Libya: Suffering on the Rise from Armed Conflict

By Staff, Agencies

Casualties from the battle for Libya’s capital mounted Tuesday and the United Nations moved dozens of migrants to safety from a detention center in the south of the city where fighting had raged nearby.

Medical facilities reported 47 people killed and 181 wounded in recent days as eastern Libyan National Army forces seek to take Tripoli from an internationally-recognized government, the World Health Organization said.

The fatalities were mainly fighters, although they also comprised nine civilians, including two doctors, the WHO said.

In central Tripoli, while there were no signs yet of military and security vehicles or personnel on the streets, shops and cafes were closing earlier than usual in the evening and residents were apprehensive about the prospect of violence.

The LNA forces of Khalifa Haftar - a former general in ousted strongman Moammar Gadhafi’s army - seized the sparsely populated but oil-rich south earlier this year before heading toward Tripoli this month.

They are fighting on the southern side of the city, where witnesses said Monday afternoon the LNA had lost control of a former airport and withdrawn down the road.

The government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, who has run Tripoli since 2016 as part of a UN-brokered deal that Haftar boycotted, is seeking to repel the LNA with the help of armed groups from Misrata.

Sarraj’s forces carried out an airstrike on an LNA position in the suburb of Souq al-Khamis Tuesday, a resident and an eastern military source said, without giving more details.

The renewed conflict threatens to disrupt oil supplies, boost migration across the Mediterranean to Europe and scupper UN plans for an election to end rivalries between parallel administrations in east and west.

Some 5,700 refugees and migrants are trapped in Libya’s detention centers in conflict areas, UN agencies say.