Heavy fighting erupted yesterday around Tripoli International Airport, where rival militias have been battling for control, killing at least four people and forcing thousands from their homes, local residents and witnesses said.
The airport standoff is the most serious violence in Tripoli since the 2011 fall of Muammar Gaddafi, with Libya’s fragile government unable to assert authority over rival brigades of former rebels fighting for political and economic power.
The shells are landing on us from all warring militias
Militias used heavy anti-aircraft cannons, Grad missiles and rockets in exchanges around the Qasr Ben Ghashir neighbourhood, trapping some families while several thousand others fled the fighting around their homes, community leaders said.
One Reuters witness said gunmen were set up on roofs of homes facing each other with residents caught in between.
“The shells are landing on us from all warring militias,” said Mohammed Abdulrahman, a spokesman for the district. “We couldn’t reach some families until now.”
A doctor from a local hospital said they had received nine wounded from the area. A health ministry official did not return calls seeking confirmation of the death toll.
The fighting broke out just days after one powerful militia said it was ready to put an end to heavy clashes that had deepened fears the vast North African oil-producing country is becoming a failed state.
The battle pits fighters from Zintan in the northwest and their allies, who controlled the airport since the ousting of Gaddafi, against armed groups tied to Misurata, a western coastal town. Both are loosely allied with competing Islamist and nationalist political factions.
The clashes have all but suspended international flights from Libya, damaged more than a dozen planes parked at the airport and prompted the United Nations to pull its staff out of the country because of security fears.
Yesterday’s fighting followed border clashes as gunmen killed 21 Egyptian military border guards near the frontier with Libya on Saturday, highlighting a growing threat from an area that security officials say has become a haven for militants seeking to topple the Cairo government.
Security officials said the assailants were smugglers. But an army spokesman said on his Facebook page that “terrorists” – the term authorities use to describe Islamist militants – were behind the attack. He said a weapons storage facility was blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade in an exchange of fire, killing the soldiers and wounding four others.
The attack took place in Wadi al-Gadid governorate, which borders both Sudan and Libya. Two smugglers were killed in clashes with the guards, security officials said.