Death from the skies of Libya, part I: Arab Winter
Analysis of the United Arab Emirates’ involvement in the Libyan Civil War.
Armed resistance troops in Libya.
Image Credit: BRQ Network
On the evening of January 4, around 50 young cadets were conducting routine drills at a military academy in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. They had just begun marching when a flash of light ripped through their ranks, leaving dozens incinerated on the ground while their compatriots fled in panic. The cadets had done nothing to provoke such an attack, yet 26 of them now lay dead or dying on the smouldering parade ground.
A BBC News investigation concluded that this scene of carnage had been riding on the tip of a Blue Arrow 7 missile, fired from an unmanned, Chinese-made drone, flown from an airbase in eastern Libya by forces of the United Arab Emirates.
This attack occurred in the context of the wider maelstrom of violence that has gripped Libya since the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 - a civil war in which the UAE has thrown its weight behind the forces of warlord Khalifa Haftar. And yet, it still raises questions. Why has the UAE involved itself in the violence in Libya, and why it is using Chinese-made drones to do so?
The incident of January 4, and others like it, can arguably be seen as the confluence of three separate strands: the UAE’s regional campaign against political Islam, Chinese security cooperation along its Belt and Road, and the preponderance of drones in the Libyan civil war.
The Threat
The Emirates’ involvement in the Libyan civil war may be construed as an expression of its endeavour to roll back the influence of political Islam abroad. However, its antagonism to Islamism beyond its borders can be seen as a way of dealing with the domestic threat that Islamism poses within the UAE itself.
“Political Islam” can very broadly be defined as the organisation of society along Islamic lines. In the more precise formulation by Colby University Professor of Government Guilain Denoeux, it “provides political responses to today’s societal challenges by imagining a future, the foundations for which rest on … concepts borrowed from the Islamic tradition.” The potential threat that Islamism poses to established centres of power – such as the governing elite of the UAE – is that its imagined “future” might be different from their own.
Perhaps the most influential Islamist group in modern times is the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt, in 1928, the Brotherhood voiced a “rejection of Western values and imperial domination of Egypt … [aiming] to replace foreign influence with Islamic values, law and policies.” It was therefore an activist organisation, and in its pursuance of the implementation of sharia law it would come to clash with the socialist, Arab nationalist vision of the then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser. After the attempted assassination of Nasser by a Brotherhood member in 1954, the organisation was driven underground, and throughout the 1950s and 60s many of its members fled Egypt for other parts of the Arab world.
Inevitably, they were drawn to the Gulf. When a cluster of British-controlled sheikhdoms combined to form the United Arab Emirates in 1971, the young nation suffered a dearth of educated nationals, which “necessitated the import of experts to fill a variety of posts, particularly in the education and judicial sectors.” Islamists secured a foothold in Emirati society by filling that void, leading to the establishment of a local Brotherhood affiliate – Islah – in 1974.
With branches in the emirates of Dubai, Fujairah and Ras al-Khaimah, Islah quickly flourished. Apart from running “social and cultural activities, [such as] sporting and charity events,” Islah members secured important positions in government, including that of minister of justice in 1977 and minister of education in 1979. The organisation’s influence was such that “by the early 1990s, the UAE’s judicial and education sector was effectively a state within a state.” Islah had become “the UAE’s most influential and vocal non-state actor,” effectively opening up the potential for it to become a domestic political opposition.
This potential makes Islah seem threatening to the UAE’s dynastic governing elite, especially given the organisation’s encroachment into political affairs. Whereas initially it had concerned itself with social matters such as the development of Islamic education and the restriction of the sale of alcohol, the organisation “developed a political reform agenda in parallel to its social agenda … [earning] it the ire of UAE authorities.” It pressed for more representative government and more equal distribution of wealth, in a country with a highly centralised political structure and severe economic inequality between the emirates.
While Abu Dhabi and Dubai have taken advantage of oil and commerce to raise glass towers in the desert, “in the [five] northern emirates what one sees is a developing-world landscape.” This economic disparity may have contributed to the attractiveness of Islah’s reformist message in the northern emirates. As noted in a U.S. embassy cable, “the poor economic conditions in the Northern Emirates … compared to the wealth of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, may be a factor in breeding resentment … [making] some who feel disadvantaged more susceptible to the messages of extremists.” Though Islah can hardly be called “extremist”, this concern is not groundless; after all, two of the nineteen hijackers on September 11, 2001, were from the northern emirates.
