 Good afternoon. Welcome to New America. Today is the launch of our study together with Air Wars examining the air war in Libya from 2012 to today and the effects on civilian casualties and the kind of outlines of the multiple foreign countries and local players that are involved in this aerial conflict. We have an excellent panel that will be moderated by Lisa Sims who was one of the authors of the report. And we also have from London, from the United Kingdom Chris Woods who directs air wars and Oliver Eimhoff who was integral to the research. And finally Jonathan Weiner who was the U.S. Envoy under the Obama administration to Libya who will provide some expert commentary. So handing it over to Lisa now. We're going to actually show a video really briefly from one of our researchers who is actually Libyan and based in the UK and he wasn't able to make it unfortunately to help present with us so we wanted to give him some time to say a few words. Hello everyone. I'm Osama Mansoor. I was born and raised in Libya. Last year I joined the interest in project at Air Wars with the three other great Libyan researchers. When I was initially contacted by Air Wars I was exceplinated regarding the project. I said to myself this is an amazing opportunity to be part of this first work for Libya. Our whole aim is to eliminate a forgotten conflict using incredible data which the team has been working very hard for nearly a year by now. It's notable that the majority of Libyans use Facebook with an estimated two million users across the country which is one-third of the population. In a contrast Twitter is used mainly by Libyan politicians. The team has carefully assisted the local sources and their political affiliations. This includes the TV channels, electronic newspapers, activists and politicians and official pages of armed groups. I am very disappointed not to be with you in a person to present our findings as I was refused entry to the U.S. under Trump administration travel ban. This is sad for all Libyans not to be presented in such a key new project about their own country. Thank you very much. So now we're going to give our researcher Oliver some time to give a presentation on the results of our study. Yeah, thanks to Osama first of all, shame that he can't be here. And thanks to everyone for coming today and showing interest in our Libya project. So I'm going to present our findings here briefly. So altogether we monitored 2162 airstrikes since 2012. We took the end of the NATO campaign in 2011 as a cut-off date because we were interested in what happened after the NATO campaign and how Libya evolved after the conflict. And we have a total count of a minimum of 243 and a maximum of 395 alleged civilian casualties now. If you look into the report and our web page, the numbers might slightly change because the conflict is ongoing and there's still a strike to occur. Yeah, so here you can see our belligerents. Libya is an extremely complex conflict. You can see the three Libyan belligerents at the top, which is the Libyan government of National Accord, the international, the recognized government. And here the Libyan National Army, which by far conducted the most strikes. And the Libyan General National Congress that doesn't exist anymore that split off from the elected government in 2014. And then we have various international actors here which also includes Israel, which only was involved in one incident conducting two strikes, which didn't result in any civilian casualties. So we didn't list them here. And yeah, we have Egypt, France, the UAE, the U.S. And then one major issue we faced in Libya was that there were a lot of joint and contested strikes, which means, for example, joint strikes would be strikes conducted by the LNA together with Egypt or the UAE, which supports them. For example, also the GNA together with the U.S. as they are also allies. And contested events would be events where sources claim different belligerents or there was also a thing that happened quite often that sources, for example, said strikes were conducted by France or the UAE or Egypt. So we had to sum them up and you can see that it's quite a high amount of alleged civilian fatalities. So you can see like one civilian casualties occur. Usually the number of alleged belligerents also go up because no one wants to be responsible for strikes. Yeah, I talked a bit about the numbers already. So the Libyan National Army has by far conducted the most strikes and has also the highest rate of civilian casualties. Then the U.S. follows with the second highest number of strikes. So here again you can see the total number of strikes. So here you can see after the end of the revolution that Libya was pretty quiet in 2012 and 2013. Then in 2014 the GNC and the LNA split from the government and the Second Civil War started around that time. Also ISIS started showing up and in 2015, for example, ISIS took over a third from the LNA and other minor forces back then. And yeah, then you can see a massive spike in strikes in 2016, which is mostly attributed to the LNA which you can see here and the U.S. which you can see here. So that represents a third campaign conducted by the U.S. together with the GNA and the LNA at that time was fighting Islamist militias mostly in Benghazi and Derna. And then 2017 was also quite a strong year in terms of airstrikes but the number slightly decreased towards the end of the year due to the political agreement in Libya which resulted in a more peaceful situation. So especially regarding the U.S. you can see a massive decrease in strikes here. The LNA was still quite heavily bombing the Egypt as well, for example. And then in 2018 we again have tracked much less strikes as there's only fighting going on in various areas of the country but many less than in the years before. And in terms of civilian fatalities per belligerent, yeah, you can see that the LNA is by far the strongest actor there as I said before. One of the most interesting results from our study is also that the U.S. conducted 25% of the strikes but is only responsible for 4% of the civilian harm events. Yeah, which is very interesting as in most of the strikes by the U.S. were conducted in third. So in an urban area which usually leads to a higher toll of civilians but you can really say that the U.S. precision strikes work there and where much more exact than the strikes for example used by the LNA which also heavily bombs in urban areas for example in Benghazi and Derna which uses old jets doesn't use precision strikes and often bombs in residential areas. Because of that we're actually quite surprised that the number of LNA strikes isn't even higher because LNA civilian casualties isn't higher because it had such heavy bombing in urban areas that we actually expect a much higher number there. So we had many reports there but often not reports of civilians which could be due to the reporting situation in Libya. Often the internet and the electricity is cut off and journalists are cut from areas besieged by the belligerent so it's difficult for them to report there. Here you can see the local distribution of civilian fatality incidents. So you can see Libya's most densely populated areas are all at the coast because this area here is mostly desert and you can see the most heavy fighting was in Benghazi, Derna, and Third. Tripoli is actually the most densely populated area but there was not that much of fighting going on. So you can see here Benghazi definitely had the most incidents as it was very heavily besieged, yes, Third and Derna as well. Then we have a few outliers here. There's the Sapa which is the biggest town in the south where we also had a lot of civilian casualty incidents because it's exactly at the line between LNA and GNA governance. GNA is here, LNA is here, and the tour-reg control territory is here so there's usually a lot of fighting going on there. And then this area is also very interesting near the Egyptian border where Egypt is basically policing its border with its air force here so around Kufa and in the exact border area there's sometimes occurs civilian casualty incidents as a result from the Egyptian air force bombing SUVs of which it thinks there are terrorists or smugglers entering the country. Another interesting thing in Libya was also that we had a lot of maritime strikes which also mostly happened around this area in Benghazi, Third and Derna of the coast because most of the big cities are so close there that the belligerents usually expected weapons smuggling or fighter smuggling there so there was a lot of bombing of boats and of course it's often difficult to tell like who's in a boat so sometimes fishermen were reported hit instead of smugglers or alleged terrorists so that was a massive issue and we also had the first reported double-tap maritime