BEIRUT (AP) — The mass beheadings of Egyptian Christians by militants in Libya linked to the Islamic State group have thrown a spotlight on the threat the extremists pose beyond their heartland in Syria and Iraq, where they have established a self-declared proto-state. Militants in several countries — including Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia — have pledged allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, although the degree of coordination and operational planning between IS leadership and the group’s affiliates remains unclear.
LIBYA
The country has been in free-fall since the end of the civil war that ousted longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Libya’s elected government has relocated to the far eastern part of the country, while a loose alliance of militias have set up a rival government in the capital, Tripoli. Fighting between government forces and Islamic militias rages in the second largest city of Benghazi. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, embassies have shuttered and diplomats have fled the country, along with hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers, many of them Egyptian.
This chaos has proven fertile ground for IS, which has received pledges of allegiance from several extremist factions in Libya. IS-affiliated groups divide the vast, oil-rich country of 6 million people into three regions: Tripoli, Barqa or Cyrenaica in the east, and Fazzan in the south. The interior minister of Libya’s elected government, Omar al-Sinki, has said that al-Baghdadi appointed a Tunisian named Abu Talha to lead the IS faction in Tripoli. Al-Sinki also has said that the bulk of IS militants in Libya are Tunisian and Yemeni.
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Libyan police vehicles outside the Italian Embassy in Tripoli on February 15, 2015. (Hazem Turkia /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
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Associated Press writers Paul Schemm in Rabat, Morocco; Brian Rohan and Maggie Michael in Cairo; Angela Charlton in Paris and Frances D’Emilio in Rome contributed to this report.
