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In the middle of a quiet Thursday afternoon, a succession of cars pulls up outside a modest suburban home. Out pile 20 agents of the city's General Security Directorate, thugs by any other name. Not gentlemen to stand on ceremony, they force their way in and ransack the place, smashing things up at will. The man who lives here is not exactly surprised by their appearance.
He's been arrested seven times before, thrown in jail, and been tortured at length. Never with regard to a specific charge. Visitations from Gaddafi's goons are an occupational hazard in his line of work. His name is Fatih Terbil, and he's a lawyer, a rather fearless one, a champion for human rights. In June 1996, over 1,200 prisoners in Libya's notorious Abu Salim jail were massacred.
For years, the relatives of those murdered have been seeking justice. A baby-faced 39-year-old, always dressed in a baseball cap and checked keffiyeh scarf, the recognizable Tabil has become something of a celebrity, a lightning rod for those aggrieved. He takes great personal risk in seeking answers from the authorities. Tabil's own brother, cousin and brother-in-law all died in Abu Salim, so he has a personal stake in uncovering the truth.
True to form, the goons break what they can: rough up Tabil's mother, then drag the lawyer away. Where ten, even five years ago, Tabil would simply be disappeared, now it's not so easy. By early 2011, the entire mood of the country, of the region, is changing. Arab leaderships are already succumbing to people power. The Gaddafi regime has suddenly got to tread carefully. So what has prompted his arrest this time?
Tabil and the Abu Salim protesters have made a bold statement of intent, chancing their arm. On Thursday, February 17th, 2011, they had planned to stage what they call a "day of rage." They can't appreciate it at this very moment, no one really can, but the ensuing unrest will spread like wildfire, swiftly becoming something else entirely: a full-blown rebellion against Colonel Gaddafi's rule. This is the final part of the Gaddafi story.
And this is Real Dictators. Amnesty International visited Abu Salim for the first time in the late 2000s. But for the most part, the Abu Salim massacre remained unknown to the wider world. Libyans knew about it after it became public in the 2000s, but for the wider world until 2011, it was largely unknown.
And because of the role of the families of the men who had perished in the massacre in the uprising in 2011, it was really a frame that a lot of journalists, including myself, used to explain not just the uprising that year, but also what had led to the uprising. It was a way to explain to the outside world what Libyans had endured during the 42 years Gaddafi was in power. Organizing a day of rage was a clever move.
for it was never officially an anti-Gaddafi protest. Ostensibly, it was an anniversary demonstration against the 2006 publication in Denmark of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Technically, the authorities can't argue with that. But Gaddafi and his inner circle are no fools. Tabeel is brought before Gaddafi's enforcer, the head of intelligence, his brother-in-law, Abdullah Sanusi. News spreads.
Outraged, a crowd is soon picketing the Benghazi courthouse, where Tabeel is being held. Gaddafi may publicly berate them as alcoholics and drug addicts, but he cannot escape the fact that this crowd includes professionals, doctors, lawyers, engineers. Bizarrely, Gaddafi's son Saadi, the soccer player, the one who demolished the Benghazi football club, is sent to the second city to act as peacemaker. But by now the crowd is at fever pitch,
Their actions will spark a chain reaction that will hasten Gaddafi's end. The story of the massacre at Abu Salim is a very powerful part of the narrative that drove the uprising in 2011. It was something that drew Libyans in. It was an emotional connection to the past. It was something that reminded Libyans of what the Gaddafi regime was capable of. There is a context to all that is happening.
Beyond Libya, by February 2011, the Arab Spring is now sweeping across the region. There are protests in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Mauritania. There's civil unrest in Morocco, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait. Mass protests in Algeria and Lebanon. In Yemen, the regime is being overthrown. In the fall of 2010, a revolution broke out in Tunisia to start. It was called the Jasmine Revolution.
It began over an individual who was a very poor street seller and he didn't have the proper documentation or at least he was accused of not having a proper documentation. And the police came in and destroyed his stand and what little livelihood he had. And his response to that was to pour gasoline over himself and kill himself.
