Power without a throne: how Khalifa Haftar controls Libya

In July 2025, four of Europe’s most senior officials landed in eastern Libya for an urgent meeting. Italy’s interior minister had watched migrant arrivals surge during the previous six months. Greece’s migration chief was reeling after 2,000 people reached Crete in a single week. Malta’s home minister feared his island was next. And the EU’s migration commissioner was scrambling to rescue an agreement worth many hundreds of millions that was visibly failing to stop the boats.

Libya is a place where crises converge. Its 1,100-mile coastline, the longest Mediterranean coastline in Africa, has become the main departure point for migrants heading north. Since Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in 2011, the country has been torn apart by successive civil wars. Russia, Turkey, Egypt and the UAE arm rival factions, and the contest no longer stops at Libya’s borders. From military bases in the south, Russia and the UAE funnel weapons and fighters into Sudan’s civil war, which has driven hundreds of thousands more refugees north towards Libya’s coast.

Whoever controls Libya holds leverage over Europe. Yet Libya’s political crisis is so byzantine that it confuses even experienced European officials. The country is split between two governments, one in the west and one in the east, and neither really governs. The UN and Europe recognise the Government of National Unity in Tripoli, which was formed in 2021 to oversee elections that never happened. In response, the House of Representatives, Libya’s parliament elected in 2014, appointed a rival government in the eastern city of Benghazi in 2022, though that government is not officially recognised by any country. Both administrations, in the east and west, claim national authority. Neither controls the oil, military bases or the migration routes that make Libya matter to Europe. One man does. His name is Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar is 82. His title, general commander of the Libyan National Army, a coalition of militias assembled in 2014 and later rubber stamped by the eastern parliament, does not convey the vast extent of his power. His forces hold the oilfields and export terminals across central Libya. His coastline units police the eastern shore and run the smuggling routes that feed Europe’s migration crisis. His bases host the foreign militaries feeding Sudan’s war. For Europeans confronting migration, energy insecurity and regional spillover, Haftar controls everything that matters.

The European delegation had come to Benghazi in the hope of a private audience with Haftar. Upon arrival, they learned that he had one condition. He insisted they first meet, publicly and on camera, ministers from the eastern administration that he claims to serve. Europe does not officially recognise that government. Meeting the eastern administration’s ministers would legitimise it; refusing would mean no access to Haftar. When the Europeans declined, they were denied entry. The delegation never made it past the airport lounge. The humiliation exposed Libya’s central fiction: to reach the country’s most powerful man, you must pretend he is not the country’s most powerful man.

In 2011, foreign powers intervened to overthrow Gaddafi. This is what they built. As bombs fall on Iran and the architects of yet another intervention promise that force will deliver freedom, Libya stands as the parable they refuse to read. Every intervention makes the same promise: remove the dictator and the people will be free. Libya is what happens when the dictator is removed and the people are forgotten.

For more than a decade, as Libya’s politicians fought over diplomatic recognition, Haftar was changing the facts on the ground, accumulating the oil, territory and foreign backers that constitute real power. He claims to be a servant of the eastern government – but it is a government whose ministers he approves, whose parliament his soldiers surround, and whose laws apply only when he permits. Meanwhile, the rival government in Tripoli survives on oil revenues and infrastructure that run through territory he can close at will. Both governments are officially responsible for everything, but neither has power over anything essential. This is Haftar’s system: control everything that matters, be answerable for nothing, and force everyone to pretend the arrangement does not exist.

This system is propped up from outside by foreign powers, and held together inside by enforced silence. Egypt, Russia and the UAE officially recognise the government in Tripoli. In practice, they support Haftar. The UAE bankrolls his operations and provides the weapons that enforce his authority. Egypt offers intelligence and the use of a military base inside its own territory.