Delivered Into Enemy Hands - Human Rights Watch

insurgency, mainly in eastern Libya, intended to overthrow
Gaddafi militarily. It staged three unsuccessful
attempts to assassinate Gaddafi between 1995 and
1996. 73
The LIFG did not formally announce its existence until
Libyan authorities discovered it in June 1995, after a
clash over the rescue of an LIFG member who was under
armed guard in a hospital. 74 This clash forced the LIFG
into the open and was the start of several serious battles
between the LIFG and the Libyan government for the next
three years. This included large-scale aerial bombardment
of the LIFG’s strongholds in eastern Libya. 75 By 1998,
the government succeeded in crushing the group’s
Libyan operations, and many of its members fled. Some sought asylum in the United
Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, but a large number of them returned to Afghanistan,
one of the only locations where, according to many of those interviewed for this report,
Libyans who did not have proper papers or documentation were able to remain. 76 “At the
time there was no other country that allowed us to be together and train,” said Muhammad
Abu Farsan, an LIFG member who had fled Libya in 1990. 77 Many were also drawn to the
Taliban’s concept of an Islamic state. 78 At the time, many others from the region, such as
Morocco and Algeria, who sought to overthrow their governments for being insufficiently
Islamic, also went to Afghanistan. 79 Al Qaeda tried to use these groups and their members
to further its own aims but most of them reportedly resented these efforts. 80
said. “That was our
goal.… We didn’t anticipate
that other groups [in
Afghanistan] would have
ideas to fight against
others in this world.”
73 Ashour, “Libyan Islamists Unpacked,” p. 2.
74 Tawil, Brothers in Arms, p. 64-66; Ashour, “Libyan Islamists Unpacked,” p. 2; Hilsum, Sandstorm, 93-95.
75 Tawil, Brothers in Arms, p. 139.
76 See also Ibid., p. 179.
77 Human Rights Watch interview with Abu Farsan, March 26, 2012.
78 Ibid.
79 Ali Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (New York and London: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2011), p. 131.
80 Soufan, The Black Banners, p. 131.
DELIVERED INTO ENEMY HANDS 24
“The regime was like an
upside down pyramid
built upon the personality
of Gaddafi. Get rid of
Gaddafi and everything
changes,” Shoroeiya