Backlash Against NATO-Backed Govt: Islamists Attack Schools, Mosques in Libya

Is This the Next Libyan Civil War?

Since before last year’s Libyan Civil War was even properly finished, there was already talk about how long the rag-tag group of defectors, Islamists and NATO-backed secularists that made up the rebellion could stay together.

It seems like those tenuous pacts are flying apart as the Islamists, virtually entirely cut out of the government at the behest of NATO, are talking up arms and attacking several key spots nationwide, including several mosques and an historic religious school seen as unfriendly to their faction.

Some factions of Islamists have been targeting Sufi mosques and desecrating Sufi shrines all week, leading to Western calls for a crackdown on them to protect the “transition” to the new regime.

This new civil war could be even uglier than the last one, as the East-West divide that defined the 2011 war doesn’t exist, and there are no obvious territorial claims to be drawn between the new Western-backed regime and the Islamists, who hold significant sway in most major cities nationwide.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.