Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been shot 19 times at his compound in the western Libyan mountain town of Zintan since his capture in 2011. Four masked men entered the premises after disabling the surveillance cameras. Approximately 90 minutes earlier, his guards had withdrawn from the area for unknown reasons. The attackers did not flee even after the shooting stopped. they left. There are no gunfights. No tracking. There is no claim of liability. The culprits disappeared into a kind of silence. In Libya, an investigation usually means that killers have nothing to fear.
Saif was the son of Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled Libya for more than 40 years until he was overthrown and killed in the 2011 revolution. Since 2014, the country has been divided between two rival centers of power. In the West, successive governments, the most recent Tripoli government led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, derive their authority from United Nations recognition. In the east, rebel commander Khalifa Haftar controls territory by military force with support from the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Egypt, while in Benghazi a paper government provides de facto military rule with civilian protection. Neither side is contesting national elections, nor do they intend to do so.
The murder clues tell their own story. This was not violence born of chaos. It was an operation carried out within a narrow framework by actors who understood Saif’s movements, his protection, and the informal rules governing both. His aides say this is an inside job. It took more than a weapon to reach him. It required access to his daily routine, his guards, and the layered system that secretly kept him alive. For many years, Saif has lived in varying degrees of obscurity, protected by local understanding and, at times, Russian-related security assistance. By the night of the attack, all that protection had been lifted. Those who planned the operation knew it would happen.
Motive alone is not proof. However, methods and abilities narrow the field.
When Abdelghani al-Khikri, the commander of Tripoli’s largest militia, the Stability Support Apparatus (SSA), was assassinated by a rival brigade last year, the results were immediately chaotic. Armed clashes have shut down large parts of the capital, and sectarian fighting has become intense and instantly legible. Zintan’s operations bear no similarities. That precision, and the silence that follows, reveals a different kind of actor. Critics, culprits, and inconvenient figures in Mr. Haftar’s orbit have often been quietly removed. Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a senior Haftar military officer wanted by the International Criminal Court, was shot dead in broad daylight in Benghazi in 2021. No full-scale investigation was conducted. Others disappeared in a similar manner. These operations do not require complete territorial control. They rely on networks, intimidation, and expectations of impunity.
None of this is evidence. Libya rarely presents evidence. Just the pattern. But patterns have infrastructure.
The political order built by Muammar Gaddafi did not disappear in 2011. It was dismantled and reused. Haftar took its fragments, its tribal patronage networks, security hierarchy, and militia economy, and reorganized it around his own family, centered on the SS Tariq bin Ziyad Brigades. The Tariq bin Ziyad Brigades are commanded by his son Saddam, who was recently appointed deputy commander-in-chief of the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army and is the most likely successor to his father.
Former supporters of the old regime were not excluded from the system, but they were not trusted within it. Pro-Gaddafi politicians and commanders were encouraged to return to Haftar’s rule, and since 2014 have been absorbed only with strict conditions. Figures like Hassan Zadma, who once worked with Saif’s brother Khamis’ infamous 32nd Brigade, were recruited for utility rather than being integrated as partners. When their presence threatened Haftar’s rule, they were marginalized or disbanded.
Saif himself was not even proposed for its conditional inclusion. He remained outside the system, tolerating, containing, and monitoring reminders of another line of succession that could never be completely neutralized. He had lived under constant threat of assassination since 2017.
Saif did not represent change. He represented an alternative. The danger he posed was structural. Haftar’s coalition is united by patronage rather than ideology, and patronage is unevenly distributed. Some tribes and armed groups receive more than others. Loyalty is transactional and tailored to what each faction can extract. If Haftar dies, those who feel little change will see his successor as an opportunity to renegotiate terms or switch sides to offer more favorable terms. The only figure with a history and surname symbolic enough to attract them was Saif, the heir to the very system that Haftar repurposed. He wouldn’t have dismantled it. He would have ruled it with the same logic of patronage and the same authoritarian reflexes. Same system, different family.
Therefore, it was very difficult for him to adapt. Forty-eight hours before his murder, Saddam Haftar held a secret meeting at the Elysée Palace in Paris with Ibrahim Dbeibah, the prime minister’s nephew and head of Libya’s national security apparatus. There was no official reading. Leaks suggest that Libya’s rival factions may form yet another transitional unity government, one that would formally bring the LAAF under state control, split ministries and institutions between the Haftar and Dbeibah families, and postpone elections that would take more than a decade. Libyans have not voted since 2014. That dissatisfaction deepened with each failed transition, each broken election promise, and each new interim agreement designed to keep the same people in power. The situation will intensify if the family separation is negotiated in Paris. Saif didn’t need a program to exploit it. All he needed was to be on the ballot. In the canceled 2021 presidential election, he outvoted Haftar by a wide margin. If the only viable candidates are authoritarians, the anti-establishment authoritarians will win. Once he was absorbed into such an agreement, he could not destabilize both sides, and he could not be left outside of such an agreement without becoming a vehicle for the anger of all Libyans against it.
Five days after Saif’s murder, his tribe buried him in Bani Walid, a town long associated with his father’s supporters. They wanted Sirte, the stronghold of his father’s tribe. Haftar’s forces rejected this. Condolences have been blocked. Public mourning was prevented. Saif spent 10 years being told where he could live, who he could meet and when he would be able to speak. Those who killed him decided where he would die. His rivals decided where to bury him. No one has been arrested. No one else would. In Libya, silence after a killing does not mean there are no answers. That’s the answer.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
