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Africa North
Libyan army launches offensive against groups attacking oil crescent area
2018-06-18
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Libya’s air force carried out successful air strikes on Sunday on positions of forces that carried out the attack in the oil crescent region.

The Libyan army’s media arm published videos showing kabooms of ammunition depots which belonged to whom they called "hostile forces" amid the sounds of heavy flights.

A military source told Al Arabiya English that the air strikes were not limited on destroying the ammunition depots, but also destroyed focused on tanks and other equipment.

For his part, the emergency team of the Libyan Red Islamic Thingy Ajdabia branch announced on its official page on Friday evening that it received 28 bodies resulting from festivities between the army and the attacking forces in oil crescent region.

Another military source explained that the air strike which the army announced after launching an offensive on Saturday came after armed forces "pursued the remnants of the attacking forces around the crescent region, especially in the south amid the desert" asserting the wounding of big shots, including Ahmed al-Tagouri, a leader in "the defense of Benghazi brigades" bad boy organization during the air strikes.

This comes as an oil storage tank at the Ras Lanuf port in Libya was ablaze on Sunday amid fighting between rival factions for control of the terminals in Libya's oil crescent, a firefighting official said.

Ras Lanuf's storage tank No. 2 held 200,000 barrels of crude at the time, the official said. Another Ras Lanuf tank, No. 12, had already been set alight and damaged on Thursday, when gangs stormed Ras Lanuf and the neighbouring terminal of Es Sider.

Groups opposed to Khalifa Haftar
...Self-proclaimed Field Marshal, 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...
's Libyan National Army (LNA), which has held ports in the oil crescent since 2016, mounted Thursday's attack. It led the National Oil Corporation (NOC) to shut the terminals and evacuate them, declaring force majeure on exports.

Posted by:Fred

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