And that sparked a revolt, a revolution in Tunisia demanding a total new socioeconomic and political system without corruption in which people could move ahead, get education, find jobs and so forth.
The revolution in Tunisia sparked similar revolutions in Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, and eventually Libya. People in Libya, young people in particular, had a very difficult time getting jobs. They had a pretty educated population. Large number of people, almost everyone graduated high school in Libya in those days. And a lot of people went to college, and then they got out of college and there were no jobs.
And there was no housing, which was another major factor because you had a lot of young people in Libya wanting to get married, but they couldn't get married because there was no place for them to live. In conjunction with those two major problems, you had high food prices and so forth. So you had people coming out in the streets in early 2011. For Gaddafi, it's coming mightily close to home. It's not just in Benghazi that protests are occurring.
Events from across the Arab world have emboldened the sense of discontent. Across the country, there have been demos happening in sympathy with the Arab Spring. Protesters have been waving the old pre-Gaddafi Libyan flag of red, green and black. It's been hidden for 42 years. There's a new word on the streets for Colonel Gaddafi. It's now uttered without the customary fear. For the first time, openly, there's talk of ousting the pharaoh. On February the 17th,
The appointed day of rage arrives, but not in the manner anticipated. The peaceful protest outside the Benghazi detention center is met with police violence, tear gas, batons and bullets. The touch paper has been lit.
Libya was kind of squeezed in between two revolutions, and I think it was sort of inevitable that revolution was going to spread into Libya. Gaddafi was going to brook no dissent. Gaddafi was not interested in mediating anything with the small protests that had erupted in Benghazi. Gaddafi only sought to use violence to suppress any kind of uprising.
So the suppression of the protests in Benghazi in mid-February 2011 was going to have huge consequences because this set off a ripple effect that had protesters throughout eastern Libya basically getting ready to turn to arms. Libya's revolution, it would very quickly morph into more of a civil war than either of the majority peaceful revolutions that we saw in Tunis and Cairo.
So although we categorized in the press Libya as one of the revolutions of the Arab Spring, it was a revolution of very different character. It was an armed revolution. Libya's revolution took place at the point of a gun. In response, mobs burn police stations and government buildings. There are two demonstrated deaths, a mass funeral, and a further cycle of violence that now seems to have the whole of Libya out on the street.
The Qaddafi regime totally misunderstood the origin, strength, and intensity of the neighboring revolution in Tunisia and certainly the demonstrations they were facing now in Libya. So their initial response was to lower customs duties on taxes, bring in more food, reduce the price on food staples, promise more housing, and a number of things, even promise to give every student in Libya a free laptop computer.
But it all proved too little too late because they didn't really get at the heart of what the people wanted. As the protests continued, eventually the regime began to respond with force. And the minute the regime turned to force, to quell the public demonstrations, the people changed from asking for social and economic change to asking for regime change.
And very quickly then, by mid-February, you had the beginnings of a full-scale revolt. In the past, news of such things would have been restricted. But in the 21st century, the age of the internet, the cell phone and the digital camera, Gaddafi can no longer control the narrative. Suddenly, out of the blue, Libya is convulsed, going up in flames. Gaddafi is shell-shocked, caught totally off guard.
And then the defections begin. Gaddafi's Justice Minister, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, joins the rebels. They declare themselves the NTC, the National Transitional Council, the only legitimate body for governing Libya. Others jump ship, including a senior military commander, Colonel Amar Gwida, who now fronts a rebel Tripoli brigade. Major General Fatah Yunus, head of Gaddafi's armed forces, a crucial ally of 40 years,
goes to help the rebels in Benghazi. This is no longer a protest, but an armed insurrection. And so barracks were overrun in Benghazi. Weapons were absconded by Libyans who'd soon become revolutionaries.
And then the Libyan war would begin spreading from the east. Cities like Tobruk near Egypt would fall. Benghazi would rather quickly fall. And then there would be a sort of a tussle back and forth over the oil installations of places like Brega and Ras Lanuf on the coast of central Libya, sort of midway between Benghazi and Tripoli.