strike in a while there. Then another big issue we had with reporting was that the Libyan media is usually very focused on Libyan citizens there which is problematic as often also sub-Saharan Africans were hit in strikes which mostly means Sudanese and Chardian people and while the deaths of Libyan civilians often make headlines the deaths of foreigners often just make footnotes which is difficult or sometimes they even just reported in the Sudanese or Chardian media then. And here you can see a typical case example which is actually our latest civilian casualties allegation against the US so the US conducted a precision strike on ISIS near Bani Walid in on June 6th and claimed that it killed four members of the organizations including a senior member and a lot of local media reports conflicted with that and said that actually just the senior member was killed and the other three ones were civilians and probably family members of him and then we got in touch with AFRICOM which still denies the claim we have but you from this strike you can see the conflict between local reporting we often have and the official statements we get from AFRICOM and there you can also see the the problem that the discrepancy between transparency and accountability poses so AFRICOM is transparent here but often not accountable for the for the strikes it conducted. Nevertheless AFRICOM was or the US was by far the most most transparent belligerent we had here as it gave details on most of the alleged strikes against them the other most account the most transparent belligerent we had was the L&A which published a lot of its strikes in 2016 on its social media page which then unfortunately was deleted so they went from very transparent to completely intransparent and then the other belligerent we have here who is a bit transparent at least is Egypt which also sometimes publishes strikes on its social media and yeah so we're happy to discuss this. Thank you so much Oliver for your presentation as as you can see it is a bit of a complex conflict so hopefully we can can do a little bit to break it down some more and and get more into detail about the political context and some more of the context for these strikes Chris I wanted to start with you and if you could give us some some more background behind the study and the significance of of the air conflict in in Libya right now. Yeah thanks everyone coming along today when we first began looking at this air wars philosophically began it as a response to NATO's intervention in Libya back in 2011 at the end of that campaign campaign you might recall Rasmussen the then head of NATO gave a press conference where he said no civilians were harmed during the NATO campaign and that didn't really match what was reported out on the ground by Libyans themselves the official UN study of the war New York Times investigation human rights watch and others went in and they did find some civilian harm up to around a hundred civilians killed in that campaign and I think we had had this challenge of militaries claiming absolute precision in war which which was a big worry for us and it led to our setting up air wars to monitor for example harm in Iraq and Syria which is what we're best known for so when we went back and had a look at Libya we wanted to understand what had happened in that country since 2012 since NATO had left clearly there were security concerns for Libya clearly Libyans themselves didn't have the security they'd hoped for after after the uprising against Gaddafi and it was a great opportunity for us to team up with New America because of New America's pioneering work on CIA campaigns for example in Pakistan Yemen and Somalia and also their analytic clout to put the two organizations together and to try and understand the reporting out of civilian harm in Libya from the perspective of Libyans themselves it's a great shame that Osama wasn't able to be with us here today if it wasn't entirely clear he was banned from entering the US overtly unfortunately as part of the travel ban it was explicitly stated that he could not come to present on our findings because he was Libyan which is a great shame because a fantastic team of Libyan researchers have been working hard to illuminate this very challenging complex conflict and the US doesn't really come out of it as the bad guy I mean as you saw the US is the most transparent belligerent proportionally actually responsible for a relatively no low number of civilian harm events according to Libyans themselves so very sad that the Libyan team couldn't actually be here but I think this study does represent the most comprehensive look at what's taken place in Libya since NATO's departure and I'm also very pleased that this is an ongoing project between Air Wars and New America this is something we aim to continue with it's going to be a continuous monitoring project moving forward and we are hopefully going to be able to continue to foreground the security concerns of Libyans themselves just one final thing I'd like to say in our modelling of Iraq and Syria we very much focus on international belligerence as you saw from Oliver's presentation here we wanted to understand what all belligerents were doing and and again that matters to Libyans themselves the LNA is the primary source of civilian harm and it would have simply been wrong for us only to focus on foreign actors when domestic actors are responsible for so many problematic events in that country so this is a very much project we want Libyans to feel ownership of and which will we hope help improve their own security situation over time and just to follow up you you mentioned your your data on Iraq and Syria and how does this compare in terms of of the conflict and the number of civilian casualties yeah I mean Iraq and Syria the war against so-called Islamic State is a is a huge hot war as you know you've been running for almost four years now more than 30,000 airstrikes by the US and its allies against ISIS allegations of up to 26,000 civilian fatalities just from coalition actions and tens of thousands more from other actors as well it is a very bloody war uh Libya is much closer to the kind of low intensity conflicts that New America has been tracking for for many years now for example in places like Pakistan and Somalia and the counterterrorism actions of the US in Yemen not that obviously the hot Saudi war the civilian harm I mean these are significant numbers I mean you know it's clear that hundreds of civilians have been killed by airstrikes since 2012 identifying exactly who is responsible at any one time can prove quite challenging but these are not the high numbers we've seen reported out of Iraq and Syria and that's partly to do with the intensity of the conflict partly to do with population density but also and this is a challenge you know the study that we presented today uses a particular methodology which is focused on what Libyans themselves are reporting out that information is quite vulnerable and we found for Iraq and Syria for example that significant amounts of locally reported information disappears quite quickly from the internet towns are overrun individuals are killed websites are shut down YouTube purges videos and so on so information is lost so the bit that we're missing from this project is how much information we weren't able to capture because it simply wasn't reported out and as an illustrator what can happen in conflicts which are poorly reported locally if we look at Iraq where local reporting of civilian harm has been relatively poor during the war against ISIS half of all the civilian harm events admitted by the US-led coalition were never publicly reported by any Iraqi at the time so it's quite possible what we're showing you here is an under reporting of civilian harm nevertheless it is the best representation we have of what Libyans themselves have said and and the information that we have available Jonathan so how did we how did we get to this point so starting starting at the intervention after after the fall of Gaddafi you know we have some some militias on the ground who who start to war among each other and then we we kind of get you know a bit of a political process that leads to the GNC but then the GNC doesn't work out and and how do we get to the GNA and the LNA and the way that the the political landscape is now in the aftermath of any civil war you have what we used to call back in the 80s a long time ago the disposal problem and the disposal problem is you've trained up an entire generation of people on how to use guns and how to use guns against other people in the country and many of the people if they spent more than a short period of time with those guns decide that it's great to be able to get paid for using guns it's a it's a teenage male fantasy turned into reality wow