We Are Not Libya’s Twin—Perhaps Tripoli’s

By Abdallah Ali Ibrahim

Summary

One wonders why those seeking parallels to Sudan’s turmoil have never thought of Haiti. It is, perhaps alongside Iraq, one of the few countries whose elite once demanded the dissolution of its national army, weary of its coups, corruption, and bullying of the state. Haiti did so in 1994, only to end up not merely as a country ruled by gangs, but as a failed state that the international community has grown exhausted trying to rescue from itself. The frustration reached such a point that one observer remarked: “We haven’t yet tried not helping Haiti. Let’s give that a decade—every other remedy has failed.”

When many Sudanese, and those abroad pondering Sudan’s crisis, look for analogies to their country’s war, they tend to settle on Libya. The image of a divided Libya—split between east and west—seems tempting for Sudanese who anticipate a similar fate of partition. Yet, such an outcome in Sudan remains unsupported by evidence and, at best, only a remote possibility.

In reality, Sudan’s condition is more perilous than Libya’s by several degrees. Libya’s two governments in Tripoli and Benghazi at least draw from historical roots that predate their brief unification under Italian rule in 1934. What faces Sudan, however, is not a division into two functioning states, but rather the collapse of the state itself—a disintegration that could scatter authority into bottomless chaos.

This collapse is not a sudden byproduct of war; it has been deliberately courted by influential circles within Sudan’s modernist elite. Some of these actors have explicitly called for the dissolution of the national army, the very core of the state, believing it to be the root of Sudan’s crises.

If Sudan indeed experiences state collapse, it may have more in common not with Libya, but with Haiti—a country that, after dismantling its army, fell under gang control. As in Haiti, Sudan risks becoming a place that even the international community eventually grows tired of trying to fix.

Despite the futility, global actors continue to experiment with Haiti. In one recent campaign, a private military company was contracted to use drones to assassinate gang leaders—an effort to “buy time” for the government to regroup. Analysts called it “ambitious,” but the operation quickly turned farcical. The contractors repeatedly missed their targets, prompting one gang leader to release a mocking video saying, “The government missed me.” The drones soon became a scandal after killing eight children and injuring others, sparking outrage among human rights organizations.

Haiti’s decline has reached such depths that even the recapture of a single police communications center from gangs is now heralded as a rare national victory. The operation, carried out by local police and a Kenyan-led international mission, targeted the notorious “Vivre Ensemble” gang, which had paralyzed Haiti by closing its main airport for months, storming prisons, and freeing 4,000 inmates. The U.S. has since designated the group a terrorist organization. In a defiant video, one militia member threatened to burn the entire government if it refused to negotiate, as others around him looted servers and equipment from the facility.

Libya Revisited

If Sudan’s army is dismantled, the country would resemble Tripoli, which functionally has no army and is dominated by militias. Former ruler Muammar Gaddafi never built a true military force. Distrusting his officers, he created elaborate mechanisms to paralyze command—such as the so-called “People’s Army,” whose soldiers could refuse orders—and appointed commanders along tribal lines. After his defeat in Chad, Gaddafi effectively abandoned the army altogether, abolishing the Ministry of Defense and relying instead on elite security networks loyal to him personally. These units were staffed by his relatives and men from his own tribe, the Qadhadhfa, along with allied clans like the Warfallah and Magarha.

When the 2011 revolution erupted, Libya had no army to speak of. The vacuum was filled by revolutionary brigades that distrusted any central military authority. The absence of coordination among these groups turned the country into a patchwork of rival factions, each competing for control of state facilities, land, and revenue. When united during Operation Dignity against General Khalifa Haftar’s forces, these militias even looted the Central Bank to finance themselves.

The formation of Abdulhamid Dbeibeh’s UN-recognized government in March 2021 did little to change Tripoli’s security architecture. Power remained concentrated in the hands of a few major armed groups fighting over influence, money, and access to state institutions. Currently, three main militias dominate the capital:

The Radaa (Deterrence) Force, led by Abdulraouf Kara, controls eastern Tripoli and the airport.

The Stability Support Apparatus, headed by Abdulghani Al-Kikli (Ghneiwa), once Tripoli’s most powerful faction.

And the 444th Brigade, nominally under the Ministry of Defense.

Since May, Tripoli has been rocked by clashes between these factions, despite Turkish mediation attempts that collapsed within a week. On May 12, a meeting meant to ease tensions devolved into a firefight. Ghneiwa was killed in the skirmish, leading rival militias—chiefly the 444th Brigade—to storm his group’s headquarters and declare the dissolution of the Stability Support Apparatus.

Emboldened, Dbeibeh’s forces then turned their guns on the Radaa group and its allies. Reinforcements from Misrata entered the fray on September 7, only for Turkey to intervene once again, brokering an agreement under which Radaa handed over Tripoli International Airport to the government. The deal was seen as a partial victory for Dbeibeh, granting his government a veneer of control, but leaving the militias intact. The agreement did not address disarmament, and Radaa still controls the surrounding districts despite its withdrawal from the airport.

On September 21, government-aligned forces again clashed with Radaa’s Sixth Battalion, using heavy weapons and effectively nullifying the fragile peace accord signed just a week earlier.

Conclusion

Drawing parallels between Sudan and other troubled states is not a matter of casual analogy, but of understanding structural similarity. Despite frequent comparisons to Libya’s “two-state” model, Sudan’s trajectory more closely mirrors that of Haiti and Tripoli—two cases where the army’s destruction, whether in revolutionary zeal or authoritarian design, led to enduring chaos.

A worrying trend among certain Sudanese political groups is their conviction that the only solution to the “senseless war” is to dissolve the 1956 state itself and disband its army.

This impulse has deep roots. Whenever crises deepened and solutions ran dry, these factions turned instinctively to “dissolution” as policy—dismantling the Omdurman Islamic University after the 1969 coup, and the National Security Service after the 1985 revolution. Yet neither institution truly vanished; both reemerged swiftly, reclaiming their roles in Sudan’s political life almost overnight.