IS building stronghold in Libyan city

With Syria suddenly under siege from a Western coalition, Libya is fast becoming a new crucible of terror on Europe’s doorstep.

Thousands of battle-hardened jihadists armed to the hilt imposing strict Islamic law on the cowed local population. Public beheadings and amputations for those who transgress Sharia law.

Gruesome mass decapitations of Christians. Wave after wave of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations targeting all opponents of the Islamist regime.

The execution for any Westerner who dares to venture into the devastated territory.

This describes what passes for normality in Raqqa, the self-declared capital of the Islamic State in northern Syria, now being bombed by the RAF as well as Russian and French warplanes.

However, it is also a description of the new and terrifying reality that has taken hold in the Libyan port city of Sirte, which sits roughly halfway between the capital Tripoli in the west and the former anti-Gaddafi rebel stronghold of Benghazi to the east.

With Syria suddenly under siege from a Western coalition that has pledged to wipe IS out both there and in Iraq, Libya is fast becoming a new crucible of terror on Europe’s doorstep.

This week, there has been talk of thousands of jihadis fleeing towards the chaotic North African nation in the hope of establishing another Islamist redoubt, from where murderous attacks can be launched against Europe.

Libya is now as lawless as even the war-torn African state of Somalia, with IS fighters flooding into the power vacuum left, ironically enough, by David Cameron’s last ill-thought-out bombing campaign against an Arab country.

Chillingly, the terror group’s rapid expansion in Libya poses an imminent and unprecedented threat to the security of southern Europe in a way that Islamist rule in eastern Syria and northern Iraq arguably does not.

After all, Sirte sits right on the Mediterranean and is just 400 miles south-east of Sicily - giving IS unimpeded access to Europe by sea.

The terror group’s stranglehold on this blighted city of 80 000 people has allowed it to plan an imminent expansion further along the Libyan coast in a bid to secure many of the country’s vast oil fields.

As we know from Syria, oil sales are a highly lucrative means to produce an income of millions of pounds, which can be used to pay fighters.

Having seized many of the arms depots that were once secured by the massive Libyan army, the jihadis have already attacked several oil installations in Libya.

And the fear is that they have now built up the capacity to seize and manage oil fields or refineries, after enticing a large number of defectors from other Libyan militia groups - including former government officials - and an influx of foreign fighters unable to make the journey to Syria and Iraq.

Despite Sirte having been under the iron grip of Islamic State since February, the dramatic events taking place there and in the surrounding region have been largely ignored by a Western media that foolishly celebrated the downfall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

It is also, of course, a huge embarrassment for the political leaders and military strategists who orchestrated it. Many of those in power in Western capitals - including London - would be only too happy for us to forget how, back in 2012, the then Foreign Secretary William Hague hailed Libya as ‘a tremendous success story’ following elections for a new government, while expressing his belief that the new administration would ‘bring security’ to Libya.

The darker truth is that the rash push to topple Gaddafi with the help of Nato-led air strikes - and in league with so-called moderate Islamist rebels - has left this fractured, tribal country under tyrannical jihadist rule in the absence of a functioning central government.

Incredibly, Libya is now juggling two opposing administrations that are entangled in a violent, nationwide power struggle.

On one side, there is a self-declared government in Tripoli dominated by Islamists; but they oppose IS’s brutality and are eager to forge ties with an international community which has, until now, refused to recognise its legitimacy.

On the other is the official, Western-backed government, which has retreated to the small town of Tobruk near the Egyptian border - ready to make a swift escape to Cairo if the Islamists take over. All of which offers an important lesson for those now calling for the ousting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This week, once again we have heard from David Cameron how it is with the help of ‘moderate’ fighters in Syria that the coalition will win its latest campaign.

With that in mind, it is breathtaking that so little attention is being paid to the situation in the last Arab country where we agitated for a regime change.

What should really worry us is that, for the bloodthirsty foot soldiers of the ever-expanding Muslim caliphate, control of the city of Sirte is arguably more important strategically than their isolated and besieged Syrian stronghold, Raqqa.

The jhadists’ potential to wreak havoc from Sirte - ironically enough, the birthplace of Gaddafi - was highlighted just days ago, when embattled Libyan government officials, and generals from what is left of the Libyan army, announced that fanatical suicide pilots are being trained by Islamic State on imported flight simulators in Sirte.

The group has been able to protect their simulators at hidden bases, they explained, and attempts to destroy the jihadist facilities thus far have come to nothing.

They now have control of a military airport, and the fear is that they are determined to launch spectacular terrorist attacks against major European cities using empty commercial airliners.

It sounds fanciful and far-fetched, to the point of being mere bluster. But you could say the same about the idea of knocking down New York’s Twin Towers using airliners.

Indeed, much of what Islamic State has threatened during the past 18 months has sounded outlandishly horrific, yet their subsequent actions - such as in Paris - have demonstrated that we ignore their boasts at our peril.

The threat of kamikaze attacks from the sky comes in addition to previous threats by Islamist groups in Libya to instigate, if they are attacked, an invasion of Europe via Italy, by sending 500,000 migrants simultaneously out to sea in hundreds of boats. No doubt they would seek to seed those boats with scores of jihadis tasked with launching mass-casualty attacks in cities. If all that were not bad enough, in keeping with its apocalyptic vision of global dominance, Sirte is the hub from which IS hopes to topple ostensibly secular neighbouring Arab regimes, to impose its barbaric rule across the whole of North Africa.

This is an especially nightmarish scenario for Egypt and Tunisia, both of which are battling relentless jihadist uprisings led by fighters who in many instances have been trained and armed in Sirte.

Tunisia, which shares a desert border with Libya, has already become increasingly entwined in its lawlessness, with the largely porous borders allowing the establishment of training camps for various jihadist groups flush with weapons left over from Gaddafi’s regime, and who are determined to topple the Tunisian government.

The terrorist who gunned down scores of mostly British tourists at a Tunisian beach resort this year was trained at an Islamic-State-affiliated camp in Libya, as was the gunman who killed 22 mostly European tourists at the capital’s renowned Bardo museum.

Egypt has already bombed Islamic State targets in Libya, in response to the massacre last year of 22 Egyptian Christians on a beach - an atrocity which was shown in a grisly online IS video.

The government in Cairo - already struggling to contain the IS affiliate group in Sinai which brought down a Russia airliner recently - now fears an Islamist spill-over from its border with Libya.

The Libyan chaos, then, perfectly illustrates the way our leaders have shown themselves hopelessly unprepared to tackle the global threat posed by this ruthless terror organisation. We are always reacting to, rather than pre-empting, its next cold and calculated geopolitical move, aimed at causing still greater death and destruction.

In stark contrast, Islamic State itself is as uncontrollable as a balloon which, squeezed in one place, will simply bulge in another.

The lack of attention in the West to how this scenario is playing out in Libya is surely a dangerous failure. If we look closely at the violence now engulfing the country, we will quickly realise that the euphoria and rhetoric this week surrounding the launch of air strikes against Islamic State in Syria are likely to prove profoundly naive and short-sighted.

And yet all our leaders seem capable of offering is more bombing.

Perhaps we should heed recent calls by Peter Millet, Britain’s ambassador to Libya, for yet another Western military alliance to carry out air strikes against Islamic State in Libya.

The truth, though, is that it would have been better not to have bombed the country in the first place.

As Britain joins its allies in attacking IS in Syria, the lessons from the smoke-blackened killing grounds of Libya are all too clear.

Daily Mail