Fayez al-Sarraj says Khalifa Haftar’s attack on Tripoli ‘will spread its cancer through Mediterranean’
Hundreds of thousands of refugees could flee the fighting caused by Khalifa Haftar’s attempt to seize the Libyan capital, Tripoli, the prime minister of the country’s UN-recognised government has warned.
The warnings by Fayez al-Sarraj – who also claimed Haftar had betrayed the people of Libya – echo those given privately to the Italian government by its intelligence services, and are clearly designed to alert EU states to the possible consequences for European migration of a prolonged civil war in the country.
There have been concerns that Libya could become a “new Syria”, with civil war leading to massive population displacement.
Speaking to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Sarraj, who has been PM since 2016, said: “We are facing a war of aggression that will spread its cancer throughout the Mediterranean, Italy and Europe. We need to be united and firm in blocking the war of aggression of Haftar, a man who has betrayed Libya and the international community.
There are not only the 800,000 migrants potentially ready to leave, there would be Libyans fleeing this war, and in the south of Libya the terrorists of the Islamic State that the Tripoli government with the support of the city of Misrata had expelled from the town of Sirte three years ago”.
Sarraj said Haftar’s foreign-funded forces “are attacking civilian structures, roads, schools, houses, the airport and medical facilities: ambulances and hospitals. General Haftar says he is attacking terrorists, but there are only civilians here.”
