Excerpts, the Guardian which is leftist so a bit of caution in reading the article itself.
Libya: EU officials hope Trump will pull support for Haftar
Patrick Wintour
...
European officials are hoping Donald Trump’s surprise expression of support for the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar can be reversed amid division in Washington over US policy on the north African country.
...
In the US, the Republican senator Lindsey Graham called on Trump to “let Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Turkey know that the proxy war they’ve created in Libya is unacceptableâ€.
“We need to reinforce the message that we’re not picking one group over the others and we reject military force as the solution to the problems in Libya,†he told Politico. “It is impossible, in my view, for Haftar or anyone else to be a legitimate leader by military force. It is impossible, in my view, for him to hold Tripoli and govern the country if he obtains Tripoli by force. There will be a flood of refugees if the war escalates, which will be a nightmare for Tunisia and the entire region.â€
More at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/23/libya-eu-officials-hoping-donald-trump-pull-support-warlord
Haftar has some of the Libyan regular army fighting on his side it sounds like, see diagram.
Sen. Lindsay Graham says we shouldn't be supporting this guy, if we are, I think the support is immaterial... but we've got our CIA and such, we can't know for certain that we might have just vague support of this guy. And can this be about anything more than natural resources? What's the deal here?
As posted earlier, per wikipedia, Haftar is actually a US citizen and one of the Haftar associates went to Moscow this week.
This is a real puzzle. Maybe we can and should listen to what Graham is saying.
The Tripoli government does not appear to be an evil. We need to be very careful with this. I liked Trump initially because we'd stay out of these quagmires... and we have done that, even considering Yemen, involvement started under Obama and this Libya episode where I don't believe we have much more than the President's words.
Some of the forces working with Haftar have names like Salafist Militia, stuff like that. That could be typical for that part of the world where a whole lot of things sound Islamic. I hope it doesn't mean terrorist in anyway.
Stuff on twitter is a bit interesting to follow too:
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23libya&src=typdOded Berkowitz, so-called Libyan expert account.
https://twitter.com/Oded121351Soldiers of Fortune over there too apparently.