I've got guns I'm part of a gang and Alicia after all is not that different from a gang and I can use my guns to get what I want in Libya after the revolution anyone who fought against Gaddafi or who said they fought against Gaddafi and was a member of a revolutionary thuar or was a revolutionary freedom fighter got put on the dole you got payments for forever without having to do any further work so this became the foundation which became an economic basis for the militias if by contrast Libya had said we're going to make payments to every person who drove a taxi during the war there would be an incredibly elaborate taxi system and no one would need to have cars anymore in Libya but they did it for the revolutionary thuar so when you have gangs and gangs already have money and are being taken care of it's inevitable they're going to be turf wars so that was part of the problem separately Libyans were told for 42 years by Gaddafi that they were running the country not him his whole concept of government was direct will of the people speaking I speak through them I'm their voice but in fact they had a very little power over their affairs so after this is all over they suddenly had to go to rep representative government they had no experience with representative government no experience with compromise except the local level where they knew one another so at the national level it was grab as much as you can deny your opponent's advantage grab as much as you can yourself this devolved to a situation where they put in place weaker and weaker and weaker yet prime ministers the weak prime minister is pretty much allowed for Libyan governance to turn into opportunities for corruption and people weren't able to get things done other than contracts and then the money started running out people started extorting money for allowing oil to flow Libya has no source of funds other than oil flow and a very critical event happened in I think the summer of 2013 which was the decision to have a political isolation law that was passed by the GNC in Tripoli against Gaddafiites now there are two labels in Libya which are used a lot neither of them are good labels they're both offensive labels anybody who was a half under Gaddafi including people who are the absolute spine of the civil service and the technocrats they're all Gaddafiites and anybody who was a was a half not under the Gaddafi government and outside his system well they're the islamists so this was turned to Gaddafiites versus islamists many of the islamists they're not muslim brotherhood particularly and the Libyan muslim brotherhood was about as pluralist as any group I ran into as it happened and committed to constitution laws any group I ran into islamist was a wide range from people who wanted islamic law the type that islamic state would want not too many of them but some of them to people who wanted islam to be part of the constitution and that's about it and a wide range in between people of all kinds of backgrounds lumped in the Gaddafiites were from people who wanted to see the Gaddafi family back in charge the people who just wanted to be to have the government move east so they could get more bootle more more of the funds to people who were technocrats or well educated so these were really really bad labels but the islamists kicked out all the Gaddafiites and that was the beginning of the political conflict which led to the division of the country into two competing feckless governments in 2014 it was a Libyan event who attended an event with the then prime minister of the country fellow named Al Thinney in 2014 spoke at a think tank here and the Libyan turned to me a Libyan American who studies Libya and said Jonathan should I shoot myself in the head now or wait till I get home and he was referring to the performance of Libby's then prime minister right before the country divided which was the worst performance I have seen of any senior political figure in Washington since night I arrived here in January 1985 and I've seen a lot of them the worst sui generous unique he was yes he was that bad and after that performance I went to another event with him that was a semi-private and he was worse than the next one he wasn't there by accident lots of Libyans told me how incapable he was so they picked incapable people who wouldn't interfere with all the constituencies who were there what wound up happening was Egypt got felt threatened the Emiratis were part of Egypt felt threatened they had their flip around on the Muslim brotherhood so now the islamists were the same as the brotherhood so now the brotherhood was threatening Libyan democracy and that in turn enabled Khalifa Haftar who announced a coup in February of 14 a television coup just like Qaddafi only this time nobody came what happens if you announce a coup and nobody comes and so you get a foreign sponsor who's going to give you weapons and support and money which is what Haftar did and they didn't want Libyan revolutionaries and extremists coming to Egypt is what was a problem you had crazies extremists who taken over Derna in the east eastern coastal town they invited islamic stated and said come on and teach us how to do it right after that happened after a very small number of months they said wait a minute we don't want foreign extremists telling us what to do and there was a bloody war in Derna between the islamic extremists and the islamic state domestic Libyan extremists in islamic state now there are other people from Derna who didn't want either one but those are the people who were fighting and the Libyans kicked out the foreigners we don't want foreigners telling us what to do this is Libya so Libyans by and large don't want the United States telling them what to do I'm with them on that let's agree on that they don't want the Egyptians telling them what to do the Emirates the Saudis the Jordanians the Qataris the Turks the Algerians the Tunisians the French the Brits especially the Italians they don't want it but here's everybody involved so why did everybody get involved in 2014 2014 you had the so-called Islamists being supported by Qatar and Turkey and the so-called Qaddafi had to be supported by Egypt Emirates a little bit Saudi Arabia that resulted in in the locals saying hey we've got patrons we just use our patrons to get as much advantage as we wanted and that was disastrous and the country started falling apart it wasn't a civil war in my opinion it was a civil conflict which was at risk of becoming a civil war now last point I want to make on this part and then we'll go forward and to the airstrikes because it's what this is all about is a airstrikes right nobody went into Derna in this period of time when the dernies during the extremists invited al-qa'a islamic state in and they kicked them out they warrant air campaigns from westerners or anybody else libyans created that problem libyans solved that problem an important thing to remember as Haftar got going and refused to cut any deals to join the government of national accord he was able to do that in part because he had foreign support including billions of dinars provided by the government of russia in 2016 in 2014 people began to realize the civil conflict wasn't going well that was a bad thing for everybody involved and there began to be a big broad movement by libyans and by foreigners alike to come together in what became the government of national accord because it wasn't good for the country to have the civil conflict now individuals who had interests and were doing well from the civil conflict opposed it but ultimately everybody came together the patrons on both sides told their clients you got a deal you got a deal so in that period of time there are very few airstrikes with the exception of the growing problem in Benghazi why was Benghazi such a problem you had Khalifa Haftar Unilar is saying i'm going to get the extremists domestic libyan extremists not foreign ones out of Benghazi and replace them by my own military governor and that caused people from miss rata as well as people from Benghazi people all the way to the west triple attanian saying we don't want Khalifa Haftar telling Benghazi what to do we'll come to the aid of our brethren so you had kadafiites and the people were going to they labeled kadafiites with operation dignity now fighting in a genuine civil war within Benghazi against the islamists who came from outside Benghazi as well to join the ones in there was a coalition from very extreme people to less extreme people so the first big air campaigns happened in Benghazi they happened involving some of the foreign sponsors egypt and the emirates the un experts report specifies exactly what was going on that period that's resolved except in Benghazi by the scourad agreement at the end of 2015 2016 the russians come in and give the eastern guys five billion six billion in counterfeit libyan dinars with no oversill no oversight no accountability of any kind and in the process of all this the islamic state gets into cert and that's where i want to go straight to the air campaign i'm going to stop islamic state finds a window they're having problems now in iraq and syria even as they're expanding in iraq and syria they go to libya as a second safe haven as a place to start it up again and as an insurance policy in part they commit horrible atrocities that they then put online this actually started in 2015 and played a big role in the government of national court coming to exist because libyans and foreigners are like felt very threatened by what was going on in the islamic state and did not know how broadly was going to spread and they were slaughtering people cutting their throats on the beach and videotaping it absolutely intolerable they're intolerable they were kidnapping and killing foreigners at the same time so why do you have an airstrike campaign what's the reasons for well the reason for califa haftars was to take over Benghazi who claimed Benghazi from extremists and people he called islamists and he needed airstrikes to do that egypt was doing it to keep the muslim brotherhood out of egypt and to make sure that the east couldn't be used as a platform back to retake egypt cutter and turkey weren't doing airstrikes that didn't show up in your chart so we've now talked about um the genesis from libyan um national army and we've talked about what the egyptians thought they were doing and what the um emirates thought they were doing what did the americans think they were doing the americans saw al qaeda ansar al sharia al marbatum in islamic state terrorist training camps who were exporting terrorism to algeria to chad to teneza to kill um ordinary civilians having trained in libya and the united states began to see where they were trained and the united states spent time thinking about the very senior policy levels how do we deal with it so we don't have a lot of americans at this point wandering around libya it's too dangerous and it's not really going to work the cost-benefit ratio of going in and trying to root them out with commandos it's probably not going to work and your risk of getting drawn into a civilian situation or or uh lord knows what so the answer which the united states has come to in recent years is you do targeted surgical strikes on camps where you know they are and take them out individually president obama was extremely concerned about this not resulting in civilian deaths and put in place extraordinary stringent rules which are our military including people who actually had hair we're pulling their hair out because it was so difficult to figure out how to do it at the level that president obama was insisting on and the terrorist strikes were being micromanaged out of the nsc strike by strike by strike lots of questions being asked how do we know they're not school kids near how do we know that this isn't really a school isn't really of this isn't really of that very detailed questions when two um um uh let me think what country it was serbs the two serbs were killed after raids in sabrata where we had particular terrorist were going after i was utterly certain at the at first that we must have killed the two serbs they were there we done an air strike their bodies were found there our military said no we think we didn't i said oh come on how could this be true it's pretty obvious they said i think we think actually that they were killed by terrorists and brought in there and they haven't made to look by us i said yeah right i then looked at the evidence they provided me and bit by bit by bit i got convinced by a variety of specifics a i can't remember them and be if i could i probably couldn't tell you but i i actually became convinced from extreme skepticism to believing the account i did not feel deceived i did not feel manipulated i asked every tough question they had a lot of information so what we try to do is try to kill terrorists stop terrorists from killing people who were they were planning on killing not only in libya but externally right and i think that's actually uh a good a good place to pause because um i know that you guys uh chris and oliver have have been in contact with african about trying to to uh to get them to investigate some of these claims of civilian casualties and what has that experience been like and what has that response been i mean i so we we have found african is as oliver said in his presentation and certainly the most transparent belligerent uh we shared uh with african prior to publishing the reports uh our data on uh reported and alleged us strikes and also claim civilian casualty events so that they could have a look at that and and the us was the only belligerent to come back to us uh and actually engage on civilian harm and we we certainly appreciate that as part of their response african identified two events that they have recently investigated unfortunately to this point they won't tell us which of which incidents they actually investigated um and we are working with african to see if we can get them up to the same level of transparency that we're getting from sencom for example for um inherent resolve in iraq and syria um i i think picking up on your point about about the precision strikes i think that's absolutely true that great care was taken i think for sir so maybe oliver can talk about this a bit about the challenges our research team had cert was different from everything else so the strikes the us is still doing in libya are very much counterterrorism strikes usually against high value targets um very carefully taken strikes usually against moving vehicles moments chosen to absolutely minimize civilian harm it's very similar to the pattern that um peter and cobin tracking here for years in in in other ct theaters cert though was a heavy bombing campaign it was 500 us air strikes in five months interestingly 60 of them by reaper drain as we found out after the event um and it was only at the end we found out quite how many families uh had been uh uh there of the icis fighters and more broadly how many civilians had had remained trapped in particular neighborhoods and we still can't say with certainty how many civilians died and oliver i if you maybe want to talk about the the challenges our research has had digging into what was happening at cert i know you've written a very strong piece on this as well yeah so the main the main issue in cert was what i mentioned before already that um the the electricity and the communications channels were cut off there which is why it's cert is actually the most difficult one generally to report like for example dener always has much better reporting on civilian casualties so that was the first issue then the other issue was that there were a few embedded journalists with the albunian al masoos forces which belong to the gna gna and that were supported by supported by the u.s. campaign uh those journalists when exactly neutral as they were embedded so they were both pro-government journalists had been really report on civilian harm so there were only very few libyan journalists who made it in um who reported on on the whole issue but also reported afterwards on what hospitals and so on said how many civilian casualties and injured people they had received um then we had few tweets and so on which were mostly picking up on extremist materials on from telegram channels and so on from isis who were reporting on civilian casualties there so that was always the source worth checking out and um yeah apart from that like very very few social media sources for example doctors or so on who reported there but uh yeah as i said compared to other cities it was really difficult to gather information from sir i'd like to very briefly talk about sir in the sir campaign was different and you're absolutely right um to characterize this difference it was done in an extremely dynamic way in which us people operating closely with libyan people and i can't be more specific but in great collaboration uh were operating dynamically based on information they were getting from the field so you would see something happening on the ground there's a sniper over there the sniper over there is attacking libyan forces here that is forces who are from miss roder and triple attania were trying to retake sir and on that basis something would then be attacked so it's like a war environment in which there was close close uh collaboration between the libyan forces that were were operating with the support of and and allegiance to the governor national court we recognized uh and the u.s airstrikes so it was a very quite a special and close dynamic relationship and also worth saying by the way