The potential consequences of such economically-motivated resentment were shown clearly in the Arab Spring movements of 2011. In December 2010, a young fruit vendor in Tunisia – Mohammed Bouazizi – set himself on fire to protest the dire economic conditions of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship. By January 14, 2011, the unrest sparked by Bouazizi had forced Ben Ali to flee the country. Before long, the protests spread to Egypt, ending the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11. Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled Libya since 1969, faced his own grisly end on October 20. Even more political earthquakes shook the status quo in Libya, Yemen, Syria and beyond, raising the spectre of similar reverberations on the Arabian peninsula itself.
Although the UAE was in fact largely insulated from the unrest due to its distributed oil wealth and effective security apparatus, it was still not immune. In particular, the Arab Spring threatened to spread to the federation’s northern emirates, which had seen “increased grumbling” due to “recent fuel shortages, along with unreliable utilities services.” In the words of Middle East expert Ghanem Nuseibeh, “the wealth disparity between the northern emirates and Dubai and Abu Dhabi remains the most challenging issue for the stability of the country as a whole.”
Dissent also came from Emirati intellectuals. In March 2011, a petition signed by more than a hundred journalists, academics and activists – Islah members among them – called upon the emir of Abu Dhabi to reform the country’s parliament, pressing for an opening of its electoral system and the granting of powers beyond a merely advisory role.
Taken together, the complete picture is of an Emirati elite fearing the emergence of an organised political opposition capable of raising the banner of Islam – in a country in which around eighty per cent of the population are Muslim – to capitalise on the northern emirates’ social and economic disaffection to form an independent centre of power and legitimacy. Islah appeared to fit the bill rather well, especially after the revolutions of 2011.
The Solution
The Emirati leadership adopted a carrot-and-stick approach to discontent within the UAE. In March 2011, the same month as the petition, the government pledged $1.6 billion of investment in electricity and water networks in the northern emirates. However, in response to the petition itself, Abu Dhabi launched a crackdown on domestic dissidence, arresting numerous Islah members in the process. This concerted action highlighted the state’s wariness of facing unrest on the domestic front.
It may be this wariness that motivates the UAE to take action against political Islam beyond its borders. When post-Mubarak Egypt elected Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi as president in June 2012, “the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was seen as a threat, since [Abu Dhabi crown prince] Mohammed bin Zayed feared its influence on its Emirati branch, al-Islah, which he had repeatedly called the most dangerous opposition force in the UAE.” The Emirati government has long claimed direct financial and organisational ties between Islah and other organisations of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood movement – a claim denied by Islah itself.
The corollary to this is evident: if the UAE sees such threat emanating from beyond its borders, what’s to stop it from intervening at the source? After all, the UAE’s appetite for martial action had already been apparent in March 2011 when it deployed about 800 troops to help the Saudis suppress unrest in the neighbouring monarchy of Bahrain. However, in Egypt, its methods were more subtle – helping to the foment the protests that precipitated an eventual military takeover in July 2013. The new government of General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi was then promised lavish financial aid by the UAE, playing its own part by brutally suppressing the Egyptian Brotherhood. Hence, the UAE played a significant role in the crushing of revolution post-2011, a process known as the “Arab Winter”.
It is this same determination to quash political Islam abroad that has mired the UAE in Libya. The Emiratis’ initial involvement in 2011 occurred under the opportunistic wish to “replace Gaddafi, an erratic actor, with a more sympathetic government, leading to Emirati participation in the NATO assault against Gaddafi’s forces. However, the post-Gaddafi period was one of interminable chaos, with rival groups scrambling for power amid the evident lack of stable, centralised government.
In this mayhem, a dizzying array of militia groups have come to the fore, some secular, some Islamist, some outright jihadist. However, there is one fighting force that has vowed to restore stability to the country and rid it of Islamists and jihadists in the process. General Khalifa Haftar’s “Libyan National Army” (LNA) emerged as a significant player in mid-2014, when it launched a successful military campaign to purge the Islamist Ansar al-Sharia group from the city of Benghazi. The LNA also managed to wrest the city of Derna from Islamist groups in a yearlong battle that ended in February 2019. It was in Derna, reportedly, that the LNA first enjoyed the support of Chinese-made Emirati combat drones.
The UAE’s support for Haftar can be seen in this anti-Islamist context. He has been able to “maximize support from foreign backers [particularly Egypt and the UAE] by selling them an image of an authoritarian warlord who can bring stability to Libya and wipe out any kind of political Islam that … could provide inspiration for a regional uprising that might threaten their rule.” No matter the reality, it is the image that matters.
And so the UAE became Haftar’s “most important backer”, providing the ammunition, jet fuel and armed drones that would sustain his capacity to wage war. But the question still remains: why have the UAE sourced these drones from China, rather than its traditional military ally, the United States? As we shall see in Part II, the answers may lie in China’s increasing military engagement along the new silk roads.