Drone attacks on the western Libyan city of Zawiya, starting on 8 August, have again exposed the country’s fragile status quo, while threatening vital oil and electricity infrastructure as US and UN-backed efforts to reunify Libya gather pace.
Over the following days, drones targeted water facilities, fuel storage tanks, and the city’s power plant. One strike ignited a tank holding around 4.5 million litres of petrol.
Then, on 12 August, an attack destroyed the South Zawiya electricity substation, causing power outages in areas across the city.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, yet the immediate risks are considerable.
Jason Pack, President of Libya-Analysis LLC, warned that the disruption to the facilities will likely worsen living conditions and increase pressure on the Government of National Unity (GNU), the internationally-recognised authority in the capital Tripoli.
“An escalation of insecurity in and around Zawiya refinery is very likely in the immediate term if the attacks continue, while any move by the GNU on Zawiya could also trigger an escalation,” he told The New Arab.
Libya has remained divided despite the UN-brokered ceasefire of October 2020, which formalised the end of the last major round of fighting between the Tripoli-based government and forces aligned with Khalifa Haftar in the east.
Since then, armed groups have entrenched themselves within state institutions and local economic networks, creating a brittle status quo where local rivalries threaten vital national infrastructure.
Why the attacks matter
Zawiya, around 47 kilometres west of Tripoli, hosts Libya’s largest operating refinery, which can process approximately 120,000 barrels per day.
It is also connected to the Sharara oilfield, one of the country’s most important energy assets, with production capacity of roughly 300,000 barrels per day.
The attacks temporarily disrupted fuel supplies across western Libya. The National Oil Corporation (NOC) warned that it could halt operations if the attacks continued.
The timing is damaging. Libya’s crude production hit a daily high of around 1.44 million barrels per day in June, its highest level since 2013, while the NOC is pursuing a long-term target of raising output to two million barrels per day.
Zawiya, around 47 kilometres west of Tripoli, hosts the country’s largest operating refinery, with the attacks disrupting fuel supplies across western Libya. [Getty]
That signals Libya’s predicament, namely that recovery in its oil sector can aid its political stability, yet that very lack of political stability can threaten these gains.
“People experience Libya through electricity cuts, declining purchasing power, insecurity and the knowledge that enormous national wealth is being consumed or moved through networks they cannot hold accountable,” Anas El Gomati, founder of the Sadeq Institute, told The New Arab.
“Libya has national wealth, but Libyans have remarkably little power over where it goes, who profits from it or what it is ultimately used for.”
Zawiya’s tensions have been escalating for months. According to ACLED, the city has experienced more than 30 armed clashes in 2026.
Just days before the initial attacks, clashes erupted between rival armed groups in Zawiya and Surman, another Western Libyan city.
Any intervention by the GNU would carry risks, since it could provoke militias that view the city and its economic networks as central to their power.
The deeper problem is not just that militias operate outside of the GNU’s control, but that many groups occupy official positions within the interior, defence or intelligence apparatus.
Zawiya factions have combined state-sanctioned security functions with control over strategic sites and illicit economies, particularly fuel and migrant smuggling.
Successive administrations in Tripoli have therefore purchased short-term loyalty from militias without a reliable chain of command, in effect reinforcing militia power.
Libya has remained divided despite the UN-brokered ceasefire of October 2020, which formalised the end of the last major round of fighting between the Tripoli-based government and forces aligned with Khalifa Haftar in the east. [Getty]
Questions over eastern stability
The violence has not been confined to western Libya.
On 10 August, Fawzi al-Mansouri, the head of military intelligence for Khalifa Haftar’s self-styled Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), was killed by an explosive device outside his home in Benghazi.
The identity or motive of those responsible remains unknown, but al-Mansouri’s killing is significant.
Haftar has spent years consolidating control over eastern Libya and portraying Benghazi as a more secure and orderly alternative to militia-fragmented Tripoli.
