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Haftar's sons rise in Derna flood aftermath

Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of eastern Libya, has placed his six sons in positions of political and military power. The deadly floods in Derna have seen his youngest, Saddam, rise to head of disaster relief management and the top of his succession charts. For Libyans, it spells more bad news.
Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of eastern Libya, has placed his six sons in positions of political and military power. The deadly floods in Derna have seen his youngest, Saddam, rise to head of disaster relief management and the top of his succession charts. For Libyans, it spells more bad news.

Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of eastern Libya, has placed his six sons in positions of political and military power. The deadly floods in Derna have seen his youngest, Saddam, rise to head of disaster relief management and the top of his succession charts. For Libyans, it spells more bad news, writes Leela Jacinto

Wearing camouflage fatigues and his customary scowl, Saddam Haftar pours over a map of Libya in an airy chamber identified as the “Libyan Emergency Room” in a post on X, formerly Twitter. At his side are three Russian officials, part of a Russian defence ministry team that arrived in eastern Libya days after dams collapsed in Derna, unleashing a disaster of biblical proportions.

“Brigadier General Saddam Haftar, Head of the Libyan Emergency Room, follows up on the latest developments of search and rescue operations,” notes the post by a Libyan local news site barely a week after the September 11 catastrophe, which has been dubbed “Libya’s 9/11”.  

The youngest son of Khalifa Haftar, Saddam is often cited as the “possible successor” to the 79-year-old strongman who has controlled eastern Libya for nearly a decade. 

As the head of Tareq Ben Zayed (TBZ) brigade in his father’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), the youngest Haftar is better known for seizing money from Libya’s Central Bank vaults, according to the UN, and “inflicting a catalogue of horrors” in eastern Libya, according to Amnesty International.

© France24 2023

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"We're ready for help."@AlexCrawfordSky speaks to General Saddam Haftar, who is in charge of organising international aid teams following deadly flooding in Libya.



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— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 18, 2023