Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  By mid-June, the rebels had significantly improved their position; by August 28, after a three-pronged offensive from the east, west, and south, they’d captured Tripoli, declared an end to Gaddafi’s regime, and formed an interim government that was recognized by the United Nations on September 16. Gaddafi retreated to the town of Bani Walid, which, along with his home city of Sirte, continued to hold out for several months. During this time the regime launched several counterattacks, and Gaddafi continued to taunt NATO and the rebels on radio and television, even as his family and supporters fled to Niger, Algeria, and Tunisia. The stronghold of Sirte finally fell, after an intense urban battle, on October 17, 2011—eight months after the first protests in Benghazi. Three days later, on the morning of October 20, Gaddafi was captured on the outskirts of Sirte as he tried to flee the city. The man who had called the rebels “rats” was found skulking in a drain under the roadway, seeking refuge after NATO missiles disabled his fifty-car convoy, and rebels encircled and attacked his escort as they tried to continue on foot. Groups of rebel fighters, mounted on weapon-carrying technicals and using similar self-synchronizing swarm tactics to those of the Somali fighters I described in Chapter 2, flocked toward the scene from as far away as Tripoli and Misurata. They were drawn by cellphone calls and text messages from fighters who had been alerted to Gaddafi’s presence by members of his escort whom they’d captured in the firefight, and were now frantically searching the area for the dictator they called “Callsign One.”116

  They found him within an hour. Grainy cellphone video showing Gaddafi as a blood-covered captive, begging the mob for his life—before being beaten, hauled onto the hood of a Toyota technical while jubilant fighters photographed him with cellphones, then killed (off-camera) and his half-naked body dragged through the street—was uploaded in real time. The video reached al Jazeera and YouTube only forty minutes after the dictator’s death; within another ninety minutes, it was being shown on all major international cable and satellite news channels and carried on Twitter, Internet news sites, and radio stations.117 Thus, in the uprising’s final moments, it was globalized digital connectivity that gave a fleeting incident on the coast road outside Sirte an instantaneous national, then global, political impact.

  Faced with incontrovertible evidence of Gaddafi’s humiliating demise, the regime’s resistance collapsed within hours. Further videos followed, showing Gaddafi’s body, with that of his son Mutassim, lying uncovered for four more days. “Hundreds of ordinary Libyans queued up outside a refrigerated meat store in Misurata, where the dead dictator was being stored as a trophy. A guard allowed small groups into the room to celebrate next to Gaddafi’s body. They posed for photos, flashing victory signs, and burst into jubilant cries of ‘God is great.’”118 The transitional government declared victory, and NATO called an end to military operations on October 31, 2011.

  Benghazi: Urban-Networked Intifada

  As I said earlier, this isn’t the place for a full description of the Libyan civil war. But several aspects of the uprising were relevant to our look at the future environment. Firstly, virtually all the fighting in Libya was urban and coastal. In part, this was an artifact of Libya’s geography, with a narrow, relatively fertile, urbanized coastal strip backing onto the largely unpopulated Libyan Desert (which, at about 425,000 square miles, covers most of the country); the vast majority of Libya’s population is sandwiched between the Mediterranean to the north and the Sahara to the south. But it’s also clear that urban discontent—especially in Benghazi—was the mainspring of the intifada.

  Benghazi, in fact, is an excellent illustration of the way in which population growth, urban sprawl, and rural-to-urban migration can stress a city’s metabolism, leaving it with insufficient capacity to process the toxic by-products of urban overstretch. Along with the economic marginalization of populations within Benghazi, the political marginalization of Benghazi within Libya contributed significantly to the violence of the uprising when it came.

  As a focus of Italian power during the colonial period, and a coequal city with Tripoli under the monarchy in the 1950s and 1960s, Benghazi has impressive art deco and midcentury modern buildings, open squares, wonderful beaches, an important harbor, and a historic claim to greatness. But the city is run-down after decades of official neglect, unplanned urbanization, and rapid population growth. Outside the urban core, streets are muddy and filled with rotting trash, and only the main roads are paved.119 The city has one sewage treatment plant, built more than four decades ago. “Waste is just flushed into the ground or the sea, and when the water table rises in winter, the streets become open cesspools.”120 The anger this generated among Benghazi residents is clear from media interviews conducted during and after the uprising:

  “Why do we have to live like this?” says Rafiq Marrakis, a professor of architecture and urban planning at Benghazi’s Garyounis University, Libya’s oldest. . . . “There’s no planning, no infrastructure, no society. Gaddafi has billions and billions in banks all over the world. But he’s left us here with nothing.” “There is a severe, chronic housing shortage,” he continues. “Young people can’t own their own homes, can’t get married, can’t start their lives.” . . . And what social welfare projects the regime did undertake, such as a medical center with the pompously literal name “One Thousand Two Hundred Bed Hospital” became white elephants. “They’ve been building it for more than 40 years and it still isn’t finished,” says Marrakis.121

