Originally published 2016-01-09.
In the first week of January 2016, fighters from the so-called Islamic State attacked Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, the two largest oil export terminals in Libya, setting storage tanks on fire and killing guards at nearby checkpoints. Libya’s National Oil Corporation issued a desperate appeal for help, urging Libyans to “rescue what is left from our resources before it is too late.”
The attacks were the sharpest sign yet of how far the country had fallen since the 2011 uprising and NATO-backed campaign that ended Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. Libya had two rival governments, two oil corporations, a powerful militia leader controlling the ports, and a jihadist group trying to grab the oil wealth. This is what happened, who the players were, and how the story ended.
The January 2016 attacks on the oil crescent
Es Sider and Ras Lanuf sit on the Gulf of Sirte in the region known as the oil crescent, between the Islamic State stronghold of Sirte to the west and the eastern city of Benghazi. Both terminals had been shut since December 2014 because of fighting, but they still held large stocks of crude.
On 4 January 2016, Islamic State announced online that it had taken Bin Jawad, a coastal town roughly 120 miles (about 190 km) east of Sirte and the last town before the ports. CBS News reported clashes that day in which six fighters loyal to the Petroleum Facilities Guard and five militants were killed. Further suicide attacks on checkpoints followed, and guards were reported killed over several days.
Oil tanks burned at both sites: one at Ras Lanuf on 4 January and several more at Es Sider the next day, according to a guard spokesman quoted by Bloomberg. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude were reported lost or at risk. The same week, on 7 January, an Islamic State truck bomb at a police training centre in Zliten, west of Misrata, killed at least 60 people, underlining how dangerous the group had become.
How Libya ended up with two governments
After Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, a General National Congress was elected in 2012. When its mandate ran out in early 2014, it refused to hand over power. A new House of Representatives was elected in June 2014 on a turnout of about 18 per cent, but Islamist factions and Misratan militias rejected the result and seized Tripoli in an operation called Libya Dawn.
The House of Representatives moved to Tobruk in the far east and allied itself with General Khalifa Haftar. The international community recognised Tobruk, while Tripoli remained under the rival congress. Each side had its own version of the National Oil Corporation. Foreign oil companies kept dealing with the Tripoli-based corporation, which held the established contracts, even though its government was not the recognised one.
The result was paralysis. By early 2015, Libya’s oil revenues had fallen by about 90 per cent, and production at times dropped to a fraction of its pre-war level of roughly 1.6 million barrels a day.
Ibrahim Jadhran, the man who held the ports
On the ground, neither government really controlled the oil crescent. That job belonged to Ibrahim Jadhran, born in 1981 in Ajdabiya. He had spent six years in Gaddafi’s Abu Salim prison, fought as a rebel commander in 2011, and in 2012 was put in charge of guarding oil installations in the centre of the country.
In 2013 he turned against the central government, demanding more autonomy for the eastern region of Cyrenaica. His forces blockaded Es Sider, Ras Lanuf and Zueitina, which helped push national output down sharply. In March 2014 he tried to sell oil independently: the tanker Morning Glory loaded crude at Es Sider and slipped out, but US forces boarded it in the Mediterranean, near Cyprus, at the Libyan government’s request. The affair also helped bring down Prime Minister Ali Zeidan.
By 2016 Jadhran was officially fighting Islamic State, and his spokesman gave the running casualty reports. Yet the picture was murky. CBS reported claims that his own brother had joined the militants and was taking part in the assault, and Middle East Eye cited a source who said Jadhran had once offered the group cooperation in return for keeping the ports. Neither claim was independently confirmed, and both should be read as reports from a chaotic war.
Why Islamic State wanted Libya’s oil
Islamic State had taken Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, in 2015, and by early 2016 an estimated 1,500 mostly foreign fighters were based there. In Syria and Iraq the group had funded itself partly by seizing and smuggling oil, and analysts feared it would try the same in Libya.
Some security analysts saw the port attacks as partly diversionary, drawing defenders away while the group consolidated towns along the coast. Even without holding the terminals, it could damage the industry that paid every Libyan salary, and so weaken any future government.
Exporting stolen Libyan crude would have been much harder than in Syria, though. There was no friendly land border and no easy market. In late 2015 Russian officials had accused Turkey’s leadership of profiting from Islamic State oil sold out of Syria; Ankara denied it, and the accusation was never independently proven. Whether the group could ever have sold oil from Libya at scale remains an open question.
Foreign troops: what was reported and what happened
At the time, British tabloids reported that special forces were preparing for a large Western ground deployment, with talk of around 1,000 British troops in a 6,000-strong coalition led by Italy. That invasion never took place.
Instead, outside powers mostly backed Libyan forces. Small special forces teams were reported on the ground, and in 2016 the United States carried out air strikes in support of the campaign to retake Sirte. Critics of the 2011 intervention, which was authorised by the UN Security Council to protect civilians but ended with regime change, argued that this was the predictable cost of removing a government without a plan for what followed. Supporters replied that Gaddafi’s forces had been threatening mass killings in Benghazi. Both points remain part of the debate.
What happened to the oil crescent next
Islamic State did not take the oil ports. On 17 December 2015, the rival parliaments had signed the UN-brokered Libyan Political Agreement in Skhirat, Morocco, creating a Government of National Accord. Its prime minister-designate, Fayez al-Sarraj, arrived in Tripoli in March 2016.
In May 2016, forces aligned with that government launched an offensive on Sirte. After about eight months of fighting, they announced full control of the city on 5 December 2016, and Sarraj declared it liberated later that month. Islamic State lost all its significant territory in Libya, though remnants withdrew into the desert.
Jadhran’s run also ended. In September 2016, Haftar’s forces seized Ras Lanuf and Es Sider from his guards, days before the first tanker in almost two years was due to load. Exports then resumed, and production rose from around 220,000 barrels a day to about 600,000.
Libya’s divisions did not go away. Haftar declared the Skhirat agreement void in 2017, fought a long war for Tripoli, and a permanent ceasefire was only agreed on 23 October 2020. A unity government formed in March 2021 was meant to lead to elections in December 2021, but the vote has been repeatedly delayed, and rival administrations in the west and east continued to compete for power and oil revenue.
What the episode shows
The January 2016 attacks are a case study in how oil and fragmentation feed each other. Whoever holds the pipelines and terminals gains leverage over everyone else, so armed groups fight for them, and every shutdown deepens the crisis that created the armed groups in the first place.
They also show the limits of quick predictions. Many observers expected Islamic State to seize the oil crescent and for Western armies to invade. Neither happened. Libyan forces, divided as they were, pushed the group out, and the long struggle over Libya’s oil became one between Libyan rivals and their foreign backers.
Sources: CBS News, 4 January 2016; Bloomberg, 12 September 2016; Africanews, 18 December 2016; Wikipedia: Ibrahim Jadhran; Wikipedia: Second Libyan Civil War; Wikipedia: Libyan Political Agreement; Wikipedia: Islamic State – Libya Province; topic first covered by Zero Hedge via The Anti-Media.
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