And for quite a while through early and mid 2011, there was kind of a seesaw effect where Qaddafi's forces were pushing east and then the rebels were having some success of pushing Qaddafi's men back to the west towards Tripoli.
And when things really sort of hotted up for Gaddafi was also when rebels near Tunisia were able to get access to dormant arms stockpiles and actually launch a revolution around the hinterlands of Tripoli. Gaddafi sought no negotiation. He thought he could win this war through the use of writ large political violence.
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On February 22nd, just five days after the Benghazi uprising, Gaddafi makes the first of a series of bizarre TV appearances. He looks dazed, confused, affronted by the growing stream of betrayals. He physically shakes as he walks to the podium, carrying an umbrella. "We will march in our millions," he fumes, slamming down his fist.
The phrase "Aliway by Aliway" "Zenga Zenga" in Arabic becomes a mocking rallying cry, an internet meme, even a mashup in a rap song. Saif al-Islam is now seeming to take the lead. "We will not give up Libya," he adds.
We will fight until the last man." Gaddafi's troops start the fight back. Will the rebels receive any support from the outside? Will Gaddafi get any support from the outside? To the Western powers, involving themselves in another war on Arab soil does not sit easily. But on March 14, in the run-up to a G8 summit, they decide to act. President Obama makes a statement:
We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy and his forces step up their assaults on cities like Benghazi and Misrata. Gaddafi, only recently a friend of the West, reaches out to his new pals, but no one is taking his calls. The UN, via NATO, implements a no-fly zone, effectively enabling the rebels.
The West did massive about-face with Gaddafi because Gaddafi had become a useful person to the West in the sort of post-Iraq war on terror era. So Gaddafi had been someone who was interested in cooperating with the West in terms of the rendition of terror suspects and that sort of thing. Also, as you may recall, Gaddafi had made deals with Silvio Berlusconi's Italy to keep sub-Saharan African migrants in Africa.
There were various deals. There were interests over energy. There were interests over terrorism. There were interests over illegal immigration into Europe. Amid the fog of war, Musa Qusa, the butcher of St. James's Square, now Gaddafi's foreign minister, declares a ceasefire. Even though Gaddafi's forces are in the process of destroying Misrata, Qusa then suddenly turns up in London, whisked there by private plane.
before dashing to Qatar, where he will avoid charges of crimes against humanity. NATO's hands are tied by strict rules of engagement. There's concern about civilian casualties. But on May the 1st, Saif al-Arab, Gaddafi's youngest son and family members, are killed in an airstrike. This is a conflict that cannot be sanitized. Now what's interesting is that they not only turned the war around, but they continued to support the rebel forces through the summer.
And we have a situation where the initial writ of NATO was to take all necessary measures to protect civilians from attack. But at some point in March, April, that writ was reinterpreted in Europe to say regime change. We're supporting regime change.
And I've never been able to put a date on it or a place or a time. But certainly by April, at the latest, you were beginning to hear in Europe that this was really regime change or after and not simply protecting innocent civilians. Bizarrely, on June the 13th, Gaddafi appears at Tripoli's luxury Rixos Hotel, where he goes on television to play chess against the head of the Russian Chess Federation.
completely relaxed, as if nothing has happened. But it is the endgame. Soon his public broadcasts will only come by radio, as he goes on the run. "It is impossible to destroy this regime. How do you plan to destroy a regime emboldened by millions of citizens?" he declares in one of his final messages. He brags that the idea of getting rid of himself as leader is a bad joke. He denounces the rebels as dogs, as bisexuals.
The First Libyan Civil War, as it will become known, is brutal and horrific. Up to 25,000 are killed, double that are wounded. By August, the strategic towns around Tripoli are falling as the Gaddafi loyalist forces are pushed back. The battle for the capital begins. On August 23rd, the tyrant's famous Bab al-Aziziyya compound is attacked. Its walls crumble, its treasures are looted.
