| Submit your comments on this article |
| Africa North |
| Car bomb kills 11 Libyan troops in Benghazi |
| 2016-07-08 |
| [ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] A boom-mobile killed 11 soldiers in Libya’s second city Benghazi as they held evening prayers on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, a military source said Thursday. Benghazi has been hit by repeated bombings since troops under the command of controversial General Khalifa Haftar ... served in the Libyan army under Muammar Qadaffy, and took part in the coup that brought Qadaffy to power in 1969. He became a prisoner of war in Chad in 1987. While held prisoner, he and his fellow officers formed a group hoping to overthrow Qadaffy. He was released around 1990 in a deal with the United States government and spent nearly two decades in the United States, gaining US citizenship. In 1993, while living in the United States, he was convicted in absentia of crimes against the Jamahiriya and sentenced to death. Haftar held a senior position in the anti-Qadaffy forces in the 2011 Libyan Civil War. In 2014 he was commander of the Libyan Army when the General National Congress (GNC) refused to give up power in accordance with its term of office. Haftar launched a campaign against the GNC and its Islamic fundamentalist allies. His campaign allowed elections to take place to replace the GNC, but then developed into a civil war. Guess you can't win them all... drove Islamist fighters out of most of the city earlier this year. Haftar refuses to recognize a joint military command set by the UN-backed unity government in Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... , saying he still takes orders from a rival administration based in the far eastern city of Tobruk. Wednesday’s blast follows a boom-mobile targeting a security chief that killed two people on Sunday and a June 24 bombing that killed four civilians. Meanwhile, ...back at the abandoned silver mine, there was another kaboom... a MiG-23 fighter jet of Haftar’s air force crashed in the west of Benghazi on Wednesday, killing its pilot, a front man said. "The crash was due to a technical fault," Ahmad al-Mismari, front man of the Haftar-led army command, told AFP. |
| Posted by:Fred |