Out of the Mountains (36 page)

Beside these general sources of unrest, there was a strong interregional dynamic: Libya's economy depends on petroleum exports, and much of the oil and gas that drives these exports comes from Cyrenaica. Yet throughout his forty-two-year rule, Gaddafi (who came from Sirte, in Libya's western region of Tripolitania) had favored communities in and around Tripoli. The regime neglected Cyrenaica, allowing Benghazi's infrastructure to decay and—in the view of many residents—denying the city its due political influence.
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This was particularly galling for Cyrenaicans because King Idris as-Senussi, Libya's Cyrenaica-born monarch whom Gaddafi had overthrown in a coup in
1969
, had treated Benghazi and Tripoli as coequal centers, dividing his time between the two cities. As a consequence, cities in eastern Libya saw frequent unrest and protests throughout the Gaddafi regime, with periodic demonstrations and violence against officials and security forces, and a major uprising in
1996
that the secret police (the Mukhabarat al-Jamahiriya) suppressed with great bloodshed. Beside this tradition of unrest, eastern Libya had excellent connectivity with Egypt, and there was a history of events in Egypt influencing conditions in Cyrenaica. After Mubarak's fall, it was thus only a matter of days before unrest began to affect Libya.

On February
15
, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of the Revolutionary Committee (local government) center in Benghazi, then marched to police headquarters to protest the detention of Fatih Terbil, a lawyer representing the families of more than a thousand detainees killed by the secret police in Abu Salim jail, Tripoli, after the
1996
uprising. As in Tunisia and Egypt the protests began peacefully, but when police attacked the demonstrators, killing twenty-four, the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (an umbrella group like those in Tunisia and Egypt) called for a Day of Rage on February
17
. Mass demonstrations broke out that day—sponsored both by pro-democracy activists and by regime supporters mobilized to drown out the protest—and rapidly turned deadly as security forces fired tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and ball ammunition into the crowds. Dozens were killed. Numerous observers reported mercenaries and Mukhabarat in plain clothes roaming Tripoli in unmarked cars, committing drive-by shootings against any group of more than three people on the street in an effort to dissuade protestors from gathering.
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As in Tunisia, the regime attacked protestors' funerals, and this heavy-handed brutality created such an immense popular backlash that the number of demonstrators swelled dramatically, with many violently confronting police in towns across the country.
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On February
21
, after a week of rioting, rebels in Benghazi announced the formation of a provisional government, the National Transitional Council. The council sought recognition from the international community, reinstated the royal tricolor of independent Libya to replace Gaddafi's plain green revolutionary banner, and declared its intention to overthrow the regime, by force if necessary. This prompted the immediate resignation of Libya's entire mission at the United Nations in New York and the defection of Libyan ambassadors to China, India, Indonesia, and Poland.
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Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the former justice minister, defected to become head of the National Transitional Council and called for an end to the regime. A former interior minister and several army generals later joined the rebels. The same day, two Libyan air force pilots defected to Malta with their Mirage fighters, in protest at being ordered to bomb demonstrators on the streets of Benghazi, while French workers from an offshore oil platform near Benghazi fled by helicopter, also to Malta.
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Like the French oil workers, most of the
1
.
5
million expatriates in Libya (many employed in the economically critical oil and gas sector) were “scrambling for the border, or waiting from help from their governments. Several passenger ferries [were] waiting in the choppy waters off the coast of Benghazi for any evacuation order,” and the harbors of Brega and Benghazi were crowded with refugees.
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Convoys of expatriate workers headed along the coast road for the Egyptian and Algerian borders, and international companies pulled workers out and closed facilities. The regime's control was unraveling fast.

Though the uprising centered on Benghazi and other eastern cities, towns in Tripolitania—including Zintan, Yefren, Misurata, and Tripoli itself—were also experiencing unrest, with police stations on fire and violent battles in the streets. Far from remaining peaceful or taking the path of civil disobedience as in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan uprising was fast evolving into a military struggle—a proto-insurgency. Resistance groups were forming on their own initiative, seizing weapons from the regime, arming themselves, allying with military and police defectors, capturing and holding territory, and establishing local neighborhood watch groups to administer the areas they had liberated from regime control.
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This was classic competitive control behavior, with numerous groups struggling for dominance over the same key terrain—almost exclusively the coastal cities, the routes between them, and people living in those areas. The competition had a hard coercive edge: there was much brutality and little quarter given on all sides.

Libyans were now using the expression
intifadat al-Libya
(Libyan uprising) to describe the revolt, implying an armed insurgency, alongside the generic term
at-thawra
(the revolution), which protestors had used in Egypt and Tunisia. Insurgent groups were forming simultaneously alongside the continuing mass civil unrest in Libya's cities—a civilian pro-democracy movement and a diverse armed resistance were thus emerging in parallel. The death toll had passed one thousand, with thousands more wounded, and police, troops, and mercenaries were firing into crowds in Tripoli and other cities, killing dozens every day. It was clear that this was going to be different from, and far more intense than, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The protests were more violent, the protestors were better armed, and President Gaddafi—spooked by the rapid collapse of regimes to his east and west—was showing a great deal of fight. Besides rallying supporters to stifle protests and having the security forces, including the army, immediately escalate to lethal force against the demonstrators, Gaddafi's regime had created an Electronic Army in a similar vein to Egypt's, but with a much more active strategy of hacking, spoofing, and breaking up anti-regime networks, as well as using phishing techniques to identify the locations of online regime opponents, who would then be arrested or killed. Gaddafi quickly imposed a near-total media and Internet blackout on the country, cutting off web access as early as February
18
, making it extremely difficult for outsiders and Libyans alike to understand what was happening, but also having the unintended effect of blinding his own Electronic Army, undermining his own awareness of the insurgents' “air war.”