In the chaos, rebels ride around the streets in the colonel's golf buggy. Others ransack his Bedouin tent and his family's villas. Enterprising rebels carry off Aisha Gaddafi's mermaid-shaped sofa made of gold, her own likeness superimposed upon its face. Within 48 hours, Tripoli is in opposition hands, though Gaddafi himself is still nowhere to be found. And as the rebels consolidated their forces and began to advance,
a lot of people that were former supporters of the regime stepped away, either joined the rebel forces or in some cases simply left the country. So he was increasingly isolated in the final months of the fighting, basically more and more depending on his immediate family, particularly his sons, I think, to support him. And I'm not sure whether they were giving very good advice by then.
So he had to be feeling more and more alone and desperate and running out of options as to what he might do. There was one point in the late summer where he attempted to put an olive branch out and say that he would make some reforms or he would step down. But it was too little, too late. People weren't interested in anything at that point in Libya except him being gone. October 20, 2011.
Just after dawn, in the small city of Sirte on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, a mud-spattered Toyota Land Cruiser screeches through the rubble-strewn streets, weaving between bombed-out buildings. There is the incessant rasp of AK-47s all around, the whoosh of rockets, as bitter factional fighting reaches its crescendo. Up above, NATO fighter planes patrol the sky, launching ground strikes in support of the rebels of the NTC.
a stronger than usual resistance by loyalists attracts attention. It suggests that someone high up in the regime, a person of interest, is hiding in the area. Suddenly a loyalist convoy begins a high-speed breakout. Some 75 vehicles, heavily armed, tear out of the city, hoping to punch through the rebel cordon. It's a bold move, but a conspicuous one. A US drone tries its luck.
Then one of the French Rafale jets, circling above, looses off a missile. In the dirt and sulphur of the fireball, debris flies, smoke swirls, mangled car wrecks lie all around. Damaged but somehow not destroyed, the Land Cruiser in question slams to a halt and its stunned occupants stagger out. They cast around for cover, desperate to get off the road and out of sight.
Just across the way is a filthy sewage pipe. The dazed passengers hustle their VIP across to it and shelter him inside. For 42 years, Muammar Gaddafi, Colonel Gaddafi, has ruled Libya with an iron fist. His brutal authority has been synonymous with the country that now lies around him in ruins. He's been spotted. It's too late. Bullets ping around Gaddafi as he hunkers down. As his bodyguards are overcome,
The circling rebels drag the fugitive out of the pipe. They haul him onto the hood of a truck, then subject him to a protracted, sadistic assault. It's a vile and ignominious attack. At one point, Gaddafi is sodomized with a metal bar. It's a cathartic explosion of rage against their lifetime oppressor. Their bloodlust finally satisfied, the rebels take turns to put a bullet in him. Quite how many?
No one ever knows. Guns are fired skyward. Cries of Allah-u-Akhbar ring out. Gaddafi dies mere miles from where he was born, confused but defiant. To the last, he protests that he is their brother leader, the benevolent one. What did I do to you? His solid gold pistol is passed around, the ultimate war trophy. Some say it's the weapon which delivered the coup de grace. Gaddafi's son, Muhtasim,
has been in his father's party. He is led away and detained. In an online clip, he's pictured alone in a room, smoking. He's executed shortly afterwards. Gaddafi somehow seems to have believed himself to have been invincible, I think. And he was running scared. He'd run away from Tripoli around August of 2011 and had disappeared and had gone into hiding. Having had 40 years of complete and utter rule in Libya, I think it must have been a horrendous, shocking experience.
Later, Gaddafi's bloody, leaking corpse is taken to the town of Misrata, up the coast. Here it is laying on a filthy mattress in a walk-in supermarket meat freezer, his son Mutasim next to him. Thousands will file past to witness the demise of the tyrant for themselves. Some pose for selfies with the semi-frozen bodies in a mixture of ecstasy and sheer disbelief.
Libyans were just absolutely fed up with 40 years of this brutal, repressive, chaotic, arbitrary dictatorship.
