Where will the revolution end up? Foreign Policy reports:
Mustafa Abdel Jalil, head of Libya’s transitional government
Behind the scenes and off the record, officials close to the NTC describe the fissures that have opened up between top military commanders and political officials. Tensions between Western-backed liberals and homegrown Islamists are on the rise, bolstered by the international community’s fears that Islamist militant groups will hijack the revolution. On Al Jazeera just an hour after Jalil’s speech, Ali Sallabi, a popular Islamist cleric, denounced the NTC as composed of “extreme secularists” and warned that they were taking the country into “a new era of tyranny.” Sallabi has ties to Tripoli’s military commander, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who once led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a militant group with links to al Qaeda.
Then there are the divisions between the leadership that spent most of the uprising in the relatively safe rebel-controlled city of Benghazi and the people who fought on the ground to liberate Libyan cities, block by block. Regional rivalries are also coming to a head, with fighters from Misrata, the western mountains, and Tripoli clamoring for credit and control of the revolution. But most of all, everyone seems to have it out for Mahmoud Jibril, the de facto prime minister who is effectively Jalil’s deputy and foreign minister.
Jibril is another former Qaddafi loyalist whose place at the top of the new government has some NTC insiders and high-ranking military committee members wary. The blunt, U.S.-educated leader has the ear of Western governments, but his aloofness and apparent lack of appreciation for local fighters have rankled some on Libya’s streets. Already, he has been accused of appointing too many old-regime elites to top positions, spending too much time outside the country, and not delivering on all his promises of collecting foreign aid.
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