the many civilian casualties that are resulting from isis actions i mean isis were using suicide bombers snipers they were trapping civilians in neighborhoods you know the civilian harm was coming from all quarters it was not just as a result of incoming so so the goal was to extirpate exterminate destroy the ability of the islamic state to control any territory in libyan to control any territory and exploit it and they left some of them some were killed others simply fled and disappeared back into the desert the difficulty then is as you follow up on that how do you know exactly what happened how do you do adequate oversight over what happened who are the people who should be doing it how do you assess all the information available what's the mechanism for assessment and what's the mechanism for being transparent about and they were in the u.s government the military the people who were doing the strikes from the people did the assessments and for people at the state department of the white house we would rely on their assessments of what they learned and didn't learn what i can't tell you to this day is where the gaps lacuna and lacuna i were what was invisible to the united states that should have been visible i can't assess it i think one of the values sorry christ uh just really quickly and in terms of uh u.s transparency on this subject what does the u.s um report every strike what has your experience been following up on on eric schmidt uh ran a great piece in the new york times earlier this year picking up on the there has been a shift in the current administration to them not declaring some of the strikes in in libya so until the times pushed in i think they'd held back four of the eight strikes that are taking place under the current administration we are talking about a relatively small number of strikes i just coming back to your point i i think it's likely that we're looking at relatively low levels of civilian harm from african strikes for all the reasons that we talked about other than cert which does remain to some degree a question mark but i do think it's entirely unrealistic for african to claim zero civilian harm in any year including 2011 by the way african has not declared any civilian harm from the the nato campaign either that i'm aware of in libya and i think that still is a challenge for us we're getting the transparency from african but we're not getting the accountability and i hope that this kind of study at least puts the position of libyans themselves on the table so that african have another point of reference rather than just their own intelligence i think it's incredibly useful to see the work that you've done it's information that is never available to me when i was doing the job or since or from any other source it is different from the internal assessments the military have given us and all of you i want to give one quick anecdote which is we used to after a terrorist strike against a very high-value target everybody wanted to know well was the terrorist killed or not we had situations we didn't know for a very long time the answer to that question and we had situations in which the answer was yes we're absolutely certain one agency would say another part of the government say we're not certain that they're right and later on it would turn out that the person who'd been killed was very much alive and still doing bad things so the process of trying to figure this out even when you're focused on somebody you know you're paying attention to can be a very very tricky in terms of actually getting the information and reaching an assessment so i want to pull back a little bit and talk about the gina and the lna they're they're the the main factions on the ground and and libya and what why part of part of the need for for airstrikes is is the militant crisis in libya and the weakness of the gna and its ability to to combat this threat how what what is what's creating where where's the the breakdown and and the gna being able to to to get control of the country and control the militant crisis well the russian government gave the speaker of the house in the east a guy from the east who never wanted the government to function billions of dinars to spend with no accountability over oversight there were counterfeit dinars they were backed by nothing and in the west al siraj was at that moment unwilling to say they're all counterfeit because there was liquidity crisis and people didn't have dinars to they could get out of banks anywhere and so in this particular case my advice was rejected which is to clear those dinars counterfeit because you're going to have a terrible problem if somebody's got six billion whatever the number was dinars to spend give me six billion i can prevent a whole lot of civil accord i can stir up a lot of trouble so haftar and aguila got all of this money it wasn't the only money they got they also raided the local banks so they could do what they wanted so the problem of the government national court is doesn't control an army the army fell apart into militias the arms the the arms were grabbed by militias and widely distributed the militias are all paid you could fight we could all be fighting one another on the street with our guns and all get our paychecks the next week despite the fact that we're fighting with one another from the same government this this is crazy but it is why the country can sustain civil conflict because they're all being paid by libyan oil there's no differentiation there have been no consequences for anybody who doesn't recognize the government and the government needs to have national institutions and every time it's tried to create it it's failed and what are the levels of accountability so the gna was was part of a un negotiation so what are the levels of accountability therefore we're supporting you know rival forces for supporting the lna there's evidence that the that france has has supported the lna that ua that that egypt the united states took the position while i was in a special envoy and we would not support any military group that unless that group was part of the government that we um recognized other countries took a different position everybody denied that they were providing military support um to haftar um they were providing weapons to haftar they're doing anything with haftar other than participating in reconnaissance uh the french ambassador told me that the articles i read in le monde um were about what the french were doing weren't true because the french were not involved in that area and um does what is our our data say well the le monde article was very detailed and specific and some french um uh intelligence guys wound up dying in a plane crash soon thereafter exactly where the article said that they were working but the french ambassador told me none of it was true um are there how many french strikes in the database and where where are they where do they appear to be conducting strikes uh so we have of fish uh we have clearly attributed five strikes to france and then we have a lot of contested events of which a lot actually resulted in civilian harm so there's a lot of alleged civilian harm against france by the small number of strikes they have conducted and um the most of the strikes by them are usually conducted in the south of the country which can be explained by the interest that france has in uh the situation in the sile zone so the chart mali and so on in those countries but there's also a few strikes conducted in the coastal areas in the north i want to ask you a question about how you think about strikes if general haftar and the lna are doing strikes and the strikes are being fed in real time by intelligence acquired um from say the french we'll leave others out of this for the moment just pretend the french because we know the french we're involved in that area because of the uh special forces guys or intel guys who got killed would you call that an lna strike or you call that an lna and a french strike it's a complicated one it's so in the war against islamic state in iraq and syria that the it's generally taken that the person who the nation that drops the bomb has responsibility but australia recently actually conceded uh and and they broke precedent and they changed precedent they conceded a strike that they had provided the faulty intelligence for but they hadn't actually conducted the strike which i thought was an interesting move by australia and and quite a welcome one as you say islam is hugely important to this we know the ua is providing a great deal we know that france is and that is feeding into these strikes by haftar uh you know the basically proxy strikes uh and also quite inaccurate strikes as well we you know we we've tagged a whole batch of events in the data which when we look at iran and syria uh really give