Turkey Sent Up To 3,800 Fighters to Libya - Pentagon
By Staff, Agencies
Turkey sent between 3,500 and 3,800 paid Syrian fighters to Libya over the first three months of the year, the US War Department’s inspector general concluded in a new report, its first to detail Turkish deployments that helped change the course of Libya's war.
The report came as the conflict in oil-rich Libya has escalated into a regional proxy war fueled by foreign powers pouring weapons and mercenaries into the country. The US military has grown increasingly concerned about Russia’s growing influence in Libya, where hundreds of Russian mercenaries backed a campaign to capture the capital, Tripoli, in the country's west.
The quarterly report on counterterrorism operations in Africa by the Pentagon's internal watchdog, published Thursday, said Turkey paid and offered citizenship to thousands of mercenaries fighting alongside Tripoli-based militias against troops of east Libya-based commander Khalifa Haftar.
Despite widespread reports of the fighters’ extremist links, the report said the US military found no evidence to suggest the mercenaries were affiliated with the Daesh group or al-Qaeda. It underscored that they were "very likely" motivated by generous financial packages rather than ideology or politics.
The report covered only the first quarter of the year, until the end of March - two months before a string of Turkish-backed victories by the Tripoli forces drove Haftar’s self-styled army from the capital’s suburbs, its stronghold at Tarhuna and a key western airbase.
The reversal for Haftar and his foreign backers, including Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, trained the spotlight on Turkey’s deepening role in the proxy war.
The latest report said the Turkish deployments likely increased ahead of the Tripoli forces' triumphs in late May. It cited the US Africa Command as saying that 300 Turkish-supported Syrian militants landed in Libya in early April. Turkey also deployed an "unknown number" of Turkish soldiers during the first months of the year, the inspector general added.
To the consternation of regional rivals and NATO allies like France, Turkey is staking its hopes for greater leverage in the eastern Mediterranean on the US-supported government in Tripoli. Ankara's open military intervention stands in contrast to covert support from foreign backers on the other side of the conflict.
