been shot off my bicycle in Saint Petersburg, Russia, made the acquaintance with an armed Albanian posse that had just strung up a sheep thief, been stalked by a big cat for days in the wild, was interrogated for two days in Iran under suspicion of being some sort of spy or maybe drug smuggler - I never found that one out - been interrogated by Gaddhafi’s goons in Sirte for talking to a Libyan about the weather, shot at by a half blind ninety year old in the US for taking a rest near his house, fell off a cliff, attacked by vicious dogs a few times, charged at by an angry wild bore and almost got washed away with my tent in a flash flood in Albania. But that drive through Tripoli is the one single event that but the shits up me most of all. I’m just glad it’s got more peaceful there now.

kiwi wrote:

You hit the nail on the head. Gangsters. As if carbon printed from Libya last year.

Yep, you hit it. They do have a certain resemblance to how scumbag Gaddhafi's goons worked.