As in Egypt, when the Libyan regime blocked international news media, social media networks stepped into the breach, enabled by the fact that virtually all the fighting was in urban centers, which initially had good cellphone coverage. Besides passing information to the outside world—mainly cellphone videos and photographs smuggled out to Al Jazeera television and rebroadcast into Libya—social media networks emerged as remote command-and-control nodes that played a practical coordination and logistics role. Social media, in this sense, besides the “air war” function of popular mobilization as in Tunisia and Egypt, also performed a command function like that of the Mumbai raiders' Karachi control room, though in this case the command system was distributed through multiple networks and remote platforms, rather than concentrated in a single node. Twitter was used “to transmit information on medical requirements, essential telephone numbers and the satellite frequencies of Al Jazeera—which [was] continuously being disrupted . . . Social networking sites have supplied the most graphic images of the crackdowns on protestors, but also broadcast messages from hospitals looking for blood, rallied demonstrators and provided international dial-up numbers for those whose internet has been blocked. Libyan activists also asked Egyptians to send their SIM cards across the border so they could communicate without being bugged.”
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John Pollock, in a brilliant piece of contemporaneous reporting on the uprising, highlighted the ways in which social media and online tools began to fulfill these practical military functions. We've already looked at his account of the engagement outside Yefren in which Sifaw Twawa's team destroyed the Grad launcher with help from virtual advisers over Skype, an example of something closely approaching nonstate remote warfare. He also describes how activists in Benghazi reacted to the regime's downing of the Internet on February
18
: “Internet and cell-phone access was cut or unreliable for the duration, and people used whatever limited connections they could. In Benghazi, [a citizen journalist named] Mohammed ‘Mo' Nabbous realized he had the knowledge and the equipment, from an ISP business he had owned, to lash together a satellite Internet uplink. With supporters shielding his body from potential snipers, Nabbous set up dishes, and nine live webcams, for his online TV channel Libya Alhurra (‘Libya the Free'), running
24
/
7
on Livestream.”
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Nabbous gave interviews to international media, created the nucleus of what later became the Rebel Media Center, and inspired international supporters much as activists in Tunisia and Egypt had done. “Nabbous had only enough bandwidth to broadcast,” says Pollock, “so volunteers [in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East] stepped forward to capture and upload video. Livestream took an active role, too: it archived backups several times a day, dedicated a security team to guard against hackers, and waived its fees. Others ran Facebook groups or monitored Twitter, pasting tweets and links into the chat box.”
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A self-organizing corps of volunteers, many of whom had never met a Libyan or been to Libya, thus became critical to the Libyan intifada.

As well as getting the message out, these volunteers provided training in first aid, taught Libyans how to communicate securely via Skype and email, and gave intelligence support to the rebels by passing updates on regime actions and weapons sightings. Steen Kirby, a high school student in the American state of Georgia, was one such volunteer: “As well as identifying weaponry, Kirby pulled together a group through Twitter to quickly produce English and Arabic guides to using an AK
47
, building makeshift Grad artillery shelters, and handling mines and unexploded ordnance, as well as detailed medical handbooks for use in the field. These remotely crowd-sourced documents were produced in a matter of days, then shared with freedom fighters in Tripoli, Misurata, and the Nafusa Mountains.”
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The American broadcaster Andy Carvin, of National Public Radio, used Twitter to crowd-source weapons technical intelligence: it took his Twitter followers only thirty-nine minutes to correctly identify an unusual parachute-equipped bomb seen lying on the docks during fighting in Misurata—it turned out to be a Syrian-made variant of the Chinese Type
84
air-scatterable mine, which regime forces were dropping from helicopters over the city and harbor. Carvin's effort to identify the mine was permanently recorded on the social networking site Storify.com—this was the Type
84
's first known use in war.
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As the conflict progressed, international supporters—including hacktivists in Europe and the United States, and Anonymous via its latest Freedom Op, #OpLibya—helped coordinate humanitarian aid, disseminated information on displaced persons and logistics needs, and organized operations to smuggle Western journalists, supplies, and activists into Libya. Many of these—including Christopher Stevens, the future U.S. ambassador to Libya (later killed in the September
2012
Benghazi terrorist attacks)—landed at night from boats on the Mediterranean coast.
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The fact that Libya's population is spread out along the country's
1
,
100
-mile coastline made it virtually impossible for the regime to block access to rebel-held areas from the sea, and this allowed the rebels to move people and supplies around, giving them access to seaborne support and the ability to maneuver, especially once NATO's blockade began, denying sea space to the regime. Along with the Mediterranean sanctuary, the virtual networks of international support represented a complete logistical, informational, and command-and-control hinterland for the uprising, providing instant strategic depth as the movement gathered momentum. They later remotely organized medical supplies, aid convoys, and an entire hospital ship that came in under fire to dock at the port of Misurata during the siege of the city.

The “air war” in Libya was thus far from merely an Egypt- or Tunisia-style propaganda battle: it was becoming the command-and-control backbone for the uprising, helping synchronize and coordinate the combat power of a diverse group of nonstate actors. This allowed a diverse movement of small groups, spread across several coastal cities, to act in a unified manner against the regime, making this a true case of network-enabled insurgency. Access to sea-based resupply and to globalized electronic connectivity for these urban populations in Libya's coastal cities was creating a virtual theater that mobilized nonstate supporters of the uprising from all over the world.