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Friday, August 26, 2011

To Which Victors Go the Spoils?

I wondered if the Tripoli offensive had any eastern rebel component. Those rebels remained stuck in the "waist" of Libya while the western rebels captured Tripoli. Would the western rebels take kindly to the eastern rebels waltzing in to Tripoli to claim a share of power? Stratfor discusses life after Khaddafi and raises this point:

Anti-Gadhafi rebels in Misurata waged a long and bloody fight against government forces to gain control of the city, and while the Cyrenaican rebels were bogged down in the Ajdabiya/Marsa el Brega area, Berber guerrillas based in the Nafusa Mountains applied steady pressure to the Libyan forces in the west and eventually marched on Tripoli with Arab rebels from coastal towns such as Zawiya, where earlier uprisings in February were brutally defeated by the regime prior to the NATO intervention.

These groups of armed rebels have fought independently on different fronts during the civil war and have had varying degrees of success. The different roles these groups have played and, more important, their perceptions of those roles will likely create friction when it comes time to allocate the spoils of the Libyan war and delineate the power structure that will control Libya going forward.

Just getting rid of Khaddafi is a victory. Getting more could be a problem.