The loss of its military power in Syria has led Russia to turn its sights on Libya. Could the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria see the strengthening of his Libyan counterpart, Khalifa Haftar?
The reports began trickling in barely 24 hours after Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad was ousted.
“Several Assad regime officials arrive in Libya’s Benghazi,” read a headline on a local Libyan news site on Monday, December 9 – the morning after rebels arrived in Damascus to find the Syrian president had fled.
While Assad was taken to Moscow, Libyan news reports said “a number of Syrian officials” loyal to Assad had landed in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. No details of the fleeing officials were provided, although officials at Benghazi’s Benina airbase and global flight tracking sites confirmed the plane landing.
By the end of the week, air traffic between Syria and Libya had increased. Russia was withdrawing significant amounts of military assets from Syria, primarily from its Khmeimim airbase in Latakia, and transporting them to Libya, according to several news reports.
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With Assad’s sudden fall, Russia was scrambling to manage its considerable military facilities and personnel in Syria.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted that Moscow was in touch with rebels in Damascus. Fighters from Syria’s rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) were posted on the outside perimeter of Russian military facilities, journalists in Syria reported. Outsiders were not allowed into the high security zones.
More than a week after Assad’s ouster, in a critical development, the Syria-Libya traffic had expanded to the sea.
Russia had begun moving naval assets on the Mediterranean from the Syrian port city of Tartus to Libya, according to US news reports. An unnamed US defence official told CNN this week that “Moscow has increased pressure on Libyan National Army commander Khalifa Haftar to secure Russia’s claim to a port in Benghazi”.
The Libyan port warning had a whiff of déjà vu.
Moscow’s attempts to secure naval access to eastern Libya, an area controlled by strongman Haftar, have been alarming officials in Western capitals over the past few years. Destabilised and divided during more than a decade of conflict, Libya has been an ideal entry point into Africa for Russia.
But Western concerns over Russia’s growing influence in Libya and the neighbouring Sahel region have not translated into any thwarting action on the ground. And so the warnings, by unnamed US officials, of Russia’s naval ambitions in Libya continue to make periodic headlines in US newspapers.
The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has notched up the geostrategic scramble, sending ripples thousands of miles across the Mediterranean Sea, a vital maritime zone connecting the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
All about that naval base
Russia has a critical naval facility in the Syrian port city of Tartus, which houses elements of the Black Sea Fleet and is Moscow’s only repair and replenishment hub in the Mediterranean.
Established by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, the Tartus naval base was expanded and modernised by Russia after the 2011 anti-Assad uprising, when President Vladimir Putin used military might to back his Syrian ally.
Russia’s reward came in January 2017, when it signed a free-of-charge 49-year lease with Syria, granting Moscow sovereignty over the Tartus naval base. The lease could be automatically extended for further 25-year periods if neither side objects.
While HTS-led rebels now controlling Syria have allowed Russia to withdraw its military assets so far, the future of Moscow’s permanent naval presence in the Mediterranean is far from certain.
“We’re yet to see what will happen in terms of the Russian presence in Syria. Obviously they come out weaker in the sense that the man they have invested in has gone. But the crown jewel of Russian foreign policy in Syria was not necessarily Assad. It was the military bases that they held there, that enabled power projection in the Mediterranean. That’s still being negotiated right now and I think Libya is part and parcel of this strategy,” said Emad Badi, nonresident senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Atlantic Council.
With Assad’s fall, the focus has now shifted to Libya’s 1,700-kilometre Mediterranean coastline, of which the eastern chunk is controlled by Haftar’s armed coalition.
“The Russians are now more dependent on Libya. This gives Haftar a stronger hand to play. Haftar is always trying to play countries off one another, so he will feel even stronger,” said Tarek Megerisi, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Fathers, sons and lessons in kleptocracy
In the course of an intrigue-packed military career, Haftar has switched sides, worked with rival powers, and managed to save his skin while amassing a fortune.
Dubbed “the strongman of Cyrenaica” or eastern Libya, the 81-year-old warlord began his military career in Muammar Gaddafi’s army before deserting to the US, where he spent two decades, gaining US citizenship and clocking up other monikers such as “America’s man”.
But over the past few years, Haftar has adroitly turned into “Russia’s man”, using a template set by Assad, his Syrian strongman counterpart.
