Red Crescent Recover 14 Executed Bodies From Army-Held Benghazi District

UN Envoy Urges Probe Into War Crime

The Red Crescent has reportedly recovered the bodies of 14 unidentified men from the city of Benghazi today, all of them shot in the head at close range, with doctors at the city’s main hospital saying they were almost certainly executed.

Details are scant, mostly because no one yet knows who the men are, but they were recovered from a neighborhood held by Libyan Army Chief Khalifa Hifter, raising concerns that his force, which has been trying to establish control over a growing portion of the city, is using increasingly aggressive tactics.

UN Envoy to Libya Martin Kobler insisted that the summary executions were clearly war crimes, and demanded an immediate investigation to determine who was responsible for the incident. It’s unclear that will happen, with so much of Libya under disputed control by myriad factions.

Hifter’s Army, for instance, is loyal to the Tobruk parliament, or at least mostly loyal to it, and while that parliament is UN-backed, or at least partly UN-backed, the UN has also blasted them for refusing to endorse a Tripoli-based “unity government.”

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.