Fresh fighting breaks out in Tripoli airport despite truce

TRIPOLI: Fighting between powerful militias battling for control of Tripoli’s airport broke out again on Friday, just hours after they had agreed a truce, witnesses said.
The clashes came as the government sought United Nations help to prevent the country from becoming a “failed state.”
Gunfire and blasts were heard in Tripoli’s Abu Slim neighborhood, some 15 kilometers (nine miles) south of the airport, an AFP correspondent said. Residents said the battles pitched rival militias against each other.
The airport has been closed since Sunday, when Islamist gunmen from the city of Misrata launched an attack on the facility, which has for the past three years been held by liberal, anti-Islamist fighters from Zintan, southwest of the capital.
Foreign Minister Mohamed Abdelaziz has asked the UN Security Council to dispatch experts to train Libya’s defense and police forces to ensure they can protect oilfields, airports and other vital sites.
The call came in the wake of the airport attacks and amid a surge of violence across the country, with clashes between rival militias sparking fears of all-out civil war.
Tripoli’s mayor and leaders of battling militias said overnight that a truce had been agreed and that control of the international airport would be handed over to neutral forces.
Mokhtar Lakhdar, a commander for the Zintan forces, told AFP that a truce had been agreed under the authority of the city’s governing council. Since Sunday, dozens of rockets have been fired at the airport, badly damaging aircraft and the main terminal building.
Ex-rebel fighters from Zintan and Misrata, east of Tripoli, both played a key role in the NATO-backed uprising that toppled dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. But they have become fierce rivals in the deadly power struggle between armed groups that followed and which is now wracking the North African country.
Ahmed Hadeia, a spokesman for the rival Misrata fighters, said the cease-fire was “only around the airport” and did not include other sites controlled by the Zintan forces.
Misrata leaders said in a statement read out Thursday on television that the fighting at the airport was a “battle of revolutionaries... against followers of the old regime” of Qaddafi.