UN’s Ghassan Salame says he hopes both sides will realise that neither could achieve an outright military victory.
The United Nations’s top envoy for Libya has said that renegade General Khalifa Haftar tried to stage a coup when he issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj of the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA).
Speaking to BBC Radio on Monday, Special Representative Ghassan Salame said Haftar’s decision to issue in the course of his offensive arrest warrants against al-Serraj and other top Tripoli officials “sounded more like a coup than counterterrorism”.
Haftar announced an attack against Tripoli on April 4 to wrest control of western Libya from armed groups that back the UN-backed GNA, headed by al-Serraj.
The 75-year-old, who casts himself as a foe of “extremism” but is viewed by opponents as a new authoritarian leader in the mould of former strongman Muammar Gaddafi, has vowed to continue his offensive until Libya is “cleansed of terrorism”.
Libya, which has been mired in chaos since the NATO-backed toppling of Gaddafi in 2011, has been split into rival eastern and western administrations since 2014.
In March 2016, GNA chief al-Sarraj arrived in Tripoli to set up a new government, but the Haftar-allied administration in the eastern city of Tobruk refused to recognise its authority.
Haftar’s push on the capital threatens to further destabilise the oil-rich country and reignite a full-blown civil war.
