Khalifa Haftar (; born 7 November 1943) is a Libyan politician, military officer, and the commander of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army (LNA). A prominent officer for the Libyan Arab Republic and its successor, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, from 1969 to 1987, he has been a major figure of the Libyan crisis since 2011. In 2015, he was appointed commander of the armed forces loyal to the elected legislative body, the Libyan House of Representatives. Haftar has been the de facto ruler of the eastern part of Libya since early 2017, governing the region as a military dictatorship under the LNA.
Haftar was born in Ajdabiya. He served in the Libyan Army under Muammar Gaddafi, and took part in the coup that brought Gaddafi to power in 1969. He participated in the Libyan contingent against Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Haftar then participated in the Chadian-Libyan war (1978–1987), becoming promoted to Chief officer of the Libyan military in Chad in 1986 for the final phase of the conflict, known as the Toyota War, until he was captured by Chadian forces in April 1987 and held as a prisoner of war, which was seen as a major embarrassment for Gaddafi and represented a major blow to Gaddafi's ambitions in Chad. While being held prisoner, he and his fellow officers formed a group hoping to overthrow Gaddafi. He was released around 1990 in a deal with the United States government and spent nearly two decades living in the U.S. in Langley, Virginia, and gained U.S. citizenship. In 1993, while living in the United States, he was convicted in absentia in Libya, of crimes against the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and sentenced to death.
Haftar held a senior position in the forces that overthrew Gaddafi in 2011, during the First Libyan Civil War. In 2014, he was commander of the Libyan Army when the General National Congress (GNC) refused to give up power. Haftar launched a campaign against the GNC and its Islamic fundamentalist allies. His campaign allowed elections to replace the GNC but then developed into the Second Libyan Civil War. In 2017, Ramzi al-Shaeri, vice-president of the Derna city council and lawyers Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting accused Haftar of the war crime of ordering the killing of prisoners of war during the recapture of Derna. Haftar has been described as "Libya's most potent warlord", having fought "with and against nearly every significant faction" in Libya's conflicts, as having a "reputation for unrivalled military experience" and as governing "with an iron fist". In November 2021, Haftar announced his candidacy for the presidential election in December 2021 before it was postponed.
Although Haftar is reportedly an anti-Islamist, his allies include the Salafi Madkhali militias for geopolitical purposes. Besides his native Arabic, Haftar also speaks English, Italian and Russian, and some French. He is a dual Libyan-US citizen. He is expected to renounce his US citizenship before the next Libyan election.
Early life and education Khalifa Belqasim Omar Haftar was born in Ajdabiya in Cyrenaica, British-occupied Libya to an Arab Bedouin family belonging to the Firjan tribe. He studied at al-Huda School in Ajdabiya in 1957 and then moved to Derna to obtain his secondary education between 1961 and 1964. He joined the Benghazi Military University Academy (also known as Benghazi Royal Military College) on 16 September 1964 and graduated from there in 1966.
In the late 1970s, he went on to receive military training in the Soviet Union, completing a special three-year degree for foreign officers sent to study in the USSR, at the M. V. Frunze Military Academy. Haftar later pursued further military training in Egypt. He was also stationed with the artillery corps.
Early years in the Gaddafi government
As a young army officer, Haftar took part in the coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power in 1969, assisting Gaddafi in the overthrow of Libya's King Idris. Shortly thereafter, Haftar became a top military officer for Gaddafi. He commanded Libyan troops supporting Egyptian troops entering Israeli-occupied Sinai during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Like other members of the Free Officers movement (the junta that toppled the monarchy), Haftar was known as a secularist and a Nasserist. He was a member of the Revolutionary Command Council which governed Libya in the immediate aftermath of the coup. Haftar later became Gaddafi's military Chief of staff. In the late 1980s, Haftar commanded Libyan forces during the Chadian–Libyan conflict, which ended in defeat for Libya.
War with Chad By 1986, Haftar had attained the rank of colonel, and was then the Chief officer in command of Gaddafi's military forces in Chad in the Chadian–Libyan conflict. During the war, in which the Libyan forces were either captured or driven back across the border, Haftar and 600–700 of his men were captured as prisoners of war, and incarcerated in 1987 after their defeat in the Ouadi Doum airstrike.
Shortly after this disastrous battle, Gaddafi disavowed Haftar and the other Libyan prisoners of war who were captured by Chad. One possible contributing factor to Gaddafi's repudiation of Haftar and of other captured prisoners of war may have been the fact that Gaddafi had earlier signed an agreement to withdraw all Libyan forces from Chad, and Haftar's operations inside of Chad had been in violation of this agreement.M. Brecher & J. Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, p. 92 Another possible reason given for Gaddafi's abandonment of Haftar was the potential that Haftar might return to Libya as a hero and thus pose a threat to Gaddafi's rule itself.
