West Demands Longtime CIA General to Withdraw From Libya Oil Ports

While several of the nations involved are openly allied with him and the Tobruk-based parliament, a group of six Western nations has issued a joint statement today demanding that Gen. Khalifa Hifter, a longtime CIA asset, immediately withdraw from a pair of oil ports he seized over the weekend.

The statement demanded that Hifter’s forces unconditionally withdraw from the entire “oil crescent” and warned that the nations are prepared to forcibly stop any “illicit” oil exports from Libya. This statement insisted all the exports must be from the UN-backed Tripoli government, and not the also UN-backed Tobruk parliament.

The US is the only one of the six nations involved openly allied with the UN-backed government, and multiple of the European signees have recently been allying themselves with the Tobruk parliament in general and with Hifter’s forces in particular in operations around the country’s east.

Oil exports are virtually Libya’s entire economy on a global scale, though with so many would-be governments operating at once, it’s not clear that any of them is able to control the entire trek from production in the southern deserts to export at the coast.