Starting in 2020, things started to get strange in Africa for those who knew what to look for.
Normally, coups in Africa are nothing to write about. But starting in 2020, we saw six countries flip in a pro-Russian direction in just three years. Individually, they were curious. Taken together, that rate of turnover outpaced even the most optimistic neoconservative ambitions for pro–United States regime changes in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark summarised, “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and, finishing off, Iran.”
In 2011, the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization destroyed the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. They had wanted to do it for a long time. A true cosmopolitan, Gaddafi had provided lawyers, guns, and money to black nationalists in South Africa, Palestinian Nationalists in Tunisia, Irish Nationalists in the British Isles, White Nationalists in Canada, and Armenian Nationalists in Turkey. The one ideology for which the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution had no patience or tolerance was radical Islamic Salafi jihadism. In March 1998, Libya was the first country to issue an Interpol arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden. The warrant received no attention or action. Five months later, Al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224.
In September 2001, President George W. Bush told Congress that “every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Gaddafi took the US up on the offer, dismantling its weapons of mass destruction program under the United Nations’ supervision. It paid over $1 billion in reparations to victims of terrorism to get removed from the State Sponsor of Terror list. In 2008, future US Ambassador to Libya (and Benghazi embassy casualty) J. Christopher Stephens reported that “Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent.”
Gaddafi had been highly suspicious of the citizens who chose to join the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan and surveilled them extensively, dutifully reporting them to other intelligence agencies whenever possible. In one particularly obscene case, a Guantanamo detainee named Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu was on the ground leading the Salafi jihadist group “Supporters of Sharia.” While hundreds are held in Guantanamo, being tortured without trial, the US knowingly released what it deemed a “probable member of al-Qaeda and a member of the African Extremist Network” to tear things up in Libya for them. A United Kingdom Parliamentary retrospective on the Libya overthrow later admitted, “The possibility that militant extremist groups would attempt to benefit from the rebellion should not have been the preserve of hindsight. Libyan connections with transnational militant extremist groups were known before 2011, because many Libyans had participated in the Iraq insurgency and in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda.”
Gaddafi made a series of dire warnings of what would happen if he died:
“Libya plays a vital role in regional peace and world peace,” he said in an interview with the France 24 television station. “We are an important partner in fighting al Qaeda.”
“There are millions of blacks who could come to the Mediterranean to cross to France and Italy, and Libya plays a role in security in the Mediterranean.”
Saif Gaddafi likewise warned, “Libya may become the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean. You will see the pirates in Sicily, in Crete, in Lampedusa. You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.” While the Mediterranean didn’t see a resurgence of literal piracy, Gaddafi’s predictions were otherwise correct if not conservative.
Within five years, US military officials openly conceded that Libya was a failed state. In February 2015, the International Crisis Group warned, “On the current trajectory, the most likely medium-term prospect is not one side’s triumph, but that rival local warlords and radical groups will proliferate, what remains of state institutions will collapse, financial reserves . . . will be depleted, and hardship for ordinary Libyans will increase exponentially.”
As predicted, millions of blacks flocked to Libya’s Mediterranean coast to cross into France and Italy. Many were beaten, raped, and starved in what the United Nations Children’s Fund called “living hellholes” or even sold in open-air slave markets. On the Italian island of Lampedusa, it is not unheard of thirteen years later for hundreds or thousands of illegal African migrants to land in a single night. On May 22, 2017, in a manifestation of what former Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigative counsel Jack Blum called a “disposal problem,” a Manchester-born Libyan named Salman Abedi returned from his MI5-sponsored jihad in Libya and blew himself to pieces in the middle of an Ariana Grande concert. He killed himself and twenty-two others in an audience primarily composed of young girls.
As the second phase of Hillary Clinton’s “bank shot,” the overthrow of Libya’s government and the looting of its arsenals allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to direct those weapons to jihadis in Syria. The scourges of the Islamic world would also use this windfall of weapons to brutalize populations across Africa’s Sahel region, most notably in Mali. After 2011, countries in the Sahel experienced between a tenfold and twentyfold increase in deadly Islamic terror incidents from groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State following what Vision of Humanity calls a “Jihadization of Banditry.”