People were living in a state of humiliation. Everyone had expected that there would be this major change. When Libya was brought in from the cold after 2003, there was this idea that the country was going to open up. And Libyans used to tell me at that time, "Oh, we should be the Dubai of the Mediterranean. We have a very small population. The country has a lot of oil wells." So there'd been this expectation that, you know, after years of sanctions and isolation, when people were living really tough, isolated, cut-off life, that things were going to get better.
And they didn't by 2011. Most ordinary Libyans were employed in the state sector, but that wasn't enough to make ends meet. So they would have to do a second job in the afternoon. They would be getting money off the black market. There were shanty towns around some of the big cities. People were living in this horrendous state in a country where oil wealth was starting to come back.
By 2011, when they'd seen what had happened in Tunisia and Egypt, and there was a different mood and a different air, people had the courage to actually take to the streets and step out and rise up against Gaddafi. And it is no coincidence that that really all kicked off in the east, in Benghazi, because Gaddafi had kept that eastern region deliberately underdeveloped. It was like a punishment because it was seen as a rebellious area. It's also the area where the monarchy had emerged from.
It was also the area where a lot of the Islamist opposition had been based in the 90s. So he really sort of kept Benghazi deliberately down and Tripoli was the center of everything. People from eastern Libya used to complain all the time that everything was in Tripoli. So even if you needed the most basic bit of paperwork done as a resident of Benghazi, you had to get on an airplane and go to Tripoli to sort it out.
And all of that resentment had been building. So there was this extra sort of narrative in Benghazi about being marginalised and being deliberately kept down. So it started in Benghazi and then everything just took off, basically. The story unfolded from there. But yeah, people had just had enough of four decades of rule by this brutal, bizarre dictator who used his country as a sort of melting pot, an experiment for all of his crazy ideas. Does he deserve to die like this?
Would it have been better for Libya, for the international community, to put him on trial, to seek answers, to hold him accountable? Difficult to say also. I mean, given lack of similar international cases. But I think overall, even though a trial of Gaddafi would have probably consolidated the polarization between those supportive of the regime or neutral and those against the regime.
I think it would have been much better if carried out within the framework of a fair justice trial within the law. That would have been, I think, more helpful to the Libyans because even though it would have consolidated the polarization, it would have also helped reconciliation. Unveiling the truth is important when it comes to reconciliation. Now Libyans are not able to adopt any approach when it comes to reconciliation.
I thought he was lucky. He's lucky. He's just got the bullet and died. That's it. My feelings are, no matter how awful he was, nobody deserved a death like that. Pretty brutal, horrendous death. Yeah, I think it would have been better for Libya had he gone through due process and been put on trial. Maybe it would have helped in some way or another. But no, I don't think he deserved the death he got. He was an awful, horrible dictator. That's not a way to deal with a situation like that.
I would say it would have been better if you put him on a trial, but what happened, happened. He deserves no less really, Gaddafi deserves no less. Gaddafi is denied a Muslim burial, which is meant to take place within 24 hours. He's interred in the desert, back from whence he came, in an unmarked grave. The Bedouins call the scorching desert hell. If Gaddafi was destined to be born and die in battle,
He will also begin and end his life in damnation. It's difficult to say whether Gaddafi realized in his mind that he had lost the support of the people.
If you go back to the very beginning of the Qaddafi regime, 1969 to 1971, 72, a lot of people began to characterize Qaddafi as crazy, mad, unbalanced, and so forth. Most diplomats that worked with him did not accept that characterization, nor did I at the time. But that characterization at the beginning of the regime, I think, is somewhat different from where he appeared to be in 2011.
By 2011, he appeared to be less in control of himself, almost unbalanced in many of the statements he made and just the way he looked and conducted himself. Someone even attempted a psychoanalysis of Gaddafi and he wrote a book in 1980s saying that Gaddafi was insane and mad or a psychopath. I don't really share such views. I think Gaddafi was not mad. He probably did mad things, but he wasn't mad.