  The Libyan government had in fact made enormous efforts to improve Benghazi’s water supply through the Great Manmade River Project of the 1980s, which brought underground water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer in the Libyan desert to towns such as Tripoli, Benghazi, and Sirte via a network of trans-Sahara water pipelines.122 But other systems within the city’s infrastructure (including governance, housing, public sanitation, and traffic flow) had been neglected. This lack of capacity made it hard for the city to cope with an inflow of population and housing growth over several decades, and ultimately “became one of the major reasons why Benghazi turned against the government.”123

  As the regime relaxed some restrictions on contact with the outside world and grew more integrated into the international community after giving up its nuclear program in 2003, people in Benghazi became better connected with Libyans in the diaspora and with other populations in the Mediterranean basin and the broader Arab world. This was not always a positive thing: many young men from Benghazi went to Iraq to fight the coalition after 2003, for example, contributing to a radicalization of the city’s youth. Al Q aeda documents captured in Iraq in 2006 showed that the two cities of Benghazi and Derna (the next town to the east along the Cyrenaican coast road) together accounted for almost 85 percent of Libyan foreign fighters entering Iraq.124 More broadly, satellite television and the Internet showed Libyans how the rest of the world lived, making people realize how badly “they were being shortchanged. The example of the rapid development of the Persian Gulf countries, particularly the Emirati city-state of Dubai . . . was particularly galling.”125 Libyans could suddenly see how people in the Emirates—with a harsher climate, a smaller population, and a similar degree of coastal urbanization—had prospered under their government’s policies. They could look around and see their own city falling apart. “[Then] young people get YouTube and see how one of Gaddafi’s sons spent a million dollars to have Beyoncé perform at his party.”126

  Oil revenues drove Libya’s economic development over the second half of the twentieth century. Funded by oil money, government policies—including free education and public health—lowered maternal and infant mortality (thereby contributing to an urban youth bulge) and created a literate population. Libya recorded the highest literacy rate in the Arab world in 2006, and the UN Human Development Index (which assesses standard of living, social security, health care, and other development factors) ranked Libya at the top of all African countries in 2007.127 But in th
e same year, the country was struggling with overall unemployment of 20.7 percent, and far higher youth unemployment—largely because Libya’s education system simply didn’t generate graduates with skills the country’s labor market actually needed.128 Thus the economically vital oil sector depended on foreign labor, while Libyan high school and college graduates tended instead to seek jobs in the government bureaucracy, which was already full of older Libyans and therefore couldn’t absorb them all.129 And because the bureaucracy’s main function was as a jobs program for otherwise unqualified Libyans, ministries became bloated, inefficient, and unresponsive. They enforced unnecessarily complex regulations and processes in an attempt to justify high staffing levels and create opportunities for corruption and rent-seeking, and officials demanded bribes to supplement their meager salaries. In this sense, the problem in Libya’s cities wasn’t so much a lack of governance as a surfeit of inefficient and predatory bureaucracy.

  All this, combined with a lack of economic opportunity for young people, meant that Libya’s cities—especially Benghazi, because of its marginalization by the central government—gradually filled with educated, politically aware, unemployed, radicalized, alienated youth, with little opportunity to improve their lives within the existing system. There was massive resentment against foreign workers, the government in Tripoli, the repressive police and Mukhabarat, and local bureaucrats. When the Arab Awakening began, “although unemployment was not the only source of the grievances that led to the 2011 uprising, Libya’s chronic youth unemployment problem was a major reason behind the instability.”130

  When the intifada did break out, the Libyan army failed to play the restraining role that the military had played in Egypt.131 The regime’s hyperviolent response turned an uprising that began in a similar way to Tunisia’s and Egypt’s—with peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations and street riots by unarmed protestors—into full-scale civil war. The army’s inability to exercise a mitigating influence resulted from the fact that Gaddafi had deliberately kept the national army weak, creating local militias personally loyal to himself, as well as a network of secret police informers and a strong armed police presence in all major cities and towns. The core of the Libyan regular army consisted of four mixed armor-infantry brigades, mostly drawn from tribes loyal to the Gaddafi family, and in some cases commanded by Gaddafi family members (including Al-Saadi, who led the special forces, and Khamis, who commanded the feared 32nd Brigade, one of three well-armed “regime protection units” similar to Saddam Hussein’s Special Revolutionary Guard in Iraq).132 The proliferation of militias, armed police, and mercenaries working for the regime meant that the army, while perhaps first among equals, didn’t have a monopoly on the use of force, and thus lacked the coercive edge it needed to effectively compete with the other groups. Dozens of officers defected to the rebellion, a few units switched sides, and upward of 130 soldiers were executed for refusing to fire on their own people, but the army as an institution remained loyal to the regime for most of the uprising.133

