From the outset, Gadafy has put the uprising down to an al-Qaeda conspiracy, writes MARY FITZGERALDin Darnah
THE RUGGED hills that surround Darnah, a drab, neglected Mediterranean town whose seafront is lined with ugly concrete apartment blocks, have nurtured generations of fighters dating back to the Barbary Wars of the early 19th century.
The area, known to Libyans as the Green Mountains, saw fierce resistance to Italian occupation in the 1920s and 1930s. Decades later, local men returned from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan used its shaded valleys to foment rebellion against Muammer Gadafy.
More recently, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, Darnah, a town of 50,000, became a “wellspring for foreign fighters in Iraq”. Several dozen of its sons joined the Iraqi insurgency, helping Libya earn the distinction of coming second only to Saudi Arabia in terms of supplying fighters.
“Darnah is well known as a city where the tradition of jihad is very strong,” says Abdel Hakim al-Hisadi, a secondary school teacher who spent the late 1990s at a training camp in Afghanistan and now oversees the deployment of some 200 rebel fighters to the seesawing front line further west along the coast.
From the outset of the Libyan uprising, Gadafy has sought to cast the challenge to his 42-year rule as an al-Qaeda conspiracy. He also warned that militants had declared an Islamic emirate in Darnah – a baseless claim greeted with derision across rebel-held eastern Libya. “It didn’t surprise us that Gadafy would try that trick,” says al-Hisadi. “He knows that one way to frighten the West is to mention that something is linked with Islam.”
Admiral James Stavridis, Nato’s supreme allied commander for Europe, recently told a US senate committee that intelligence reports had indicated “flickers of potential al-Qaeda” among Libya’s rebels, but he qualified this with the observation that the opposition leaders appeared to be “responsible men and women”.
The people of eastern Libya are all too aware of Gadafy’s efforts to paint them as militant extremists. “We are not al-Qaeda” is a refrain I heard numerous times from rebel fighters and ordinary men and women on the streets of Benghazi, the opposition’s de facto capital, and other eastern towns.
Last week leading members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant faction that emerged in the mid 1990s and very recently changed its name to the Libyan Islamic Movement, told me it had pledged allegiance to the rebels’ transitional National Council headquartered in Benghazi.
They rejected allegations that the group, which was established to overthrow Gadafy, was ever affiliated with al-Qaeda. While acknowledging that some LIFG men went on to become senior figures in al-Qaeda, they insisted the group itself kept its distance. “Our fight was always a Libyan struggle only,” said one.
Men drawn from LIFG ranks are among those fighting Gadafy’s forces and several of its veterans are helping recruit and train volunteers for the rebels’ ragtag army, including Salim al-Burrani who co-ordinates al-Hisadi’s fighters, the youngest of whom is 17, at the front line. Al-Hisadi, who trained at a camp in Khost, the area of eastern Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden ran several bases, says he saw the Saudi once during his time there but didn’t even speak to him.
Al-Hisadi says he disagreed with the September 11th attacks and left Afghanistan for Pakistan after the US-led invasion, where he was captured and handed over to US officials. He was returned to Libya some months later, and spent several years in jail.
Like most in Libya’s eastern flank, al-Hisadi welcomed the coalition air strikes that halted Gadafy’s advance on Benghazi and gave rebel forces enough momentum to recapture territory.
“They came at a critical time,” he says. “The people here were going to be slaughtered but they were saved by the West. It has changed our view of the West and I think it will have a very positive influence on attitudes in the long-term. It is our duty to thank them.”
Al-Hisadi says he wants to see a constitutional and pluralist Libya, echoing what the LIFG men had told me. “I’m not a politician and when Gadafy is gone I will go back to teaching but I’m looking for a state that brings freedom and justice for the people.”
A democracy? “I don’t reject democracy as long as it doesn’t go against Islam,” he replies.
Sheikh Yousri, a popular blind cleric who, since the uprising began, has delivered Friday sermons to tens of thousands gathered next to the Benghazi courthouse turned rebel headquarters, offers a similar view. “As long as the laws in a new Libya do not go against Islam, we will accept them,” he says.
“We are not saying that all the laws should come from Koran and Sunnah but that they should not contravene Koran and Sunnah.”
Opposition leaders have repeatedly said that their vision for Libya’s future is of a democratic country with a multi-party political system that reflects the nature of their Muslim-majority nation, one of the most conservative in north Africa. They point out that the dominant strain of Islam in Libya stems from the Maliki school of thought, which is generally considered tolerant.
“The West has worries about Islam that don’t bother us,” says Iman Bugaighis, a National Council spokesperson and one of the few women to be seen not wearing a headscarf in Benghazi. “We are all Muslims and all Sunnis. We have some extremists, yes, like all societies, but they are a tiny minority despite all the repression we have suffered from the regime. The vast majority of Libyans are moderate.”
Some Islamists in Libya, like their counterparts elsewhere in the region, talk approvingly of the model offered by Turkey’s ruling AKP, a party with Islamist roots.
“No one in Libya will ask for an Islamic state like that of the Taliban,” says Mohammed Busidra, who spent 21 years in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail, making him one of Libya’s longest-serving political prisoners. “The Libyan people are not suited to live in a strict Islamic state. It would be similar to Gadafy’s aggression if we were to take that approach.”
Busidra, who studied biochemistry in Wales as a young man, is not aligned with any particular entity in Libya’s Islamist spectrum, which ranges from the Muslim Brotherhood to groups adhering to the austere Salafist reading of Islam. At the time of his incarceration, he was active with the Tableeghi Jamaat, an apolitical transnational movement that calls on Muslims to be more observant.
Busidra argues that while Libya might be a conservative society, with particularly pious pockets like Darnah, this does not necessarily mean that people would support Islamist political parties in a post-Gadafy scenario. “I think Libyans will vote for those who are nationalists, respect Islam, and have democratic views,” he says. “Nothing more.”