In the wake of the momentous developments in Syria, Libya has inevitably been mentioned, though most often in the context of misinformed and inappropriate comparisons to its fracturing and descent into civil war following the 2011 overthrow of dictator Muammar Gadhafi. What is missing in this commentary is an appreciation for how the fates of the two countries have been intertwined and shaped by similar forces in the decade since the Arab uprisings and, more importantly, how the recent, stunning collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime will affect the political, economic, and military standing of Libya’s factions.
Over the past few years, those Libyan factions have been locked in a stalemate that has kept their country largely free from major conflict, but that has depended largely on a modus vivendi between the two foreign powers with significant military forces on the ground—Russia and Türkiye. Assad’s downfall, by changing the respective strategic positions of those powers in the region, and especially by complicating Moscow’s ability to channel fighters and weapons into Libya, could affect this fragile equilibrium.
Nowhere will the aftereffects be felt more acutely than in the eastern part of Libya. There, the largely autonomous and deeply repressive administration of militia commander Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and his sons had long been bolstered, both directly and indirectly, by the Assad regime through a common ideology of authoritarian kleptocracy, networks of illicit businesses that enriched the two regimes, and mutual military aid from Russia.
Not long after he consolidated his rule in eastern Libya, following a bloody struggle for the city of Benghazi that lasted from 2014 to 2017, Haftar realized that Assad could provide both a template for political legitimacy and a source of military and economic support. In 2020, Haftar’s eastern-based government reopened an embassy in Damascus with the encouragement and facilitation of his longtime political and military backer, the United Arab Emirates, which at the time was spearheading the Arab world’s rehabilitation of the Syrian dictator. The symbolism of this move wasn’t lost on citizens in both countries. The post-2011 counterrevolutionary and anti-Islamist wave, led by Abu Dhabi and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, had prevailed and with it the narrative that only iron-fisted dictators such as Haftar and Assad could guarantee stability.
Concurrently, when Türkiye deployed thousands of Syrian mercenaries who had long fought the Assad regime to Tripoli and its environs—part of a broader military intervention to support the internationally recognized Libyan government which Haftar’s militia forces were trying to topple—Haftar turned to importing thousands of pro-Assad Syrian fighters, whose travel to Libya was facilitated and coordinated by Russia and authorized by the Syrian regime. While the battlefield impact of these militants was ultimately minor, their arrival hastened a burgeoning logistical cooperation between Moscow and Damascus that manifested itself in more substantial military and economic support for Haftar’s regime, which persisted until the recent dramatic events in Syria.
Beyond politics and arms flows, eastern Libya has been tied to Syria through robust and intersecting networks of illicit trade, reflecting two extensive organized crime ecosystems whose connection benefited both sides. For years, aircraft operated by Cham Wings Airline, a private Syrian carrier that has long supported the Assad regime by transporting cash, narcotics, materiel, and fighters, including Russian mercenaries, ferried irregular migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and India into eastern Libya. Here, their perilous journey onward across the Mediterranean toward Europe was facilitated and overseen by Haftar-linked militias, led by his most ambitious son Saddam, who reaped exorbitant profits from the business. Despite various European Union deals with Haftar intended to curb human flows, the transfer of migrants courtesy of Cham Wings from Damascus through northeastern Libya remained uninterrupted. These commercial flights become integral to the Mediterranean’s human-smuggling industry—at times accounting for nearly half of all arrivals into the EU via Libya. This generated millions of dollars in annual revenue, with a chunk of the income accruing to the Haftars’ armed coalition.
In addition to human smuggling, Haftar’s rule in eastern Libya has also benefited from narcotics cooperation with Syria. Under Assad, Syria evolved into a multi-billion-dollar hub to produce Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant, which flooded Libya’s market through the Damascus–Benghazi corridor, enriching Saddam Haftar and his associates. From Libya, these addictive, dangerous tablets, which are banned by many countries, spread further south and west, reaching Sudan, the Sahel, Algeria, and beyond. In parallel, the same Cham Wings flights were regularly employed to transport weapons sourced from Syria’s black market into Libya’s thriving arms trade.