Many of the things that he did or attempted were insane, but he wasn't insane. I think Gaddafi was a clever, very shrewd man. If you want my assessment, he's a psychopath. He's really a psychopath, power maniac, that he do anything Machiavellian to get what he wants, to do what he likes. The means doesn't concern him. What he cares about is power, that he has got everything and he do what he likes.
Clearly, I think he was not the man he was in 2011. He was not the man he was in 1969. One of the things that always impressed me about Gaddafi was his ability to read the people of Libya.
He would come up with some pretty crazy social, economic, political ideas over the years. But he always seemed to sense when he had gone too far and he would back off and create a new political body or blame the General People's Congress or General People's Committee or reshuffle things at the National Oil Corporation or the Central Bank or whatever.
But he always seemed to have a pretty good feel for how far the people of Libya would go with him. And whenever he felt he'd gone too far, he would back up. Now, I don't see any evidence of that happening in 2011. So it goes along with my thought process that he was increasingly unbalanced by that time. One thing is sure. Gaddafi dies a very wealthy man. His estimated personal fortune, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times,
stands at an estimated $200 billion. By this assessment he dies richer than Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Carlos Slim combined. Muammar Gaddafi rivals only John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie as one of the richest men ever to have lived. Forbes contests the figure, but does not dispute that he died fabulously blinged.
As events unfolded in the beginning of 2011 in Libya, WikiLeaks began to post diplomatic cables originating in the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli in 2008-2009, which evidenced in great detail the rivalry, greed, corruption, and extremism that Libyans in general had long suspected of the Gaddafi family, but that bad behavior had never been documented in this way. In the last days,
As the Brother Leda's family are scrambling across the border into Algeria and Niger, hordes of gold bullion are being shifted in secret flights to South Africa, their whereabouts currently unknown. In this series, most of the dictators we've covered have a clear and defined legacy. They exist firmly in the past. With Gaddafi, it's different. Ten years after his death, Libya is still in turmoil, riven by a decade of not one but two civil wars.
It's a land marauded by death squads and foreign mercenaries. The numbers of the missing mount up. Mass graves are still being unearthed. To be honest, I'm not sure Gaddafi has a legacy at this point. And I don't know that we'll know the answer to that question in Libya until the chaos, the instability and so forth is finally tampered down and we get a working government.
People were kowtowed and repressed, but I always remember a Libyan saying to me at the time of the revolution, you know, under Gaddafi, we were so embarrassed to be Libyan. We didn't like to tell people outside we were Libyan. But yeah, I think people felt degraded. They felt humiliated. They had this crazy leader who was an embarrassment.
We mustn't forget he had his supporters inside Libya as well, the people who were willing to fight till the end. He did have his support base inside Libya, but for most ordinary Libyans, yeah, it was embarrassing and it was horrendous living under that kind of regime for 40 years.
The Gaddafi years, it was just the strangest place I think I'd ever seen or been to. It was just totally eccentric, totally bizarre, very, very difficult to access, very difficult to do research in. So you'd take research trips there, but it was very difficult to talk to anybody once you were there. And the more critical your writing became, the more difficult it got to get access.
It was just a very bizarre place. Even walking around the streets, everything was painted in this regulation green of the Jamahiriya, the color that Gaddafi had chosen to represent his revolution, which is also the color of Islam. And so every doorway, shutter, everywhere you look was all painted this same regulation green. There was no advertising anywhere, certainly not my first visit. So there were these great billboards with revolutionary slogans or pictures depicting episodes from Gaddafi's life in the past. It was very odd.
Libya was so isolated from the rest of the world. It was so cut off from the rest of the world. Media access was so limited. Researchers and academics specializing in Libya had limited access to the country. So there was so much that we didn't know about Libya, that we didn't know about what was happening there, that we didn't know about the Libyan people, Libyan society.
So for much of his regime, Libya was Gaddafi and Gaddafi was Libya to the outside world. That's pretty much all the outside world knew. And it seemed that Gaddafi was quite content with that, that he would epitomize Libya to the outside world.
