East Libyan planes strike rivals for fifth day near oil ports

East Libyan forces carried out a fifth day of airstrikes on Tuesday against a rival faction that overran the major oil ports of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, officials and residents said.
The eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA) and the Benghazi Defense Brigades (BDB) have been battling for control in Libya’s eastern Oil Crescent since Friday, threatening production from oil ports that the LNA seized in September.
A senior official from Libya’s National Oil Corporation said on Monday that production had dipped by 35,000 barrels per day (bpd) due to the latest unrest, leaving national production at just over 660,000 bpd.
OPEC member Libya was producing more than 1.6 million bpd before a 2011 uprising led to political turmoil and conflict that slashed output to a fraction of earlier levels.
LNA spokesman Ahmed Al-Mismari said the latest strikes had hit targets from the Benghazi Defense Brigades (BDB) at Ras Lanuf and at Nawfiliya, 75 km to the west.
“It forced them to mobilize ambulances to carry their dead and wounded to the west,” he said.
A resident and a military official in Ras Lanuf confirmed the airstrikes, but said there had been no change to the positions of the rival factions on the ground.
A social media account used by the BDB said the group “is protecting all its positions, and controls the area from Nawfiliya to beyond Ras Lanuf.”
Since the BDB attacked Friday, a front line has formed at the center of the Oil Crescent, between the ports of Ras Lanuf and Brega. The LNA still controls Brega as well as a fourth port, Zueitina, which lies to the northeast.
It says it is using airstrikes to prepare the ground for a counter-attack.
The LNA ended long blockades at Zueitina, Ras Lanuf and Es Sider when it took them over seven months ago, leading to a sharp boost to Libyan oil production. Es Sider and Ras Lanuf were badly damaged in previous rounds of fighting and are still operating well below capacity.
In an unrelated development, fighting between rival people-smuggling gangs on Libya’s Mediterranean coast has killed 22 people, the International Organization for Migration said on Tuesday.
The dead were thought to be migrants rather than smugglers because they were sub-Saharan Africans, IOM spokesman Joel Millman said. More than 100 people were wounded, he told a news briefing in Geneva, citing information from colleagues in Libya.
The latest deaths come in addition to the 140 bodies found on Libyan beaches so far this year, while there have been 477 deaths at sea on the route from Libya. So far this year 15,760 migrants have arrived in Italy, up from 9,101 in the same period of 2016, while almost 3,000 migrants have been rescued at sea and brought back to Libya, Millman said.
The number of migrants setting off for Italy by boat from Africa has risen more than 50 percent so far this year, after half a million people arrived during the past three years.
Italy is promising to send more migrants who do not qualify for asylum back home, either by force or with their consent.
“This is creating all kinds of activity in the smuggling industry, and apparently that activity has reached the level of violent shootouts that left 22 killed in the last couple of days,” Millman said.
He also said 62 Syrians also showed up among migrants arriving in Italy. Syrian refugees have mainly gone to Europe via Turkey and Greece, a route that was effectively blocked last year by a deal between the European Union and Turkey. Fewer than 200 Syrians made the trip from Libya to Italy last year.
“So with 62, obviously we are not setting records, but it could be a shift showing that that traffic has come back across North Africa, maybe coming to Libya again,” Millman said.

Source: Arab News