A maritime route between the two countries also emerged, enabling a range of illicit shipments, including fuel smuggling—an activity that expanded markedly in eastern Libya over the last two years under Saddam Haftar’s authority. A large portion of the fuel imported by Libya’s National Oil Corporation was illegally reexported, and some of it ultimately made its way to Syria. According to experts at The Sentry, an international investigative organization, the overall volume of illicit trade between Libya and Syria amounted to about $300 million in annual revenue.
A key node in all of these elements of the Syrian-Libyan organized crime pipeline was Maher al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother and commander of the Syrian Army’s elite Fourth Armored Division and Republican Guard, who oversaw production of Captagon and orchestrated money laundering operations that enriched core loyalists and helped the regime evade international sanctions. In March 2023, he flew to eastern Libya to meet with Saddam Haftar and discuss furthering their cooperation on illicit activities, highlighting the very personal and high-level ties that cemented Syrian regime support to Haftar’s rule.
The sudden disappearance of those linkages has thrust Haftar and his clan into new and uncomfortable territory. This is evidenced by the scant media coverage devoted to the events in Syria by Haftar-aligned media outlets and the absence of significant public reactions in eastern Libyan cities, which contrasted sharply with the noisy celebrations in the western cities of Misrata and Tripoli. The hasty departure of Assad, who like the Libyan field marshal portrayed himself as a bulwark against Islamism and smeared his opponents as terrorists and jihadists, puts a dent in the narrative of strongman permanence—though Haftar’s other autocratic backers in the Arab world, Presidents Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo and Mohammed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi, remain solidly in place. Still, the upset in Syria could spur Haftar to reconstitute the logistical underpinnings of his criminal network, possibly working with exiled remnants of the Assad regime and affiliated gangsters, or double down on other streams of funding. It could also prompt him to pursue political realignments at home and abroad, especially as the position of one of his main foreign backers is coming under strain as well.
Indeed, a second major consequence that Assad’s ouster could have in Libya relates to that backer, Russia. The Russians played a major role in abetting Haftar’s rise to power starting in early 2014, supporting his military campaign in eastern Libya with technicians, advisors, intelligence support, propaganda, and by printing currency for his unrecognized government—even as it engaged with other Libyan players. With Haftar’s attack against the Tripoli government in 2019, Russia increased its footprint in Libya with the deployment of thousands of mercenaries from the Wagner Group (which has since been reconfigured), regular military personnel, aircraft, and air defense systems. While Haftar’s bid for power failed due to Türkiye’s military intervention, Moscow quickly adapted, keeping much of its personnel and weaponry at key airbases near oil installations. And in recent years, in addition to its continuing support for Haftar, Russia has used Libya as a vital waystation for the shipment of personnel and hardware into the African states of the Sahel and beyond.
The fall of the Assad regime could jeopardize, or at the very least complicate, this supply route into Africa and, critically for Haftar, into eastern Libya. That is because much of it passed through Syria, especially through the Russian naval facility at Tartous and the Hmeimim airbase in Latakia. The Kremlin has already taken steps to engage Syria’s new leadership on continued access to these facilities, yet the outcome of these negotiations is uncertain. Without the centralized, authoritarian Assad regime in place, maintaining Tartous and Hmeimim could prove costlier and more cumbersome for Moscow, especially as it contends with local opposition or fragilized logistics—all which could be felt by Haftar.
Faced with such uncertainties, Russia could decide to pressure Haftar for more permanent naval access to the eastern Libyan port of Tobruq, which has already served as a maritime node for flowing Russian materiel and personnel into Africa. But that is likely to incur even more pushback from NATO and the United States, making Haftar’s dilemma of balancing the demands of his patrons even starker.