us cause for concern but we didn't see civilian harm reported out on the ground but for example we might see the lna hit nine neighborhoods uh of obdena on the same that's very troubling that there are a couple of possibilities with the dorna ridge one possibilities are getting bad is our another possibility they don't have any is our and they're doing it through instinct and fuel such as it is on the is our question it would be an interesting question for research to determine what is our capability the libyan national army which is not the national libyan army but is the libyan national army mr haftar what is our they've got oh they're over do they have radar of their own do they have satellite uh information of their own it's an interesting question if they don't where are they getting it i think i think one of the things that fascinated us on the transparency side was how many of the strikes the lna was declaring and we wondered whether this was the lna almost um mirroring u.s transparency as a way of claiming legitimacy it's unusual for for an actor like the lna to declare its action so overtly and and i think they declared about 800 airstrikes in total when where do they get the planes well i think that's a very good question um so before we we turn to questions to the audience i want to ask uh you all actually you know what what are your projections for the continuation of this conflict but also you know what is the significance of the airstrikes is this you know is this something to to be concerned about is this a um is this something that that people should be more invested in um it's definitely something to be concerned about in terms of i hl because libya is basically free for all at the moment and you can see how many how many belligerents are involved there so certainly an issue that your countries just see the opportunity there to hit whatever target they want and uh conduct airstrikes there in terms of projections for the conflict like the the current political situation it's definitely interesting as the as the all the parties uh agreed in paris now to have elections in december um a lot of people say they could be premature in the country is not ready for democratic elections hafta already said that libya is not ready for democracy uh so people say if hafta doesn't win the election he might find a different way to rule the country again on the other hand there's this poor health health condition so um yeah he he had a stroke and like some some sources even reported him dead a while ago so no one uh knows what his health situation in the future is going to be like but um it's definitely gonna remain interesting also given all the other actors that um don't have air forces there actually there's so many militias so many islamist forces many jihadi forces that all are actually quite similar in in the ideologies but still split up into various factions the only entity that's using airstrikes in libya these days to conquer territory is the libyan national army of general hafta everybody else's are fundamentally counterterrorism and it's important i think to distinguish that which is there to conquer territory and that which is counterterrorism it's not the same thing exactly that's why it's such an interesting question where the source of the uh of his uh aircraft comes from the source of his ISR and so on because that raises some very big questions haftar told me and his sons and military advisor told me that he intended to the best thing for libya would be for all the um beards he used this physical expression to describe the islamists as beards if they all were in prison um exiled or dead and he said i think we could all agree that dead would be best his um i said i didn't think we could all agree that um he then's sons and the military advisor told me soon before i was leaving that he was going to conquer the rest of the country and take over libya by a mixture of conquest and a claim by december 2016 um fire all of the politicians because they were all useless eliminate all libyist politicians ruled by military decree until libya was ready for democracy and some distant date in the future since most countries aren't ready for democracy i assume that would be more or less as long as he was around um that was his vision he was very clear about it there was no ambiguity he was going to correct the arc of history so it would be him not um kedathi all those years he'd been back of course part of the of the group of military people as part of the original overthrow of king idris in 1969 so that was his vision and he would have civilians be responsible for health care and education and that kind of thing right so his airstrikes are in support of that vision which is in part a vision of military governors running the country and i think it's important to differentiate that from airstrikes that are um uh carterist in nature or attacking the islamic state i think it's a really big distinction airstrikes have their problems regardless of the goals for reasons of identification and civilian loss and you're far away from it but in a libyist specific context it's an important thing to keep the distinctions in mind that uh distinction is quite important and um especially in and identifying you know who is the most responsible for for civilian deaths and part of doing that is increasing accountability um among all participants including the ones who are going after militants and chris i want to give you the final word um how do we how do we do that how do we increase transparency among all actors and where where would we like to be i i think it's it's troubling that if we look at all airstrikes in libya since 2011 uh the nato intervention and the the seven years since that we've looked at for this study not one actor foreign or domestic has ever conceded civilian harm in one event and that that is uh not acceptable uh we wouldn't accept that in other conflicts it's it's as if we permit things in libya that we we we we would be concerned about elsewhere and as oliver mentioned the country has become a free for all we bring this back to the security of libyans themselves it's what they most crave it's what they've most wanted since 2011 and and in many ways we're no closer to helping them reach that point and in fact many in international powers are interfering in libya in multiple ways not just directly through airstrikes but but but as you were saying through the funding and through the the back channels and so on um one way we can help libyans is is to keep in mind that that their security situation does matter the the decision is taken in foreign ministries elsewhere impact on them and that an airstrike is is really not necessarily the answer um that would be my great thank you so much um let's take some audience questions uh we have a mic wait for to come around to you have peter in the front thank Jonathan thank you for the master class on the history of libya since the nato intervention um i mean it's complicated but you you uh explained it very well so what do we i mean what what is the solution to the conflict i mean what what is a sort of plausible non-fair retail sort of solution uh that that might make this kind of discussion moot three things first you have to have one peace process political process not multiple ones so people don't forum shop so the un has to be the source of the solutions has to be un led second the sponsoring states need to tell their clients you have to deal you have to deal now and we will not support you further if you don't uh become part of this process third the process has to result in the distribution of economic benefits at the local level throughout the country uh where there's any meaningful population and ideally should get down to the south as well libya makes enough money from its oil that there's more than enough money to go around even with a dollop of corruption built in patron it through for patronage networks um if the political agreement incorporates the needs of different regions if incorporates the needs of different regions it becomes counterproductive to bomb at that point you are just you're you're taking away from consensus and you're threatening interests they're actually part of the deal if everybody's good benefits from the deal so that's the solution and the personal ambitions of individual libyans need uh to be countered to the extent that they're different from that deal the only other solution besides the one i've just articulated in which early elections would be just fine because they would then be enforced not only domestically but internationally is the strongman coming in to replace qaddafi and that was general haftar's vision told me directly in my face that was his vision in the summer 2016 um and um back in 2016 i didn't know of any country including egypt the emirates