Libya after Gaddafi: an assassination and a country that cannot move

On February 3, 2026, four masked gunmen entered Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s home in Zintan, disabled the security cameras and shot him dead. He was 53.

Gaddafi had been a candidate in the presidential election scheduled for April 2026. For analysts who had followed his return to public life, he was one of the few figures capable of consolidating Libya’s residual Gaddafi loyalist base.

Libya has not held a national election since 2014. A vote scheduled for December 2021 collapsed before it could take place, blocked by disputes over electoral law and the eligibility of several leading candidates.

In November 2025, the High National Election Commission said it would be ready to organise presidential and parliamentary elections by mid-April 2026, provided that funding was secured and the electoral framework finalised. That framework was supposed to be completed by the 6+6 Committee, a joint body composed of six members from the Tripoli-based parliament and six from the Tobruk-based House of Representatives.

Gaddafi had registered as a candidate. Polling conducted before his death placed him among the leading contenders. The April elections did not take place and no arrests have been made in connection with his killing.

The two governments

Libya has been formally divided since 2014, three years after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. The current configuration has been largely stable since 2021, when elections were postponed indefinitely and the eastern parliament appointed a rival administration to challenge the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.

The Government of National Unity (GNU), led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, is based in Tripoli and retains international legitimacy, recognised by the UN and most Western governments. Its authority in practice depends on a negotiated balance among armed groups that control strategic infrastructure across the capital. Militia networks formally linked to state institutions operate with substantial autonomy, controlling ports, airports and ministries. Tripoli’s fragility was demonstrated again in May 2025, when the killing of a prominent militia leader triggered clashes that killed at least six and exposed how rapidly political disputes translate into armed confrontation in the capital.

The Government of National Stability (GNS), led by Prime Minister Osama Hammad, is based in Benghazi. Nominal political authority rests with the House of Representatives in Tobruk, but effective military and strategic control resides with Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA). Haftar has governed eastern Libya with centralised military authority since 2017, using tribal militias, Salafist units and foreign fighters integrated into a command structure held together by patronage and coercive discipline.

The GNS controls most of Libya’s oil-rich interior and eastern coastline, and has demonstrated its capacity to weaponise oil production. In August 2024, Haftar’s forces blockaded major fields and ports, causing output to fall from 1.2 million barrels per day to 600,000 before a Central Bank compromise restored flow in October.

Both governments are sustained by a war economy that gives their key actors structural reasons to avoid elections. In western Libya, armed groups profit from state salaries, informal taxation and smuggling networks. In the east, the LNA is tied to the same economy. A November 2025 investigation by The Sentry estimated government losses from fuel smuggling at $20 billion over 2022 to 2024, with more than 50% of imported fuel currently diverted to illicit networks.

The external players

External powers have sustained and deepened Libya’s division. Their competing interests have prevented any single faction from achieving dominance, while also blocking genuine reconciliation.

Among external actors, Türkiye has had the most direct military impact in western Libya. In late 2019 and early 2020, Ankara intervened decisively to prevent Tripoli’s fall during Haftar’s offensive, deploying drones, electronic warfare systems, advisers and Syrian fighters that broke the LNA siege and pushed Haftar’s forces back to the Sirte line. Many analysts argue that, without Turkish intervention, Tripoli would probably have fallen.

The political price of that support has been significant. In August 2024, Dbeibah signed a memorandum of understanding granting Turkish forces legal immunity and full operational autonomy in Libya, financed from the Libyan treasury. Türkiye also secured GNU backing for its maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ankara’s interest in Libya is now embedded in both military basing and maritime strategy.

Russia supports Haftar’s eastern camp and has deployed Wagner Group personnel in Libya since 2018. After the death of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023, these operations were absorbed into the Africa Corps, a structure formally subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defence.

The Africa Corps maintains three air bases in eastern and southern Libya, at Sirte, al-Jufra and Brak al-Shati, which function as a logistics hub for Russian operations across the Sahel and the Central African Republic. In January 2026, a sanctioned Russian cargo vessel arrived at Tobruk under naval escort, delivering a suspected military shipment.

