Online Reporter
Moussa Ibrahim
The world is being sold the same “human rights” pretext for the assault on Iran that left Libya in ruins 15 years ago.
On March 19, 2011, NATO came to Libya claiming to deliver democracy and human rights. What followed was an eight-month campaign of destruction that dismantled a sovereign state, shattered its institutions, and opened the gates to chaos that continues to this day.
On February 4, 2026, that same process reached one of its most tragic and revealing conclusions with the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi.
Saif al-Islam was not a warlord, nor a militia leader, nor a man of vengeance.
He was the only figure around whom a genuine national consensus had begun to emerge. Across tribes, regions and political currents, there was growing recognition that he could lead a peaceful political settlement and restore Libya’s sovereignty.
His assassination meant therefore the elimination of the last viable path toward a Libyan-led democratic process.
In that sense, the killing of Saif al-Islam was not separate from NATO’s intervention, it was its continuation. It was the final proof that what was destroyed in 2011 was not only a state, but the very possibility of rebuilding one through dialogue, reconciliation and national will.
The Western war machine only served its own interests in destroying a nation that could liberate Africa. On March 19, 2011, the NATO bloc began a violent eight-month-long military onslaught of Libya, a sovereign African union founding member state, which had enjoyed four decades of stability, prosperity, and the highest Human Development Index (HDI) scores in all of Africa.
NATO’s justification for the aggressive and bloody attack was the now-infamous “protection of civilians” doctrine, formalised under UN Security Council Decree No. 1973.
The French Air Force, however, had already initiated a major raid on immobile Libyan Army units. They had already pulled out of the city of Benghazi, a protest hotbed, in a show of goodwill and peaceful intent. More than 400 resting Libyan officers, soldiers, medical, and media personnel were massacred without the chance to fight back against an unjustified and undeclared foreign air attack.
Tens of thousands more Libyans would later perish under more than 26 000 air raids, 100 cruise missile attacks, and a naval blockade conducted by NATO’s 30-member coalition. Among the victims were a terrifying number of civilians from all walks of life.
The number of women and children killed was especially high, as they sought refuge in civilian buildings deliberately targeted by the mighty NATO: including houses, apartment blocks, schools, and community centres.
As we witnessed time and time again in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Syria, NATO justified these attacks by claiming they were seeking out fighters and weaponry housed in civilian facilities. No evidence has ever been presented.
In the weeks that led up to this aggression, I spoke officially for the Libyan government in countless international press conferences, media appearances, and diplomatic appeals.
Before hundreds of international media outlets, I expressed one single demand: that all hostilities cease under the direct supervision of the UN and that the African union install an international fact-finding mission to determine who committed what act, paving the way for a national conference of all Libyan parties to the conflict.
This single most powerful and earnest appeal was rejected without consideration in Western centers of hegemony and ridiculed in Western media outlets. The only solutions that were endorsed and praised were more rockets, bombs, and the continuous arming of Islamist and tribalist terrorist groups on the ground.
In the years after, “crimes against humanity” charges against the revolutionary government of Libya were either never proven or were shown to have been false.
In fact, given its 15 years of total influence over Libya’s trajectory, the West has been unable to show the alleged 8 000 victims of rape, nor the 10,000 “murdered” civilians, nor the neighbourhoods of Tripoli allegedly destroyed by Muammar Gaddafi’s air force, nor the African mercenaries supposedly imported by the Gaddafi government in the first week of the “Libyan Spring” (February 15-22, 2011).
The actual “crimes” of the Libyan revolutionary government, however, were real and consequential: Gaddafi’s Libya was re-shaping the political, economic, and cultural context of the African continent in radical and independent ways not seen since the nominal de-colonisation of African countries in the 1950s and 1960s.
On September 9, 1999, under the leadership of Gaddafi, the establishment of the African union was announced in his birthplace, the coastal city of Sirte (the very city in which he would fight his last battle against NATO in 2011).
Gaddafi then announced the start of a major revolutionary project for the plundered and exploited continent: building pan-African economic, security, and communication institutions with the aim of gaining complete and true independence from the control of the West. – RT.