anyone who thought that was a viable solution for libya that that would work as opposed to create civil conflict i told general haftar if you if he wants to hold power in libya as a country he should get himself elected submit to civilian rule for the time being participate in elections and libyan people would decide not the united states or anybody else um i still think that is the right solution when people say libya is not ready for elections depends what happens afterwards and how the internationals enforce the elections after the governor national court came into place what happened the russians came in and gave two actors billions of libyan dinars worth billions of us dollars to do with whatever they wanted what did they do they said oh we're not going to pay any attention to the government in the west that's what russia did it played a fundamental role meanwhile haftar continued to get military support from various countries without having to support the government so he didn't so um while the libyans play their play their games everybody does if i can get you to take care of these do i don't have to work anymore and you'll beat up on that guy over there because he doesn't treat us say nice things to me i might do that but you're not going to do that i wouldn't do that to you anyway um but you're not going to do that but but that's what the internationals wind up doing with the with the libyan clients it's very destructive the playing off of internationals against one another by libyans very destructive the playing off of libyans against one another by internationals very destructive you really have to adopt an approach of what's good for the whole country if you're going to counter the risks of civil conflict and if you did that you would wind up with a much smaller number of airstrikes because the only airstrikes at that point would be libyan endorsed airstrikes endorsed by the living government which was a requirement for the u.s airstrikes by the way i got every member of the presidency council individually to say yes we want you to do this we need you to do this once i got them i asked them i said this is what we want to do but we need your permission they're all it said yes before we did any so we didn't just do it to them so you have to get endorsement from the government you need the endorsement for the government to be in public before you begin you need to work closely with them on the ground if you're working closely with them on the ground you can then do the follow-up that you want on things like civilian and then become subject to a political test if you're killing a bunch of people on the ground or innocent people that's going to create problems for the government as well as for the foreign state it's not going to be sustainable so it creates corrective mechanisms to protect people in a humanitarian sense that's the right way for it to happen but it does require a functioning integrated national government to begin to happen and no more bombing for conquest let's let's see if we can take another question right over here hi thanks to all the panelists kandace rondo a senior fellow here at new america also congratulations i know that that kind of work data intensive is very difficult to do and very sad to see that our libyan colleagues were not able to join us today jonathan a question for you if you could unpack a little bit more some of the russian motivations beyond sort of the obvious which is sort of the the near term support for lna and haftar what is the broader sort of implication of russian backing of haftar for not only the us but i think the region writ large what should we expect i also want to sort of also point out that actually it's very interesting that you mentioned the sort of the counterfeiting of of dinars because that was a method that was used in afghanistan in the 1980s with the russians backing their own proxies there as well so i didn't know that thank you russia was constructive in 2014 2015 and in 2013 it was less important but still constructive they complained about us going in they complained about nato but they helped us with solutions the kremlin made a decision sometime in 2016 to play a more a destructive role and it took me months to see what they were doing as systematic and it was systematic i believe that they wanted to prevent hillary clinton from having a victory in libya they wanted to prevent obama from having victories anywhere and that their approach in libya was opportunistic to increase their influence to prevent their being any further progress until us elections were over and to deny to deny wins for these two people putin had hatred and contempt for that's what i think was going on it's not just about the united states but it wasn't part about the united states russia needs to be part of any solution there will be no solution if russia and the united states are on opposite sides russia china the united states uk and france the perm five need to be aligned algeria needs to be a core part of the solution with its view of non-intervention which is correct tunisia needs to be part of it egypt needs to be part of it in ways that makes that helps egypt protect its border the emirates can be extremely constructive and helpful and so long as they feel that there's not a threat of terrorism being exported or islamist instability and so you can bring everybody in and russia is going to be critical to that as it was played a substantial role in being destructive in 2016 thanks um at the beginning you mentioned the maritime strikes can you speak a bit more about that as that as you said seems to be something new and both in sort of the extension of the conflict into surrounding waters and seas but also sort of non-state or sub-state splinters of the state conducting combat operations both from the air and on the water seems something we're seeing more of here and in yemen um and is under discussed thanks um yes what we could add about the maritime strikes apart from what it what i've said before so they're mostly usually conducted by the by the local forces so i think most of the allegations so maybe even all of them we had there were against the lna or the gna or i think also the gnc back in the day and it's often oil tankers that get uh that get hit in the strikes then as i mentioned like on the civilian side we often have allegations that uh fisher boats were hit for example or that just refugee boats for example were hit instead of the smugglers or the terrorists that were like it was claimed by the belligerents back then uh these were actually often also strikes that were commented on at least on in terms of civilian harm by the local factions uh they then often just say the boat was carrying weapons the boat was carrying fighters or something like this and um yeah it's clearly an issue here because libya has such a large coast so in syria and iraq with which both don't have much of a coast we we haven't seen many strikes like this so it was a new issue for us it's definitely difficult in terms of geolocating because there's often no clear location for it so you can often just vaguely put it into the water and it's difficult to track in terms of filming and photography as well if a strike's had in the water where when no one can take pictures or films or something so yeah it was a new issue for us thank you so much for all of your valuable research in this extremely relevant discussion my name is sabrina harris i'm with the unic and i was just wondering if each of you could kind of discuss your evaluation of the role that the special support mission in libya has played since its creation in 2011 if you think the un has been effective and in peace building attempting to protect civilians or what you would like to see out of it moving forward um oh yeah i unsmilk so there can be huge variation between the quality of un missions and and actually i think unsmilk has been quite focused and committed around civilian harm uh there were some discussions a few years back about which model of civilian harm monitoring unsmilk would adopt and we were pleased to see that they went for the afghan model which is pretty much the the gold standard in terms of un missions and civilian harm monitoring unsmilk has been very good at foregrounding um civilian harm events and airstrikes routinely topping their list of concerns uh really because of their destructive power you know there's a lot of violence going on at ground level this isn't you know the issue in libya is by no means just about airstrikes but as we all know airstrikes can deliver great destruction um uh and and that is a particular challenge so i i think from from a position at air wars we we've seen unsmills engagement on a on a micro level on you know engagement on behalf of civilians as being very strong they made a very strong intervention