Western diplomats sat down for three hours with Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar ...
TUNIS - Western diplomats sat down for three hours with Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar in his eastern stronghold last month to try to dissuade him from launching an offensive against the internationally recognized government in Tripoli.
Two weeks later, on April 4, he sent troops from his self-styled Libyan National Army streaming towards Tripoli - just at a time when U.N Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was in the city to prepare for a national reconciliation conference this month which Guterres’ aides thought Haftar supported. The diplomats’ calls for military restraint in the meeting last month had echoed those from other Western and U.N. envoys who had traveled to Haftar’s base outside the city of Benghazi in the preceding weeks, four separate diplomatic sources said.
When he first announced his intentions in February 2014 he stood in front of a map of Libya, a somber-looking, gray-haired man wearing an immaculate army uniform, and vowed to stage a coup. But on the ground Haftar was struggling to make progress in his initial campaign launched in May 2014 against Islamist militants in Benghazi, which he dubbed “Operation Dignity”. His heavy guns and aircraft flattened residential buildings but could not dislodge the foreign jihadists holed up in booby-trapped houses.
In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron received Haftar and the U.N.-backed Libyan prime minister, Fayez al-Serraj, on the outskirts of Paris to try to persuade them to make a deal, which instantly upgraded the general’s diplomatic status. He was referring to the general’s campaign to take the south of the country earlier this year, the source said.
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