Alternately, Russia could route its aerial shipments into Libyan bases it already controls. However, this option, too, is costly and, more importantly, requires overflight permission from Türkiye. Given the tensions between the two countries on several issues and, especially, the current understanding that exists between them in Libya, such goodwill from Ankara will almost certainly come with strings attached.
Indeed, whether and how Türkiye’s behavior in Libya changes because of the shift in the regional balance of power in its favor occasioned by Assad’s downfall is a third potential effect, and one that carries even more ambiguity. After consolidating its entrenchment in northwestern Libya in 2020, the Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not confine itself to maintaining the flawed peace in and around the capital. Instead, it pursued economic objectives increasingly linked to eastern Libya—territory controlled by the very Haftar faction Ankara once fought during the war for Tripoli. Since 2021, however, Türkiye has gone to great lengths to woo the Haftar family and its allies, opening a consulate on Haftar’s territory and securing numerous contracts for Turkish companies in cities such as Benghazi and Derna, where reconstruction unfolds under the family’s opaque oversight. This trajectory underscores Türkiye’s unwavering focus on expanding its influence in eastern Libya. As demonstrated in Syria earlier this month, when Türkiye perceives an opportunity to enlarge its footprint, it moves swiftly and decisively—even if it means turning against Russia.
One possible scenario is that the erosion or obstruction of Russia’s once-smooth corridor of aid to Haftar could embolden Libyan factions in the west who are aligned with Türkiye to challenge the eastern warlord’s position, since his ability to impose oil blockades and dictate terms to Tripoli’s government has rested partly on the deterrent effect of the Russian military apparatus. If that backing is perceived to have slackened because of Moscow’s post-Assad recalibrations or redeployments, anti-Haftar groups might contemplate reclaiming critical oil infrastructure, calculating that the cost of confrontation is now lower.
Alternately, and more realistically, Türkiye could be encouraged to intensify its political and economic outreach to Haftar, seizing on the window of opportunity afforded by Russia’s preoccupation with the aftermath of Assad’s exit. In pursuing such a path, Erdoğan would likely endeavor to keep Russia on the Libyan playing field, albeit in a diminished state, which would increase the Turkish leader’s value to NATO as an interlocutor and counterweight. For his part, Haftar could prove receptive to such overtures from Ankara. This is especially true if he feels vulnerable domestically from the attenuation of the Syrian-Russian channel, and as he comes under pressure from the United States and European states not to grant more permanent basing to a Russia that is trying to regroup after the Syria debacle.
It is crucial not to frame Libya as wholly beholden to external dynamics, or to the policies of intervening foreign states. These have long included not only Russia and Türkiye but also the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar, the United States, and France. Still, the events unfolding this month in Syria, coming on top of the year-long war in Gaza, will likely resonate within Libyan society, where domestic political and armed group actors retain their own agency and matter significantly.
Although the revolutionary fervor that fueled the 2011 uprisings may appear dormant, it has not disappeared. Relatedly, the currents of political Islamism and jihadism, despite suffering a marked decline in recent years, still operate in the background—though political and armed mobilization in Libya has often occurred independently from these hazily-demarcated and often-misused categories. It is important to recall the precedent of the hundreds of young Libyan men who went to Syria to fight at the height of the civil war, often mobilized by Islamist or jihadist networks, but inspired more deeply by sympathy for a revolutionary struggle against a brutal despot like the one they had overthrown at home. “We’d suffered, and we knew the Syrians were suffering too,” one of these militant volunteers told me. It remains to be seen what sort of more substantial forms of solidarity or mobilization the remarkable victory of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and associated groups in Syria inspires in Libya, and how this will reverberate across Libya’s political landscape.
What is very possible is that Libya’s political standoff, which has prevented the country from moving beyond an unelected transitional executive and from bridging deep institutional divides, could in the not-to-distant future relapse into conflict. This would happen not through sudden shifts in the regional balance of power alone, but through a confluence of these changes and a significant shock at home, such as a macroeconomic downturn, which could unravel the elite bargains that have ensured a tenuous stability over the past few years.