The assassination of the official responsible for military intelligence inside that stronghold raises questions about the depth of this security consolidation.
It does not necessarily demonstrate an emerging succession struggle or wider revolt against Haftar. Yet it suggests that eastern Libya’s greater hierarchy does not make it immune from opaque violence or internal vulnerabilities.
“The assassination in Benghazi shows that even a highly consolidated security system is not necessarily an institutionalised one. Zawiya shows how armed competition can still reach strategic infrastructure and impose costs on the entire country,” El Gomati told The New Arab.
“There is a tendency to confuse the concentration of power with the creation of institutions. In the east, Haftar has concentrated enormous military and political authority. In the west, international diplomacy increasingly focuses on the small number of political and armed actors surrounding Dbeibah,” the analyst added.
“But neither model answers the more important question: who controls the coercive power of the state, and who are those people accountable to?”
The limits of international reunification efforts
These developments have unfolded as two overlapping diplomatic processes seek to bridge Libya’s institutional divisions.
A year ago, in August 2025, the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) launched its latest roadmap proposing an electoral framework, a unified government and dialogue on governance, security, the economy and reconciliation. It envisaged implementation within 12 to 18 months.
Yet progress has been slow. In April, UN envoy Hanna Tetteh acknowledged that the process was behind schedule.
Although the structured dialogue later produced almost 600 recommendations, Libya still lacks an agreed electoral framework or a date for national elections.
In parallel, Washington has become more directly engaged through an initiative led by Massad Boulos, Donald Trump’s top Africa advisor. Its public objectives include a unified budget, common government, and military institutions, followed by elections.
Several steps have occurred this year, which look positive on the surface. In April, Libya’s rival legislative chambers agreed on the country’s first unified national budget since 2013, worth 190 billion Libyan dinars, or around $30 billion, after US facilitation.
That same month, the US-led Flintlock exercises in Sirte brought units from eastern and western Libya together for military training for the first time, in a bid to encourage coordination.
Yet unification remains distant, and the budget has not been meaningfully implemented.
Details of the Boulos initiative also remain vague. Reports suggest it rests on an elite power-sharing arrangement involving the Haftar and Dbeibah families, with the hope that formalising cooperation between Libya’s two dominant networks could stabilise the country and unlock foreign investment.
However, such an arrangement may merely shift their competition inside a unified government while entrenching the existing power holders.
It may also struggle to command acceptance from armed and political actors excluded from the proposed bargain, particularly in western Libya.
Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that the violence in Zawiya and Benghazi exposed the assumptions underlying the US approach.
He told The New Arab that the initiative rests on the assumption that “a bargain struck among a narrow stratum of unelected potentates in the east and west can deliver security,” adding that neither the eastern nor western administration fully controls events on the ground.
“This has plagued outside mediation for years: local power brokers and armed group leaders have a say too and can torpedo a deal – especially by putting vulnerable infrastructure at risk, as Zawiya just demonstrated.”
The Zawiya attacks expose a clear flaw in Washington’s approach. A top-down political agreement may entrench Libya’s dominant power networks, while leaving other armed actors able to use violence to improve their bargaining position.
And if international actors continue to prioritise elite bargains over institutional reform, Libya does not need a return to war for the political process to fail.
“The danger is that international diplomacy ends up negotiating the distribution of power without changing the nature of that power,” El Gomati said.
“You can bring eastern and western elites into one arrangement and still leave Libya with armed actors that operate above civilian institutions rather than beneath them. In that sense, reunification can make the map look cleaner without making the state more accountable,” the analyst added.
“Otherwise, Libya risks unifying the ‘institutions’ while preserving the political system that made those institutions fail in the first place.”
Jonathan Fenton-Harvey is a journalist and researcher who focuses on conflict, geopolitics, and humanitarian issues in the Middle East and North Africa
Follow him on Twitter: @jfentonharvey
Edited by Charlie Hoyle