Libya in chaos

It could take months before the airport in Tripoli opens again. The tower came under rocket fire on Tuesday (15.07.2014), and dozens of airplanes and tanker vehicles were damaged. According to online newspaper "Libya Herald," at least 35 people were killed and another 70 injured. It is unclear whether civilians were among the dead.

Government spokesman Ahmad Lamin fears millions of dollars worth of damage, both for the reconstruction of the airport itself and for the Libyan economy. Tripoli's airport is one of the main transport hubs in the North African country, and there are currently no alternatives - the second biggest airport in Benghazi was closed down by violent clashes months ago, and the one in Misrata was also closed on Monday.

There are clearly still many grudges to be settled among the different armed groups in Libya. The latest fighting at Tripoli airport began on Sunday when an alliance of Islamist militias from Misrata and Tripoli launched an offensive against the enemy militias of the city of Sintan, which had controlled the area around the airport since the fall of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Security situation deteriorates

The United Nations considers the security situation so critical that it has withdrawn its personnel from Libya. It is impossible to continue work in the current circumstances UNSMIL declared. That mission was supposed to help stabilize the country and make democratic development possible. But, three years after the fall of Gadhafi, that is still a long way off.

There seems to be no possible balance of power between the individual towns, tribes, regions, and the central government. Many local power centers formed during the revolution, in which cities and tribes - in part supported by local militias - competed for political and economic predominance.

Gadhafi fostered these divisions, said Günter Meyer of the Center for Arabic Studies in Mainz: "He played the tribes off each other. He always preferred the west of the country and neglected the east."

Fighting Islamists

In mid-May, former Gen. Khalifa Haftar began deploying his paramilitary "National Army" against the Islamist brigades in Benghazi. Since then, the man who was the head of the army under Gadhafi (then fell out of favor before helping to topple the dictator) has gained more and more followers - including from the army's ranks. Some of the Sintan militias have also joined his army.

But Haftar won't reveal exactly how many supporters he has - he would only declare that the Defense Ministry, which is supposed to command the Sintan militias, no longer had a say. "The ministry still controls the employees in its building and the files on its desks," he recently told the British "Guardian" newspaper.

Haftar's declared aim is to drive the Islamist militias and their supporters - including those in the current parliament - out of the country. But Libya has been sinking further and further into violence and the fighting between Islamist militias and Haftar's men continues unabated.

New parliament to the rescue?

That's why people still have high hopes of the result of the parliamentary election on July 20. Turnout was only 42 percent, however, and the security situation in the east of the country means that people there haven't been able to vote at all, which is likely to result in accusations of election fraud.

Results from 24 of the 1,600 polling stations will be declared invalid, and more could follow. In order to reduce political tensions, only independent candidates were allowed to stand for election and there were no party lists. "Many indicators suggest that the Islamists have taken heavy losses," said Meyer. "The arguments that Haftar made against them seem to have fallen on fertile ground."

The interim parliament elected in 2012 should have been dissolved in February, but then it wanted to extend its mandate to December. Then the election was brought forward in a bid to get Libya out of the crisis. In the face of the escalating violence, the European Union has been pushing for the newly elected parliament to convene as soon as possible in order to form a new government with the broad support of the different groups.

But the new parliament won't have it easy, for in the future it intends to meet in a hotel in Benghazi to reinforce its commitment to the neglected east of the country. But this is where the fighting among militias happens to be particularly heavy. "Should these militias continue to hold sway, the new parliament and the government that emerges from it will remain powerless," said Meyer.

At the moment, the ruling government sees no way out of the spiral of violence and so is even considering a call for military help from abroad.