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I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, you guys, introducing Alyssa Sims.
She wrote this study for the New America Foundation with Peter Bergen.
It's called airstrikes and civilian casualties in Libya since the 2011 NATO intervention.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate you joining us here.
Very important study.
I guess the big headline was 550 US drone strikes in Libya.
And those are just 550 among many others.
Yes.
So the Intercept actually did an additional study and they found 550.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I just assumed that was based off of yours.
Apologies.
No, no worries.
They did cover our study as well.
But for ours, we got about 525, but that could be higher based on information that we don't have.
We've been in contact with AFRICOM, which is the US Africa Command.
They are in charge of the military activity in Northern Africa.
And, you know, they told us, you know, we've investigated two cases of civilian deaths and we don't think we're responsible.
And they haven't claimed any casualties, but they didn't really have any issues with the 525 number.
So I think that that might be correct.
All right.
So what numbers do you have for casualties?
What range?
And I guess just for now, in terms of American airstrikes there.
In terms of American airstrikes, we have in our database at the very, at the minimum, 11, but possibly as many as 21.
We put it in ranges based on the estimates given in different reports and some of them have them higher or lower.
But we also have a category of contested strikes.
So sometimes someone reporting a strike on the ground might say, you know, someone might say the government of national accord, which is the ruling government in Libya, they might say they conducted the strike and another person might say the US did.
So it could be potentially higher than that.
All right.
And now there are all different nations bombing Libya.
Can you give us a breakdown there?
Absolutely.
So in 2011, NATO actually intervened in Libya because this was actually as the Arab Spring was occurring across the Middle East and North Africa.
And, you know, during this time, Gaddafi, he had threatened to kill civilians.
He had killed thousands of them already.
And it was getting, the situation there was becoming pretty precarious.
So at the UN, they signed a resolution saying that, you know, giving NATO permission to go into Libya and to protect civilians there.
And after, so that ended in October of 2011.
But what happened over the course of the next couple of years is that once Gaddafi was out of power, there were a number of militias on the ground who had fought during this revolution and who had received weapons and things from foreign powers, and they weren't ready to hand over power to this new central government.
So there was a lot of infighting.
And, you know, then, you know, once the infighting happens, you have terrorist organizations like ISIS, who already had, you know, small presence there, they start to take root.
And suddenly some of these people who, some of these countries who were, you know, supporting the NATO campaign in 2011, they came back and started, you know, either supporting factions on the ground, like the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, but also targeting terrorists like France and the US.
So you have a number of people who are back and they're conducting strikes, except it's not necessarily under the same authorization.
And it's hard to tell now who has a, I guess, who has permission to be there and who doesn't, which has created a really kind of, I don't want to say lawless because to my knowledge and my research, no one's breaking international humanitarian law, but it's a situation where people, where countries have the freedom to go in and to conduct strikes as they wish, which is not a great precedent to set for future conflicts.
All right.
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Well, and you mentioned humanitarian law, but what other international laws might it be in violation of these policies?
Well, it depends on how you look at the situation.
So regardless of whether they have authorization to be conducting strikes in Libya, there is a responsibility to prevent civilian harm, to prevent civilian deaths.
And if it were found that certain countries or certain groups in Libya are striking in urban areas without taking the necessary precautions to prevent that, then prevent civilian deaths, then that would be in violation of international humanitarian law.
Well, and there are at least two major and maybe three separate national governments, and none of them really control the country.
And so can politicians in Tripoli invite America to go ahead and attack Benghazi, and then can the Haftar regime in Benghazi give authorization for strikes in the West because everybody's claiming to be the national government in a still unresolved conflict there?
Right.
So Haftar doesn't actually have any power to give authorization to conduct strikes.
So he's actually a part of a rival government, the LNA.
And under the agreement that made the GNA the government of national accord, no country is supposed to be supporting Haftar.
However, there's no real accountability.
There's no way to penalize, say, France for supporting Haftar on the ground, not necessarily with military action, but definitely with advising, which bolsters his ability to continue to conduct attacks.
And the LNA is actually responsible for the most civilian casualties in our database, and with 96 to 175 and over 1,000 strikes.
So they're the ones that really need to be penalized, but there's no real way to do that right now because the LNA is also going after militants, and they've been a huge part of the counterterrorism campaign in Libya.
So you have a bunch of different problems that are overlapping and preventing the GNA from kind of taking control of Libya.
Well, you know, I talked with another journalist recently who really covered about how the so called terrorist threat in Derna was really overblown.
It was just being used as an excuse by Haftar to attack it, but sure sounds like good PR if he needs to keep the Western support there, which he clearly has, as you say, at least the French, which means America's in league with the French on that, right, in backing him in the East?
I don't have any evidence to support the US's.
But, you know, anything that's giving the LNA more credibility is making it harder for the GNA to consolidate power there.
And part of the problem is that the GNA doesn't have, they're supported by local militias, they don't have a fighting force, and they're not able to combat terrorism in the country, which is a real problem.
It's like, as you mentioned, it has become smaller in Derna, as you know, Derna is where ISIS kind of started to expand, and then they're pushed out of there and they moved into Sirte.
And they're still, you know, around in pockets of the country, even with the big campaign that the US did in 2016.
Yeah, I was just going to ask you to talk about that, if you could, please.
Sure.
So as ISIS started to grow in Libya and project, you know, their force around the world, you know, they conducted a big attack in Tunisia, and they were also conducting attacks in France in 2014 and 2015.
And that was during the time they were still, you know, a rising power.
So the US in 2016, in August 2016, they conducted Operation Odyssey Lightning, which they acknowledged that they conducted 495 strikes in Sirte.
And that's actually probably where the most civilian deaths, if any, excuse me, occurred from the US, and we still don't really know how many people might have died during that period, because it was so hard for, it's so hard for journalists to report from Libya and to go into those areas when those strikes are occurring.
But we rely a lot on social media and what people are posting.
And you can see, you know, pictures of dead children in areas, in some cases in areas where the US said they conducted a strike that day.
And after that, that, excuse me, that operation ended in December 2016.
And it opened up very briefly in the last month of the Obama administration.
And since then, ISIS has still continued to wreak havoc in the country.
And that's why the US is still conducting strikes there.
And we've struck al Qaeda in Libya as well.
So as long as that problem persists, I, you know, the US will continue to conduct strikes there.
But, you know, we have to kind of think in a more nuanced way about about how we authorize these operations and, and, you know, who is allowed to conduct strikes at any time, because this has created, obviously, a bit of a crisis of civilian deaths with with everyone conducting strikes at once on on various different targets.
Well, so what about when you say al Qaeda, they're talking about so called AQIM, al Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb, or is that the Libyan Islamic fighting group?
Are they still around?
They're still around in the region.
I'm not sure the extent of their operations and in Libya, the strikes on al Qaeda have been mostly one offs here and there.
They haven't there.
They haven't conducted an operation in the same way that they've they've targeted ISIS in the country.
But I know that there was a strike recent recently that killed an al Qaeda commander.
And there was the Muqtar bil Muqtar strike.
I believe that was in 2015.
But I could be wrong.
But they've they've been one offs with which kind of demonstrates that, that al Qaeda is moving around in Libya.
And if the conditions remain as they are, it could create an opportunity for them to grow their operations there.
All right, well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Alyssa.
Great work here.
Sure.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Okay, guys, that's Alyssa Sims.
She wrote this very important study for the New America Foundation with Peter Bergen.
It's called airstrikes and civilian casualties in Libya since the 2011 NATO intervention.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
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