CAIRO — A leading rights group on Thursday urged Libya’s U.N.-backed government to investigate the fate of hundreds of people missing from a key town near the capital, Tripoli. Dozens of mass graves were found there after the withdrawal of a much-feared militia last summer.
In a statement, Human Rights Watch quoted Libyan officials as saying that at least 338 residents of the town of Tarhuna were reported missing. The majority of them disappeared during a 14-month-long military campaign led by forces loyal to a rival government, based in eastern Libya, to capture the capital, according to the report.
Since 2015, Libya has been divided between two governments, the U.N.-supported one based in Tripoli and the one in the east, each backed by a vast array of militias.
In April 2019, east-based commander Khalifa Hifter and his forces marched on Tripoli in an attempt to take the city and tried to co-opt some rival militias. At the time, the town of Tarhuna was under the control of the notorious al-Kaniyat militia, which had initially sworn allegiance to the Tripoli government.
But the militia changed sides in 2019, siding with Hifter and granting his troops access to Tarhuna, a strategic town 41 miles southeast of the Libyan capital. Since then, the Tripoli government has discovered 27 mass gravess.
In November, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned al-Kaniyat and its leader Mohamed al-Kani after finding it responsible for killing civilians whose bodies were discovered in numerous mass graves in Tarhuna, as well as torture, forced disappearances and displacement of civilians.
Hanan Salah, Human Rights Watch’s senior Libya researcher, said that not just al-Kani’s militia but also senior commanders among Hifter’s forces “could be criminally liable for abuses committed by al-Kaniyat militia in Tarhouna for which they had command responsibility.”