Haftar, like Assad until his ouster, holds power by relying on close-knit family ties. In the octogenarian Libyan warlord’s case, his lieutenants are his sons, who occupy lucrative posts and top military ranks in eastern Libya. The most prominent among them, Saddam Haftar, is widely rumoured to be the chosen scion of “Clan Haftar”.
The links between the Haftars and the Assads run deep, according to Frederic Wehrey, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Khalifa Haftar and his sons had long been bolstered, both directly and indirectly, by the Assad regime through a common ideology of authoritarian kleptocracy, networks of illicit businesses that enriched the two regimes, and mutual military aid from Russia,” noted Wehrey in a recent blog.
Human and drug trafficking links
The trafficking networks linking clans Haftar and Assad have been documented in numerous reports.
They were often physically linked by Cham Wings, a private Syrian airline sanctioned by the EU and US for laundering money and supporting the Assad regime.
The plane with Assad regime officials that landed in Benghazi on December 8, just hours after Damascus fell to rebels, belonged to Cham Wings, according to Libyan news reports.
Investigated by Frontex, the European border and coast guard agency, for its involvement in human trafficking, Cham Wings was the subject of a February 2024 investigative report by Spanish daily EL PAÍS and Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch journalism collaborative.
The report tracked the trafficking of Syrians and Bangladeshis from Damascus and the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka to Benghazi. The migrants then reached the EU with the help of “perpetrators often acting under the protection of the Hafter [sic] family,” noted EL PAÍS.
The exclusive agent for Cham Wings in Libya, Mahmoud Abulilah Al-Dj, denied the accusations in an email to EL PAÍS.
But the US Treasury Department sanctions listing for Al-Dj mentions an additional allegation: drug trafficking.
“Al-Dj used his Syria-based Al-Ta’ir Company (Al-Ta’ir) to receive cargo tied to Captagon shipments and open a major smuggling line linking Lattakia [sic] to Benghazi, which has resulted in huge profits for Captagon traffickers,” noted the Treasury Department press release.
Trade in the amphetamine drug Captagon helped bankroll the Assad regime after the imposition of international sanctions. The extent of the Captagon state-capture was in plain sight following the Syrian president’s ouster, with videos of abandoned manufacturing sites spilling with pills and portions.
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Russian flights to Libya, Turkish ones from Libya
Despite the reams of evidence detailing Haftar’s illicit business networks, the US and its Western allies continue to engage with the strongman of Cyrenaica.
“American and European intelligence are well aware of the relationship between Haftar and the Russians. But for some crazy reason, American policy seems to be that they can bring Haftar onto their side. And so, if anything, they continue to empower and help Haftar, even though he is a Russian proxy at this point,” said Megerisi.
The Western approach to handling Libya has focused on calls for the withdrawal of foreign forces and an inclusive settlement between the country’s internationally recognised government based in the capital, Tripoli, and the eastern players beholden to Haftar.
But the West has displayed neither the capability nor the will to turn words into action on the ground.
Foreign powers continue to operate in Libya but the US and EU is not among them.
In January 2020, Turkey, a NATO member, intervened in Libya to support the Tripoli administration when it came under attack from Haftar’s forces. Aided by a deployment of thousands of anti-Assad Syrian fighters, Turkey managed to negotiate an end to the hostilities.
While Ankara and Moscow back opposing Libyan sides, the two powers manage to work together in the oil-rich North African nation, a coexistence founded on economic interests.
Turkey has signed hydrocarbon deals with the Tripoli authorities while scooping up contracts in the “reconstruction bonanza controlled by Haftar’s sons” in the east, noted Wolfram Lacher from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in a recent briefing.
The understanding between Ankara and Moscow has seen some eyebrow-raising travel over the Mediterranean in recent months.
“There is a rapport and a friendly competition, let’s call it, between Turkey and Russia in Libya,” said Badi. “We’re seeing Russia deploy assets to Libya, and Turkey repatriate some of its mercenaries from Libya due to Syria-related developments. So it’s an interesting nexus on that front.”
As the year closes with the Assad clan on the losing end and the Haftars on a winning spree, analysts are wary of predicting what the cards read for 2025.
“Russia is moving things into Libya because Libya is already an established hub for them. It’s a rational move by Russia, not an escalatory one,” said Megerisi. “It’s probably worse news for the conflicts that are ongoing in places like Sudan, Niger, Mali, because a lot of the equipment that comes to Libya ends up going to other theaters where there is active combat. So we might see an escalation in those regions in the future.”