In 1986 and 1987 the Government of Chad accused Libya of using toxic gas and napalm against central government forces and against rebel forces. Libya may have used mustard gas delivered in bombs by An-26 aircraft in final phases of the war against Chad in September 1987.
As Libyan opposition alongside the United States Gaddafi demanded Haftar's soldiers be returned to Libya, but the Americans arranged for them to fly to Zaire instead. There, half of his soldiers decided to return to Libya. In late 1987, Haftar and a group of officers aligned themselves with the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), a U.S. supported opposition group.
On 21 June 1988, he declared the establishment of the military wing of the NFSL, called the Libyan National Army under his leadership. When U.S. financial aid to Zaire was not forthcoming, Zaire expelled the remainder to Kenya. Kenya only provided temporary residence, and the CIA negotiated a settlement around 1990, enabling Haftar and 300 of his soldiers to move to the United States under the U.S. refugee programme. In fact, the end of the Cold War diminished Libya's geo-strategic relevance and the CIA funding program to Haftar's brigade was suspended.
In March 1996, Haftar took part in a failed uprising against Gaddafi in the mountains of eastern Libya, before returning to the U.S.
Haftar moved to suburban area outside Washington, D.C., living in Falls Church, Virginia until 2007. He then moved to a five-bedroom house in Vienna, Virginia. He voted in Virginian elections in 2008 and 2009. From there, and mostly through his close contacts within the DIA / CIA, he consistently supported several attempts to topple and assassinate Gaddafi. He spelled his name "Hifter" in legal documents in the United States.
Early role in the First Libyan Civil War
In 2011, he returned to Libya at the onset of the Libyan Crisis, to support the anti-Gaddafi forces in the First Libyan Civil War. In March, a military spokesperson announced that Haftar had been appointed commander of the military, but the National Transitional Council denied this. By April, Abdul Fatah Younis held the role of commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, Omar El-Hariri was serving as Younis's Chief of Staff, and Haftar had assumed the third most senior position as the commander of ground forces with the rank of lieutenant-general. Younis was assassinated later that summer.
On 17 November 2011, Haftar was chosen as the overall commander of the new Libyan Army due to his military experience and loyalty to the revolution that overthrew Gaddafi.
Launch of Operation Dignity
In February 2014, Haftar appeared in a televised announcement to reveal that the General National Congress (GNC), the elected parliament which had recently unilaterally extended its mandate, had been dissolved. Haftar called for a caretaker government to oversee new elections, and urged Libyans to revolt against the GNC, the mandate of which was still in force at the time. Ultimately, his appeal did not lead to a general uprising due to the substantial lack of resources and local support for his initiative. His announcement was soon dismissed with great skepticism by the then acting Prime Minister Ali Zeidan. Haftar's actions were condemned as a "coup attempt" and "ridiculous".
Haftar's strategy was to embark on a series of "town hall" meetings around Libya and, with the support of fellow ex-officers from the military, to secretly build an army. Three months later on 16 May in Operation Dignity, Haftar began a combined air and ground assault against the pro-Islamic militias of Benghazi, as well as a sustained heavy weapons attack against the Libyan parliament. At the time of the Benghazi assault, Haftar, who had already been the target of assassination attempts, reportedly explained to a friend that he was fully aware of the personal safety risks involved in his actions. On 20 May 2014, four days after the Benghazi assault, the GNC announced that it had finally scheduled the long postponed national elections that were to replace the then-interim legislature (the Tripoli-based GNC) with the Tobruk-based House of Representatives. These elections were scheduled for 25 June 2014.
Later in May, after having been ousted from office by the GNC, Ali Zeidan endorsed Operation Dignity, as did 40 members of parliament, the heads of the navy and the air-force, and much of the army. On 4 June 2014, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle at Haftar's residence at Ghut al-Sultan near Abayar, east of Benghazi, killing four people and injuring at least three others. Haftar was not injured in the attack.
In eastern Libya, Haftar's air and ground forces remained in place and seemed to be gaining general support. Over the course of May and June, numerous pro–Operation Dignity marches were held throughout Libya, and in the 25 June parliamentary elections the secularists gained a clear mandate over and against the Islamist agenda. Meanwhile, despite its initial denouncement of Operation Dignity in May, Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thani's administration subsequently refrained from further official endorsement or denouncement of Haftar's Operation Dignity. However, the newly elected parliament branded Haftar's enemies "terrorists".
On 24 November 2014 and the following day, warplanes affiliated with Operation Dignity forces attacked Mitiga International Airport in Tripoli, temporarily shutting down the airport, but also damaging nearby houses. In response to the attack on Mitiga, a court in Tripoli issued an arrest warrant for Khalifa Haftar.
Leading role in the Second Libyan Civil War Haftar was officially made commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA) by the internationally recognized House of Representatives on 2 March 2015. The Libyan armed forces split up later in the year into the LNA under Haftar's control, which are often supported by Russia and Wagner, and the Libyan Army controlled by the Government of National Accord (GNA).