ISIS seeks refuge in Libya as military strikes against it heat up there too

Washington Times:
The U.S. military is ramping up operations and bombing raids against the Islamic State in Libya, where the terrorist group’s fighters have increasingly found refuge as their territorial base shrinks in Syria and Iraq.

U.S.-backed militias largely crushed the Islamic State’s Libya operation in late 2015, but signs that the group is gaining a new foothold in the North African nation began emerging last month. Images of Islamic State fighters moving through the vast deserts around their former stronghold in Libya’s northern coastal city of Sirte circulated through the terrorist group’s social media and online propaganda sites in mid-September.

Libya is seen as a promising base for the terrorist group because a deep factional split has prevented the creation of a functioning national government in Tripoli since the ouster of dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

While the Trump administration has publicly resisted a major U.S. military role in Libya, the Pentagon wasted little time responding to the flurry of Islamic State activity there. On Sept. 22, military officials announced that American fighter jets had been dispatched to pound an Islamic State encampment roughly 150 miles south of Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown.

U.S. Africa Command said in a statement that the encampment was being “used by ISIS to move fighters in and out of the country, stockpile weapons and equipment and to plot and conduct attacks.” It was the first time in roughly eight months that American warplanes had bombed an Islamic State target in Libya.

Islamic State and al Qaeda “have taken advantage of ungoverned spaces in Libya to establish sanctuaries for plotting, inspiring and directing terror attacks,” AFRICOM said in a statement late last month.
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Former U.S. Special Envoy for Libya Jonathan Winer said in an interview Wednesday that it is clear Islamic State, which set itself off from rival jihadi groups like al Qaeda by its ability to take and hold territory, is trying to restore its foothold in Libya.

“They’ll nurse their wounds [from Iraq and Syria] and try to come back to North Africa,” he said.
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The situation is compounded by the fact that Tunisia, which intelligence officials once described as the top source country of Islamic State foreign fighters, borders Libya to the northeast. Tunisian followers of Islamic State may now also be massing inside Libya because they fear imprisonment if they return home.

Thousands of Libyans are also known to have gone to Syria and Iraq for Islamic State. Mr. Winer, now a scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, noted Wednesday that Libya has been second only to Tunisia as a source country for the terrorist group’s ranks.
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This is an ongoing fallout from the Clinton-Obama Libyan debacle.  European fighters pushed out of Iraq and Syria are headed there now before trying to go home again. 

By overthrowing a government and having no troops on the ground to secure weapons, they created a terrorist supply operation and also freed up terrorist the government had under control.  In addition, they made it impossible to do a nuke deal with North Korea after it saw what happened when Libya gave up its nukes.  It was a strategic blunder of grand proportions that the media has been reluctant to criticize because it was a Democrat screw up.

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