Gaddafi’s son assassinated: Libya’s Rubicon crossed |
The assassination of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in Zintan on February 3 is the final, bloody exclamation point on the catastrophe of the 2011 NATO intervention. For 15 years, the West dismissed Saif’s early warnings of ‘rivers of blood’ and a ‘darker page’ as the desperate rhetoric of a dying regime; today, those words read like a precise architectural blueprint of Libya’s ruin.
For over a decade, the international community treated Saif as a ghost of the past or a legal nuisance for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Yet, on the ground, he remained the last tether for millions of supporters known as the ‘Greens’ – a socio-political movement loyal to his father Muammar Gaddafi, Jamahiriya (former state from 1977-2011) and represented by the solid green flag. Far from being a fringe group, this constituency remains a crucial pillar of the fragile stability in Libya’s restive south, where Saif served as the primary mediator between competing tribal interests. His removal from the board now triggers a terrifying realignment of power that threatens to incinerate what little remains of the country’s political process.
I stood among a sea of people in Bani Walid – a crowd so vast it felt less like a funeral and more like a posthumous national referendum. For many mourners, this was a deeply personal surrogate for the funeral they were denied for Saif’s father in 2011 – whose grave is still secret; they came to bury the son, but they were also mourning the fall of an era.
The choice of Bani Walid as a final resting place carries a weight that spans generations. It is here that Saif’s great-grandfather was buried after falling in battle against the Italian occupation in 1911. His younger brother, Khamis, is also buried in the same cemetery after NATO bombed his convoy in October 2011. By deciding to lay Saif in the same cemetery, his family has tied his murder directly to a century-long struggle for Libyan sovereignty.
To the ‘Greens’ his burial was not an end, but a reclamation. At the northern entrance to the city, a towering billboard stands as a defiant gatekeeper, depicting Muammar Gaddafi alongside Saddam Hussein, Khamis, and the local martyrs who fell defending the city in 2011 and 2012. During the funeral RT was informed by an anonymous local official that Saif’s image is to be added to this pantheon. It signalled that their movement is not a ‘fringe’ element, but a solidified nation within a nation, now radicalized by the loss of their only viable political anchor.
Saif’s trajectory over the last decade is a study in survival that defied every script........