When Syria’s government fell in late 2024, eliminating Russia’s long-standing military bases in Latakia, Libya’s value to Moscow increased substantially. Weapons shipments into LNA-controlled territory continued through early 2026. Talks are also under way to grant Russian warships docking rights at Tobruk in exchange for air defence systems and LNA pilot training. Russia’s continued access in Libya is structurally tied to Haftar’s survival as a regional power, and to the prevention of any national reconciliation that would subordinate eastern institutions to a unified Libyan state.

Egypt and the UAE support Haftar with weapons, financial transfers and diplomatic cover. Both see a stable eastern Libya, hostile to political Islam, as a strategic interest.

Egypt shares a 1,100-kilometre border with Libya and views the GNU’s militia networks, several with historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, as a direct security threat. The UAE has funded and armed the LNA since at least 2014, providing air assets that played a documented role in the 2019-2020 Tripoli offensive.

Among Western governments, the positions are fractured. The United States officially supports the UN-led political track and has recently engaged both sides on military unification, with AFRICOM officials visiting Tripoli, Sirte and Benghazi in early 2025 to discuss a unified Libyan military structure.

Washington’s practical priority, however, remains counterterrorism rather than political settlement. Italy, as Libya’s largest European trading partner and most directly exposed state to Libyan migration flows, prioritises maintaining access for Eni’s energy operations and controlling departure points for Mediterranean crossings. France has historically leaned toward Haftar as a counterterrorism partner in the Sahel.

The European Union has effectively reduced its Libya engagement to migration containment, funding detention facilities operated by militia networks in exchange for reduced crossings into European territory. The outcome is a configuration in which every external actor benefits from managed instability while publicly endorsing a political resolution that none of them is prepared to impose.

The UN roadmap and its constraints

UNSMIL Special Representative Hanna Tetteh presented a political roadmap to the Security Council in August 2025, identifying two prerequisites for elections: an agreed electoral framework and a unified interim government to administer the vote. Neither has been achieved.

The 6+6 Committee, a joint parliamentary body tasked with finalising electoral laws, has failed to produce a viable electoral framework. Aguila Saleh, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has repeatedly blocked electoral frameworks that would reduce his institutional leverage. Figures within the High State Council have used veto positions to delay compromise.

In April 2026, Tetteh told the Council that UNSMIL had shifted to engaging a smaller group of Libyan stakeholders directly, trying to unblock the two prerequisites through more concentrated dialogue.

The Security Council, for its part, has renewed the Libya arms embargo and petroleum sanctions framework, extending both until 2027 in its April 2026 resolution. The measures have not stopped weapons flows. Russian shipments to Tobruk, Emirati transfers to LNA positions and Turkish military deployments to GNU bases have continued through the embargo’s existence.

What the assassination changed

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s political team described his killing as “an assassination of the effort for peace and stability in Libya.”

That framing reflected his unusual position in Libya’s fragmented landscape. He was not aligned with either government. His support came from Gaddafi loyalists across tribal networks in the south and west, as well as from constituencies that viewed both the GNU and the GNS as illegitimate products of foreign intervention and post-2011 militia politics.

Polling ahead of the 2021 elections had placed him as a leading candidate. His candidacy in 2026 represented, for a portion of the electorate, a form of continuity outside the existing factional structure.

His elimination removes that third option. Three suspects have been identified by Libyan authorities. No arrests have been made. The 444th Brigade, a major armed formation in western Libya, denied involvement. The Public Prosecution Office in Tripoli announced an investigation. Its outcome has not been reported.

The April 2026 elections were not held. UNSMIL’s structured dialogue continues. Libya’s oil production, the country’s only functioning national economic institution, is managed through the National Oil Corporation in Tripoli, its revenues distributed through mechanisms that both governments contest and both exploit. The political impasse that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s candidacy might have disrupted has instead deepened. The stalemate, for the actors sustaining it, remains the equilibrium.