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Libyans Await Biden Term, Blame Trump for Tripoli War

A smoke rises from a port of Tripoli after being attacked in Tripoli, Libya, February 18, 2020. (Reuters)
A smoke rises from a port of Tripoli after being attacked in Tripoli, Libya, February 18, 2020. (Reuters)
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Libyans Await Biden Term, Blame Trump for Tripoli War

A smoke rises from a port of Tripoli after being attacked in Tripoli, Libya, February 18, 2020. (Reuters)
A smoke rises from a port of Tripoli after being attacked in Tripoli, Libya, February 18, 2020. (Reuters)

Some Libyan people were amused with the developments at the US Capitol last week as supporters of President Donald Trump stormed Congress.

The Libyans compared the “struggle for power” and the signs of division in their country to the developments in the US, saying the Americans had “learned” from the Libyan experience.

Setting aside mockery, many Libyans blame Trump for the war that the Libyan National Army (LNA), commanded by Khalifa Haftar, waged against Tripoli in 2019 and that only ended 14 months later with Turkey’s intervention in support of the Government of National Accord (GNA).

The Libyans hope that President-elect Joe Biden would “rectify the course” adopted by his processor.

Former senior advisor at the United Nations, Ibrahim Mousa Said Grada said Trump was partially to blame for the Tripoli war that began on April 4, 2019.

He cited the telephone call Haftar held on April 19, 2019 with then US national security advisor John Bolton, who according to western diplomats, told the LNA commander that if he was seeking to attack Tripoli, he should do it swiftly.

Many interpreted his remark as an American green light to continue the offensive and that Washington would not intervene to prevent it.

Grada described the Tripoli offensive as the “fiercest and most horrible war against a Libyan city in Libya’s modern history.”

He said the attack was “worse than any battle waged during the 32-year Italian colonial rule of the country or any fighting in Libya during World War II.”

Many Libyans hope that Biden would quickly and positively become involved in Middle Eastern affairs in order to help resolve the many problems plaguing the region.

They hope that he would steer clear from the “erratic” policy of Trump and also from the policies of his predecessor Barack Obama.

Moreover, many Libyans hope that Biden would stay true to his vow during his electoral campaign to counter Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions in Libya.

The Cato Institute in Washington, however, urged Biden against military intervention in other countries.

“If Joe Biden wants to produce a constructive record in foreign policy, he needs to repudiate much of the Obama‐Biden administration’s foreign policy legacy. In particular, he must demonstrate that the United States is out of the forcible regime‐change business,” it said in December.

It said that despite “corruption and repression” under late ruler Moammar al-Gaddafi, he “was able to maintain a modicum of stability and order, and Libya was a modernizing society with increased signs of prosperity.”

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Palestinians in Syria Flock to Cemetery Off-Limits under Assad

People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
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Palestinians in Syria Flock to Cemetery Off-Limits under Assad

People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)

In a war-ravaged Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Radwan Adwan was stacking stones to rebuild his father's grave, finally able to return to Yarmuk cemetery after Bashar al-Assad's fall.

"Without the fall of the regime, it would have been impossible to see my father's grave again," said 45-year-old Adwan.

"When we arrived, there was no trace of the grave."

It was his first visit there since 2018, when access to the cemetery south of Damascus was officially banned.

Assad's fall on December 8, after a lightning offensive led by opposition factions, put an end to decades of iron-fisted rule and years of bloody civil war that began with repression of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011.

Yarmuk camp fell to the opposition early in the war before becoming an extremist stronghold. It was bombed and besieged by Assad's forces, emptied of most of its residents and reduced to ruins before its recapture in 2018.

Assad's ouster has allowed former residents to return for the first time in years.

Back at the cemetery, Adwan's mother Zeina sat on a small metal chair in front of her husband's gravesite.

She was "finally" able to weep for him, she said. "Before, my tears were dry."

"It's the first time that I have returned to his grave for years. Everything has changed, but I still recognize where his grave is," said the 70-year-old woman.

Yarmuk camp, established in the 1950s to house Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their land after Israel's creation, had become a key residential and commercial district over the decades.

Some 160,000 Palestinians lived there alongside thousands of Syrians before the country's conflict erupted in 2011.

Thousands fled in 2012, and few have found their homes still standing in the eerie wasteland that used to be Yarmuk.

Along the road to the cemetery, barefoot children dressed in threadbare clothes play with what is left of a swing set in a rubble-strewn area that was once a park.

- 'Spared no one' -

A steady stream of people headed to the cemetery, looking for their loved ones' gravesites after years.

"Somewhere here is my father's grave, my uncle's, and another uncle's," said Mahmud Badwan, 60, gesturing to massive piles of grey rubble that bear little signs of what may lie beneath them.

Most tombstones are broken.

Near them lay breeze blocks from adjacent homes which stand empty and open to the elements.

"The Assad regime spared neither the living nor the dead. Look at how the ruins have covered the cemetery. They spared no one," Badwan said.

There is speculation that the cemetery may also hold the remains of famed Israeli spy Eli Cohen and an Israeli solider.

Cohen was tried and hanged for espionage by the Syrians in 1965 after he infiltrated the top levels of the government.

Camp resident Amina Mounawar leaned against the wall of her ruined home, watching the flow of people arriving at the cemetery.

Some wandered the site, comparing locations to photos on their phones taken before the war in an attempt to locate graves in the transformed site.

"I have a lot of hope for the reconstruction of the camp, for a better future," said Mounawar, 48, as she offered water to those arriving at the cemetery.