recently um in the siege of derna that just concluded with haftar seizing that city um so uh so that's the micro how they're doing on a broader level i i couldn't really say but on on the civility very specific issue civilian harm i think they've they've been better than missions for example the u.n in iraq have been quite challenging unsmills under resource for the scope of its mission which is practically everything it also had problems with security where portions of libya and for time all of libya reviewed to be uh viewed to be as non-secure because the inability of any libyan government to protect you if you ran into trouble in order for unsmilt to function effectively it needs to have a lot of people in a lot of places in libya and they need to be financially supported to enable to do their job all that has been under severe constraint has gotten worse over time rather than better that's a problem i add my name is jack rapasi unaffiliated two quick two quick questions first is uh is there a lot of consistency in the definition of the word strike like sent com uses fuzzy meanings and in how's that in your database uh and then they uh uh oh go on that that one first and strike is a really challenging term i mean the u.s military don't like the term internally they'll talk about a kinetic event or an incident involving the release of one or more munitions so it can be a very vague term in libya so in iraq and syria a strike might involve multiple aircraft from multiple partner nations dropping multiple munitions in libya it tends to be a much narrower focus far fewer munitions released per strike as well as far as we can see so often a strike is one munition at most two uh but you can get sequences of strikes over the city so it's um it's it's probably closer to the public expectation of what a strike is in libya than in any conflict that we've taken a look at but it's still quite a challenging term in terms of i know every time i talk to us military officials they're like why do you talk about strikes and then of course in their own public reports they report strikes so um you know it's become a shorthand but not a very helpful one sometime let's see if i can remember the other question i think it was about the russians uh so we talked about the run-up to the election but since the election have the has the russian involvement evolved or just kind of proceeded on the same trajectory um the russians continue to provide denars for a period of time the best of my knowledge and i've identified that as a critical way of messing things up they continue to have talks with a wide range of libyan actors i think that's fine potentially really good if they're telling them all they need to come to terms with one another but a substantial portion of what russia has been doing in recent years has been seeing where it can increase its influence and reduce us influence and while that's a normal thing for a nation state to do it may not be good for libyan libya context because libyan needs to have the alignment of all the outside actors in support of a common approach uh through the un it's not about the united states and it can't be about the united states and so if it's about the united states and russia and they're in contrary places that's a problem i would hope that um mr putin would see the trump administration is uh an administration that can work with libyan full alignment in pursuit of common goals uh as it has in so many other areas hi um my name is beatrice march and i'm from um the state department so i was wondering how the mixed migration of um west africans has affected the political stability um in libya and the counter terrorist efforts there the smuggling networks in libya are very ancient um this is how they're into living barter and trade is how these people have earned living go living long before there was a united states and it hasn't changed that much what changes is how you are in the living in terms of what it is you're moving are you moving dates um are you moving people they're now moving people and earning a living that way so the smuggling networks have become have fostered growing criminal networks which tie into some extent with terrorist networks we've seen some boko haram engagement all the way up to libya out of nigeria for example and so all of that's problematic it's more problematic for the way in which it is destabilizing neighbors uh the migrant trade uh destabilizing um the e u and for the fact that it's causing tremendous humanitarian injury to the people who are being trafficked so they think of them as traditional networks to earn a living which have nothing wrong with them becoming um criminalized as a result of push pull factors that are um a trans border libya has no functioning border system you did everything it could to try to help them get one after the fall of kadafi it was one of the many types of security programs the libyans were incapable of working with different donors to to carry out every single one of those programs failed it didn't matter who was offering it it didn't matter whether you were turkey or egypt it didn't matter whether you were france the uk the united states italy or anybody else they all failed and there were a wide range of them so libya needs to have security institutions that function that gets back to the need for integrated government in terms of the humanitarian issues europe would be much better much better off if it had spent money investing in uh facilities in um northern libya which essentially would involve handouts payments for the locals in return for allowing processing of refugees um and they're handling there and also they should be spending the money to build out a coast guard which is desperately needed chris um a question for you just focusing on accountability it's a two-part question one is when there is acknowledgement that civilians have been killed with by air strikes it's oftentimes written off as this is just the consequence of war and so i want to get your thoughts one on that response is it justified and second to that what would accountability look like in an ideal scenario when a country does take responsibility for civilian casualties yeah i think if one of the things we argue a lot with iraq and syria is if we if we can't start to get accountability we we can't get then we get to get to bring the numbers down i mean understanding how when and where civilians are being harmed is really important to that in with oi are for example in iraq and syria we have a willing partner that the coalition will work with uh us and does to a quite significant extent and you know we work to improve that understanding the coalition has admitted almost a thousand civilian fatalities in a hot war which is pretty much unprecedented we're just not seeing that translated across to libya and i think you know the the choice of the report title for elisabeth peter's report lawless skies really does capture what we're seeing in libya and i think for broader security concerns and precedents being set we should be deeply troubled that libya has become this free for all where any country can go and carry out an airstrike with impunity they don't even feel they have to declare it most foreign powers bombing in libya don't bother to declare and nobody takes responsibility for civilian harm so in a sense it runs deeper than our modeling of other conflicts where in libya we we we know what libyans themselves are reporting out we know where the civilians are being harmed but with such a sort of profound lack of accountability which doesn't reflect the other kind of conflicts that for example air wars is modeled that's an issue it kind of reminds me of the the u.s. denials around strikes in in pakistan prior to a sort of more coherent response in the second bar room administration term you know there was just an outlander and we're not harming civilians and that didn't match anyone's understanding and again it just brings it back to ordinary libyans the the three oliva showed that the latest u.s. claim um locals are absolutely adamant that an isis commander was killed nobody's disputing that that isis commander died but what locals are telling us and reporting out is that actually the three people who died with him that day were family members who did not participate in hostilities um african has just said no uh and and i think we we will continue to have these challenges between the public perception uh and the military perception and that's in the case of the one military who who actually talked to us you know the other seven belligerents went went went went say damn thing and and that's a great pity uh we have time for one more question all right well i think that's it thank you so much for coming thank you for talking to us about the study thank you really well done you're doing