  For their part, the rebels lacked military experience, but what they did have was an urbanized population with good functional knowledge of technology. Libya didn’t have a gun culture like that of, say, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen.134 Most anti-regime fighters, except for military defectors, had little background in weapons or tactics for urban fighting. They were unemployed youth, shopkeepers, teachers, mechanics, bus drivers, civil servants, sports fans, and so on—and one of the main tasks of rebel leaders was to train these city dwellers and forge them into a unified force.135 They never truly achieved this: by the end of the war there were dozens of local autonomous guerrilla groups fighting the regime, collaborating loosely (at best) with the rebel council. Weapons were scarce, and here the skills of the urban population came into their own: workshops sprang up in liberated areas, with vehicles and weapons being modified or made from scratch. Rebel mechanics welded helicopter rocket pods onto trucks, rigged vehicles with homemade armor plating, and mounted anti-tank guns, heavy machine guns, and anti-aircraft cannon onto pickup trucks to create Somali-style technicals. They dismantled and reused damaged and captured regime weapons and vehicles, and modified mines and RPGs with high explosives for use against urban strongpoints.136 Access to urban industrial facilities and an urban population with basic technical skills was essential to this effort.

  Weapons weren’t the only kind of technology the rebels were able to repurpose. A network of rebel supporters evaded the regime’s attempts to block the Internet and cellphones by smuggling Thuraya satellite phones, thumb drives, and CD-ROMs of geospatial, humanitarian, and intelligence information into and out of the country. During the siege of Misurata in summer 2011, for example, fighters used Google Earth data on CD-ROMs, in combination with iPhone compass apps, to adjust rocket fire in the city’s streets. “After a rocket was fired, a spotter confirmed the hit, reporting that it had landed, for example, ‘30 yards from the restaurant.’ They then calculated the precise distance on Google Earth and used the compass, along with angle and distance tables, to make adjustments.”137 Others—including children—used Google Maps and smartphones to mark regime sniper positions, which NATO strike planes then engaged from aircraft carriers offshore. In this sense, the same factors that helped create the rebellion—a connected, tech-savvy, radicalized, underemployed youth population in Libya’s crowded, marginalized, and overstressed cities—also helped the rebels strike hard at the regime when the time came.

  The proximate trigger for the uprising, of course, was Libyans’ awareness of successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Thus the Libyan revolution can be seen in part as a spillover from these uprisings, enabled by digital connectivity across the region. After the end of the Libyan war, another spillover occurred: many mercenaries recruited by Gaddafi, who had fought hard for the regime and lost, returned to their countries of origin. As well as fighters from Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad, these included Tuareg fighters from Mali, some of whom had lived in Libya ever since a failed uprising against the Malian government in the 1960s.138 Up to five thousand more Tuaregs were recruited by the regime in February 2011, many joining at recruiting centers in several Malian cities.139 Once the regime fell, these fighters moved back into northern Mali, where they sparked a resurgence of the Tuareg separatist insurrection. This, combined with an al Q aeda–linked radical movement and a military coup in February 2012, triggered the collapse of Mali’s democratic government and prompted yet another military intervention in Africa, this time led by France, in early 2013.

  The other major impact of the war in Libya is still being felt, across the eastern Mediterranean, in Syria.

  Social Netwar: Syria 2011–13

  As mentioned earlier, the war in Syria is going on as I write, and its outcome—after two years of fighting, a million refugees crowded into squalid camps in neighboring countries, millions of displaced persons within Syria, and eighty thousand killed and counting—remains in doubt. Syria represents a huge escalation in violence, scale, and scope over previous uprisings in the Arab Awakening, as far beyond the conflict in Libya as Libya was beyond the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. To do justice to the Syrian uprising would require a full-length study, and I don’t propose to discuss it in detail here—only to highlight aspects that are directly relevant to our examination of future conflict environments.

  The Syrian war began, like the other uprisings, as a series of peaceful protests. These first broke out in the southern city of Daraa on March 15, 2011, a few days before NATO began its intervention in Libya. Daraa was experiencing significant stress: decades of neglect and mismanaged resources contributed to an unprecedented and severe drought, and there had been am influx of population into the city’s outlying districts over the past few months.140 Syria has lost half its available water supply over the past decade, in part because of mismanagement and urban growth, in part because of changing weather and rainfall patterns. As a result, wa
ter is rationed in all of Syria’s cities, the water system in most towns is operating right at the limit of its capacity, and disturbances in water supply can have immediate destabilizing effects.141 As noted in Chapter 1, water supply is one of the most challenging aspects of urban governance, and the influx of a large number of displaced people, seeking water, into a city already rationing its water supply represents one of the most severe possible stresses on a city’s metabolism. In Syria’s case, this was an added burden on top of the demands of roughly 1.5 million Iraqi refugees, many of whom moved to the Sayyida Zeinab neighborhood south of Damascus as the Iraq war worsened after 2004. “Although political repression may have fuelled a steady undercurrent of dissent over the last few decades, the regime’s failure to put in place economic measures to alleviate the effects of drought was a critical driver in propelling such massive mobilizations of dissent . . . Syrian cities [served] as junctures where the grievances of displaced rural migrants and disenfranchised urban residents meet and come to question the very nature and distribution of power.”142