It was spring 2012, the height of Libya’s revolution against their dictator Muammar Gaddafi. As the intrepid revolutionaries trickled into Benghazi’s operations centre one morning, something was different. Clustered in a corner were a few surly young men sipping coffee, scrolling Facebook on their laptops.
Thinking they were perhaps new recruits whose zealousness allowed them to stumble into this sensitive location, the revolutionaries marched towards them to teach them a thing or two about operational security in wartime. An older officer blocked them: “Leave them alone, they’re General Haftar’s kids”.
General Khalifa Haftar—Gaddafi’s one-time co-putschist turned frenemy—had just returned to Libya, offering (in a very demanding way) to lead the revolutionary forces. So, his sons were to remain ‘inside the tent’ until issues with command were sorted. But the opposition to the general—who was then best known in Libya for crimes against his own people during the Chadian war of the 1980s—quickly grew. As it did towards his sons, who incensed those in the operations room by refusing to help. Instead, they aggressively flexed their impunity, spending all day browsing the net on insecure computers. Until, one day, smiles went round those same revolutionaries. They got permission to chuck out the Haftars.
One of these kids, Saddam, was not notably seen again until later that year. Amidst the chaos of the fall of Tripoli in October 2012, he was wounded trying to storm the al-Aman bank.
Almost 15 years later, that surly young gangster Saddam Haftar is a brigadier-general, chief of staff of the land forces of the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF).
Like most success stories of modern Arab politics, Saddam’s surprising rise is deeply rooted in nepotism. While he never went through any real military or officer training, he has been a crucial lieutenant to his father’s bloody power struggle—alternating between being a diplomat, a brutal suppressor of dissent, and overseeing an extraordinarily lucrative multinational business operation that smuggles everything from scrap metal to people.
This is why, despite never finishing school, having no noticeable signs of charisma, and a political toolbox limited to blunt violence, he is now being backed by a range of regional and international powers to be Libya’s next leader.
The Karama Kid
Having been unceremoniously rejected by the revolution, General Haftar left Libya, only meaningfully returning to Benghazi in 2014. Shooting amateur video from a military base, he launched “operation Dignity” (Karama in Arabic)—an operation painstakingly crafted to look like a local fightback against Islamist extremism. When it was really a multinational operation to return Libya’s chaotic revolutionary republic to a state of military authoritarianism.
What followed were years of messy, destructive, urban warfare before Haftar conquered Benghazi from a ramshackle alliance of revolutionaries, Islamists, extremists, and poor young men who had simply ended up on the wrong side of his conflict. Despite initially claiming he would retire after ‘liberating’ Benghazi, Haftar’s multinational coalition unsurprisingly pressed on to take the rest of eastern Libya, violently subduing the city of Derna through a series of foreign-supplied air strikes and a suffocating siege.
Haftar gradually traded the gun for gold and seized Libya’s lucrative oil crescent and eventually large swathes of southern Libya by promising key tribes’ prestige and riches if they became the local franchisee of the military enterprise he now presented as a national project.
While most attention during these years was on the battlefields in Libya, Saddam kept his father’s military machine lubricated with the weaponry, ammunition, financing and support it needed to proceed, cutting his teeth as an international operator. Saddam served as Karama’s de facto chief ambassador, managing the material support directed to his father’s campaign. According to the United Nation’s Panel of Experts responsible for investigating violations of Libya’s sanction regime, these military re-supplies were usually managed by obscure aircraft chartering companies.
As the military operations continued growing, so too did the amount of munitions and additional equipment required, as it became clear that Haftar would need overwhelming material superiority to win a war. So, Saddam had to start building additional procurement channels to supplement the largesse of his foreign partners.
As later confirmed by Haftar’s Airforce chief Saqr al-Jaroushi, it was Saddam who sourced the arms his father depended upon “from secret partners and foreign states” alongside his brother-in-law Ayoub el-Ferjani. And war is tremendously expensive. In early 2016, the parliament speaker, Aguileh Saleh, called for an investigation into Haftar’s diversion of state funds and material, given that the procurement was managed by his clan and distributed according to who was loyal to them.
