ISIS position in Sirte as of September 22, 2016
Little noticed by the outside world, Libyans have almost succeeded in achieving a long-awaited victory over the Islamic State. For months, bolstered by air strikes from their international allies, local militias have been tightening a ring around IS forces in the coastal city of Sirte. The jihadis have been corralled into an area of less than one square kilometer. The battle is all but won.
You'd think that Libyans and their friends in the international community would be thrilled. Actually, though, there's little sense of triumph to be detected anywhere.
The reason is simple: Victory in Sirte, however welcome,
will have little positive effect on the country's power vacuum. When the Islamic State first conquered the city in June 2015, many observers hoped that the threat would serve as a rallying point for Libya's myriad warring factions. The need to strike a resounding blow against the Islamic State, it was thought, would finally provide the catalyst for unity.
It didn't work out that way. Instead, Libya's competing power centers -- from Field-Marshall Haftar and his government in the East to its rival internationally backed government in Tripoli to the country's extremist Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Gheriani -- have tried to exploit the threat of the Islamic State to advance their own agendas. Each group knew full well that merely appearing to engage the Islamic State would garner international support and strengthen its claims to legitimacy. So far, none have proved willing to redeploy serious resources and manpower to combat a threat they perceive as secondary to their domestic opponents.
Comment: The White Helmets didn't just "play" Western media. They were and are a foreign-funded propaganda outlet used by the West to push their narrative to the unsuspecting public. Much like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the White Helmets are treated like objective sources of information by the Western press not because they are actually objective, but because they are disseminating the exact kind of propaganda that Western governments want their people to read. See also: