Libya is falling apart and it has been for over a decade. Here is why nobody can fix it.

/In early May 2025, residents of Tripoli woke up to gunfire in the streets. Not a skirmish. Not a single incident. Full-scale urban combat in the capital of a country that is technically at peace.

The trigger was the assassination of Abdel Ghani al-Kikli, commander of the Stability Support Apparatus, one of the most powerful armed groups in western Libya. Within hours, rival militias moved in. By the time a ceasefire was reached, there were dead bodies in hospital refrigerators and more in a mass grave that investigators later found inside the grounds of the Tripoli Zoo.

The Tripoli Zoo.

This is Libya in 2026. Not war, exactly. Not peace, not even close. Something in between a country stuck in a permanent state of managed collapse, kept breathing by oil money and held together by nothing more than the mutual self-interest of the armed groups who carved it up.

📌  To understand how Libya got here, you need to go back to 2011. To understand why it can't get out, you need to understand everyone who has a reason to keep it broken.

🔙  How It All Started: NATO's Unfinished Revolution

When the Arab Spring swept through North Africa in early 2011, protests against Muammar Gaddafi quickly became an armed uprising. Gaddafi responded with brutal force. NATO intervened. By October 2011, Gaddafi was dead dragged from a drainage pipe in his hometown of Sirte and killed by rebel fighters.

What came next was supposed to be democracy. What came instead was chaos.

Gaddafi had spent 42 years deliberately dismantling every institution that might challenge his power. No functioning political parties. No independent judiciary. No professional civil service. No unified national army. When he fell, there was nothing to replace him with except the hundreds of armed militias that had fought to bring him down.

Elections in 2012 brought momentary hope. By 2014, the country had fractured into two rival governments and two rival armies. A second civil war followed. It lasted six years.

Gaddafi spent 42 years dismantling every institution that might challenge him. When he fell, there was nothing left except the men with guns.

🗺️  The Two Libyas of Today

📌  Libya has had a ceasefire since October 2020. But a ceasefire is not peace it is simply an agreement to pause the killing.

WEST GNU (Tripoli): Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah. Internationally recognised, UN-backed, Turkish military on the ground. Real power comes not from government buildings but from the militia networks that keep it in place.

EAST GNS (Tobruk): Prime Minister Osama Hamad. Backed by the House of Representatives and General Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army. Supported by Egypt, UAE, Russia, and historically France.

Neither side controls the whole country. Neither will accept elections that might reduce their power. National elections scheduled for December 2021 were cancelled and have never been rescheduled.

There is, cautiously, a flicker of movement. On April 11, 2026 just days ago both governments approved the first unified national budget in more than a decade. Representatives of the Haftar and Dbeibah families are reportedly in technical talks in Tunis. Small steps. But after years of nothing, even small steps matter.

🔫  The Militias: Who Actually Runs Libya

📌  If you want to know who actually governs Libya, don't look at government websites. Look at who controls the roads, ports, detention centres, and oil fields.

Western Libya is held together by a patchwork of powerful armed groups the Stability Support Apparatus, the Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade, the Nawasi Brigade that control territory, run their own prisons, collect unofficial taxes, and compete fiercely for state resources.

The May 2025 clashes that left bodies in the Tripoli Zoo were not an aberration. They were the predictable result of armed groups sharing a city with no neutral arbiter.

In the south, the Fezzan region a vast desert bordering Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Algeria is controlled by tribal militias and armed groups tied to the Sahel insurgencies. Smuggling is the economy: fuel, weapons, drugs, and people. Human Rights Watch documented 93 unidentified migrant bodies found in mass graves near smugglers' warehouses in al-Kufra and Jikharra in early 2025.

🌍  The Foreign Hands in Libya's Fire

This country is not just failing from within. It is being kept unstable by outside powers who benefit from the chaos.

▸  Turkey:  backs the GNU in the west. Turkish troops, drones, and naval assets have been present since 2020. Ankara gains a foothold in the central Mediterranean and control over migration routes.

▸  UAE & Egypt:  back Haftar in the east. They see him as a bulwark against political Islam. The UAE has been routing weapons through Libya's southeast to Sudan's Rapid Support Forces fuelling that country's devastating civil war. Egypt has been conducting airstrikes to stop these convoys.

▸  Russia:  maintains a presence through Africa Corps (formerly Wagner) operating alongside Haftar. Russian military assets have been spotted at Libyan airbases.

▸  The Oil:  Libya holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa. Armed groups have repeatedly shut oil fields and pipelines as political leverage. A recent investigation found a Swiss crude oil trader, believed to have left Libya, never actually did it simply restructured through proxy companies.

Libya is not just failing from within. It is being kept unstable by outside powers who benefit from the chaos and the oil.