2021-05-03 13:35:40 GMT2021-05-03 21:35:40(Beijing Time) Xinhua English
ANKARA, May 3 (Xinhua) A Turkish delegation of ministers and intelligence head paid a visit to Libya s capital Tripoli on Monday, Turkish foreign ministry said in a written statement.
The delegation is composed of Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar and head of National Intelligence Organization Hakan Fidan, the statement said, noting that the talks would address bilateral and regional issues.
Turkey s Chief of General Staff Yasar Guler is also part of the delegation, the defense ministry said in a separate statement.
The visit is the first of its kind from Turkey since Libya s new unity government is formed in March.
30 Apr in 3:00 RUSI
Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and Mikhil Mishustin in Moscow, 2021
On 15 April, Libya’s Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah travelled to Moscow for the first time. During his trip, Dbeibah engaged with senior Russian officials, including Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Secretary of the Security Council Nikolay Patrushev, on intra-Libyan dialogue and energy sector investments.
Royal United Services Institution (
RUSI) reports that after meeting Dbeibah, Shoigu extolled the Libyan people as ‘Russia-friendly’ and called for a resumption of ‘full-scale cooperation’ between Russia and Libya’s defence ministries. Dbeibah vowed to ‘build new bridges’ with Russia and emphasised Moscow’s ability to play a ‘key role’ in Libya’s economy.
FOREIGN forces must leave Libya immediately, the Arab League, United Nations, European Union and the African Union said on Tuesday.
They demanded “full compliance with the arms embargo and the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign forces and mercenaries from the entirety of Libya’s territory,” following a video conference.
The so-called “Libya quartet” condemned the continued violations of the 2011 arms embargo, and reiterated previous statements, branding all external military intervention in Libya “unacceptable.” The global bodies called for “the sustained implementation of measures to fully identify and dismantle these groups.”
Libya has descended into a quagmire following the Nato-backed bombing raids that led to the ousting and subsequent extrajudicial execution of former leader Muammar Gadaffi in 2011, celebrated by then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who said at the time: “We came, we saw, he died.”
April 20, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from New Left Review Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural monuments and beautiful beaches. ‘A model partner’, Obama affirmed in 2009, as he congratulated the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
1 Today, with perhaps 50,000 oppositionists in jail, including scores of journalists, politicians, lawyers and civil servants, Turkey is exporting radical Islamist mercenaries from its Syrian enclaves to Libya and Azerbaijan, clashing with France, Greece, Israel and Cyprus over gas-drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean and imposing a brutal occupation regime on swathes of what was once the autonomous Kurdish zone of Rojava. Predictably, the cry of ‘Who lost Turkey?’ has gone up within the American foreign-policy establishment, where th