Government Issues Order to Disband Libya Forces

The order came in response to an upwelling of public anger at the militias after an armed group assaulted a United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi earlier this month, killing Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Exasperated by the interim government’s failure to curb the militia brigades, thousands of civilians swarmed into the headquarters of several of them in Benghazi on Friday and forced their fighters to scatter — in effect, an angry mob demanding law and order.

Mohamed al-Magarief, the president of Libya’s national Congress and the interim head of state, apparently sought to both appease public anger and capitalize on it with the order to withdraw and disband. Previous interim leaders have issued similar calls before without success, in part because the Libyan government still depends on many of the self-organized militias to act as its military, police and national guard.

Hundreds of such armed groups were formed during and after the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, typically armed with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and truck-mounted artillery captured or looted from the colonel’s armories. Since his overthrow the groups have been both the main guardians of the social order in Libya and the chief menace to it.

As recently as Friday the Libyan Army’s chief of staff, Yousef al-Mangoush, urged protesters not to molest the many militias that were now officially authorized and ostensibly operating under the army’s direction, because the government still needed them to control the country.

But it can be difficult to tell which militias are authorized and which are not. The authorized militias usually still report to their original commanders, and those commanders may or may not follow orders from the Defense Ministry or act on their own. The fighters and their commanders may say sometimes that they are part of the Libyan government and other times that they are outside it.

On Friday, the mob in Benghazi first marched against the Islamist militia that is believed to have led the attack on the American mission, but that militia, known as Ansar al-Sharia and opposed to democracy, also proudly plays a role in local civic life by guarding a major hospital.

The mob’s next target was the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade, which has Islamist ties but a more moderate and democratic character. That brigade is authorized, a mainstay of security in the area, and an ally of the militia that came to the defense of the American mission. Members of Rafallah al-Sehati stood with the army chief of staff at the Benghazi airport when he spoke in defense of the authorized militia. But the protesters attacked the brigade anyway, and at least four people were reportedly killed before its members fled.

Only a minority of the militias openly flout the government’s authority the way Ansar al-Sharia did, and the government’s order on Sunday applied only to the unauthorized groups. The Libyan state news agency said that the army would “use force to carry out these orders.” But it was unclear whether that referred to the use of a militia nominally under the Defense Ministry’s control or to some other new and more professional force.

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Cairo.