Saif al-Islam Gaddafi: Anatomy of a Betrayal

A single question imposes itself on anyone attempting to unravel the mystery surrounding the assassination of Saif al-Islam, the most prominent of Muammar Gaddafi’s sons, a man of singular ideas and conduct, and the presumed heir of a ruler who governed Libya from 1969 to 2011. The question is simple yet decisive: who lifted the protection from Saif al-Islam, at a time when he was living in a house in Zintan under tight security provided by local forces?

One thing is certain: Saif al-Islam was betrayed. A betrayal that enabled an armed group to enter the place where he resided, with the explicit aim of assassinating him.

Seasoned observers of Libyan affairs largely agree in dismissing the hypothesis that local forces, acting alone, could have been behind the operation targeting Saif al-Islam. He had played a role both domestically and internationally and had prepared himself to succeed his father — or so he believed. There are no local forces in Libya capable, on their own, of carrying out an operation of this nature, requiring such a degree of coordination and professionalism.

What was at stake, in reality, was the settling of accounts with any internal or external force likely to support Muammar Gaddafi’s son and help him one day reach the presidency. It should be recalled in this regard that the presidential elections scheduled for 2021 were cancelled as soon as opinion polls revealed that Saif al-Islam’s victory constituted a serious possibility.

In recent months, the emergence of new actors on the Libyan stage, such as Pakistan and India, has not gone unnoticed. This should not be interpreted as evidence of a Pakistani or Indian role in Saif al-Islam’s assassination, but rather as a sign of the widening conflict and competing interests surrounding Libya.

The country remains torn by deep fault lines between East and West. In the East, the forces of Khalifa Haftar and his three sons — Saddam, Khaled, and Belkacem — exercise their dominance. In the West, power is held, within certain limits, by the government of Abdelhamid Dbeibah, who, like Haftar, has begun to rely on his own sons. Yet the most significant event Libya witnessed roughly two months ago was the death of the Libyan Chief of Staff, Mohamed Haddad, while he was in Ankara at the head of a military delegation. His private plane, an aging Falcon, crashed shortly after takeoff. The circumstances of the accident remain obscure. The aircraft was carrying one of Libya’s most senior military officials, whose exact coordination with Turkey remains unknown, despite Ankara’s close relations with the Dbeibah government on the one hand and with Islamist movements in Libya on the other.

What matters today is that a major actor has exited the Libyan stage, for reasons that are both internal and external. This does not mean, however, that Saif al-Islam was an exceptional politician. He was above all a figure who knew the world and, at a certain moment, attempted to play a role, despite his father’s opposition, which prevented him from going too far in the relationships he had established with Western countries and certain American circles.

In reality, Saif did not possess the means necessary to implement the reforms to which he aspired. His ability to control Libyan state funds always remained limited. Muammar Gaddafi, fully aware that money constituted one of the principal sources of his power, retained total control over the country’s resources. He never accepted sharing absolute authority, not even with one of his sons.

From this perspective, Saif remained a secondary actor for as long as his father was alive, despite the image he cultivated as a reformer and as the embodiment of a possible future for a Libya that Muammar Gaddafi had succeeded in turning into a pariah state. The failure of the satellite television channel he launched in Libya offers a telling illustration of this reality. The channel’s employees endured severe hardship when the funds allocated to it were abruptly cut off, even though Saif personally supervised the project.

Saif al-Islam was not only marginalized outside Libya during the years of his father’s rule and of what was known as the “Jamahiriya”; he was also marginalized internally, where centers of power were directly controlled by Muammar Gaddafi himself. Abdullah Senussi constituted one such pole of power, as did some of Saif’s brothers, notably Moatassem and Khamis. Other figures close to the elder Gaddafi carried out specific missions on his behalf. Contrary to a widespread belief, it was not Saif who negotiated the agreement by which Libya renounced its weapons of mass destruction. That agreement was concluded by George Tenet, then Director of the CIA, who established a direct channel with Moussa Koussa, head of Libyan intelligence. It was Muammar Gaddafi himself who ordered the abandonment of those weapons after realizing, in light of the exchanges between Tenet and Moussa Koussa, the futility of any attempt to evade rigorous American surveillance.

After the death of his father Muammar and of most of his brothers, Saif remained the sole survivor of the family. He managed to adapt to the phase that followed the fall of the regime. The chaos that took hold in Libya nourished his ambitions — a chaos that has persisted since the end of the “Jamahiriya,” resulting both from a genuine popular revolution and from NATO’s intervention, which pursued Gaddafi until his physical elimination.

Only time will make it possible to identify those who assassinated Saif al-Gaddafi. The days ahead will reveal whether political Islam in Libya and its networks, benefiting from external support, played a role in eliminating a figure capable of filling the political vacuum from which the country has suffered for more than fourteen years.

Ultimately, Saif al-Gaddafi, who at one point attempted to publish a book bearing his name, held political ideas that were largely naïve. Yet he consistently refused to enter the game of political Islam and remained, like his father, deeply hostile to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and to all organizations born from the intellectual matrix of Hassan al-Banna and his companions.