“We are helpless and not being able to do anything against this deliberate destruction to the oil installations. NOC urges all faithful and honorable people of this homeland to hurry to rescue what is left from our resources before it is too late.”
The above statement from Libya’s National Oil Corp references the seizure of state oil assets by Islamic State extremists, whose influence in the country is growing exponentially as the world's attention is focused on Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Over the past year amid the power vacuum the West created by engineering the demise of Moammar Qaddafi but failed to address the poblem of what, in a country of warring tribes and sects, would replace him.
The latest IS attacks occurred in Es Sider, a large oil port closed for at least a year due to the conflict between the three groups that claim to be the legitimate government of Libya.
Reports from the most reliable sources available suggest seven guards were killed on Monday in suicide bombings while two more lost their lives on Tuesday as ISIS attacked checkpoints some 20 miles from the port. “Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, Libya’s biggest oil ports, have been closed since December 2014,” Reuters reports. “They are located between the city of Sirte, which is controlled by Islamic State, and the eastern city of Benghazi.”
ISIS also destroyed storage tanks tanks holding hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil in Es Sider and Ras Lanuf,” Ali al-Hassi, a spokesman for the the Petroleum Facilities Guard said.
Islamic State is advancing east from Sirte in order to gain control of the country’s oil infrastructure, much as the group has done in Syria and Iraq. As Middle East Eye wrote last summer, “the desert region to the south of the oil ports has been strategically cleared in a series of attacks by IS militants on security personnel and oil fields, where employees have been killed and kidnapped, and vehicles and equipment seized.”
“I expect they will try and take Sidra and Ras Lanuf and the oil fields on the west side of the oil crescent,” one oil worker said. “There are few people left to protect the oil fields apart from local security from isolated towns.”
Efforts to protect Libya’s oil are complicated immeasurably by the fractious (and that’s putting it politely) political environment.
In short: since the removal of strongman Gadaffi and his natural successors by a US, french and UK (the FUKUS axis) bombing campaign the country that was africas most prosperous and socially advanced has become a lawless failed state, a modern day Wild West. Stable government is now a distant memory, warlords and gangsters rule without constrain in their territories.
RELATED POSTS:
Evidence Points To Another Snowden At The NSA
Last week, following the news that The Clinton Foundation, the computer networks of Hillary Clinton's election campaign and the US Democratic Party and also the servers operated by 'philanthropic' organisation Open Society Foundation - really a front for meddling by the billionaire left wing activist George Soros in international politics, had been hacked, we learned of a previously unknown hacker collective, "The Shadow Brokers". These hackers claimed they had hacked hacking tools from the NSA's own special-ops entity, the "Equation Group", and released these into the public domain.
US Mission Creep In Syria nudges World Towards War
Obama Launching Massive Military Intervention In Libya And Iraq
Almost five years after the United States and its NATO allies launched a campaign in Libya to overthrow Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the United States is on the verge of massively escalating its military operations in the war-torn country.
Why the bombing of Libya triggered the illegal immigrant invasion of Europe
Libya intervention was a Us foreign policy disater
Hillary Clinton's hopes went down the khazi in Benghazi
Obama al Qaeda allies
In Byzantium
Latest Posts
Elsewhere: [Boggart Blog]...[Little Nicky Machiavelli]... [ Ian's Authorsden Pages ]... [Scribd]...[Wikinut] ... [ Boggart Abroad] ... [ Grenteeth Bites ] ... Ian Thorpe at Flickr ] ... [ Tumblr ] ... [Ian at Minds ] ... [ Authorsden Blog ]
No comments:
Post a Comment