I think what people who got carried away with the idea of Libya's potential at that time, what they were overlooking was that you cannot lift the lid on 42 years of the Gaddafi regime and expect a functioning democracy to flower from that. Gaddafi's Libya was not a common garden variety dictatorship.
It was a very unique and idiosyncratic experiment in dictatorship. We're in trouble, honestly. Libya is in trouble. We have this armed militia all over the country. They're taking the country. And they don't concern about democracy. They don't concern about prosperity. They don't concern about the future of our country. Not education, nothing.
They care about their own interests. They're not honest. They're just thuggery. I mean, like thugs, they have arms. And they destroyed the country. Is life better after Gaddafi or before Gaddafi? I would say, despite everything, it's 80% better, right? That he's away, that he's out of the picture, that his supporters are out of the picture. It's 80% better now than it was before.
I know there are so many bad things still existing, so many difficult things we have to work with and we have to grapple with, we have to rectify, but it will not be the same as if Gaddafi was there. We need time to organize and to rearrange and to remodel this country.
It's going to take some time, but I think it is still a success story as far as the Arab Spring is concerned. And it has the potential of becoming a normal country. Libya's image in the international press is now one of refugees, of rubber dinghies in the Mediterranean, and old stereotypes. The historic divisions remain.
Libya is effectively split in two along the old fault line that separates Tripoli from Cyrenaica. While Tripoli seems to be recovering economically, under a UN-backed government of national accord, Benghazi lies in ruins. At one point the old eastern capital was controlled by the violent fanatics of Islamic State, ISIS. Its fighters flocked from Tunisia, Yemen, Mali, Niger and Sudan.
Today, though, a shaky ceasefire holds. Turkish and Russian-backed militias still roam the country. The East is currently under the control of a warlord, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and his National Libyan Army. Haftar, who fought off ISIS and later besieged Tripoli, is a former Qaddafi hardliner who turned against his leader after Libya's disastrous war in Chad in the 1980s. He makes noises about a run for Libya's presidency.
And there is another figure, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Colonel's son. Saif is still in hiding, wanted by the International Criminal Court, but he's not ruled himself out of a return to politics.
I think there's a yearning for security. You used to have one brutal dictator, now you've got militias everywhere who are able to operate at whim and do whatever. The country is in really dire straits on every level. So I think there's a yearning for security, but I don't yet see that that's tipped into a nostalgia for having Gaddafi back. I don't think Libya has gone that far yet. That's not to say that might not happen, but no. I think his rule was sufficiently awful and sufficiently brutal for people not to want to see the return.
He may be dead, but in Libya, it's impossible to deny that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is still very present. This is the final episode of Real Dictators Season 2, but we will return. Season 3 will feature Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the extraordinary story of Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, as well as other tales of tyrants' past. In the meantime, we're launching a brand new weekly history show
Search Short History Of wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the trailer. History is full of the extraordinary. Civilizations like the Mayans and the Aztecs. Remarkable peoples like the Vikings and the ancient Egyptians. Fascinating figures steeped in mystery like the samurai and the Knights Templar.
Then there are events that changed everything. The California gold rush. Skilled people at the time made a dollar and a quarter. Miners in the gold fields in California made $20 a day. Gold is something you can't keep quiet. The Mount Vesuvius eruption. The sky became dark like night. The cloud had covered the sun. Can you imagine the sense of panic that these people are feeling? This was a hellscape. Chances are you've heard of these things.
but ever wish you knew more? My name is Paul McGann and I'm the host of Short History Of, the new show from award-winning podcasters, Noisa. Each Monday, we'll transport you back in time, giving you a front row seat as history's most incredible moments play out right before you. You'll be setting sail in Blackbeard's pirate ship,
Blackbeard was surrounded by sparks and smoke like some kind of demon-like creature and looked like one of these Mad Max movies. He and his crewmen had grenades and weapons and were dressing in clothing of the wealthy passengers they captured like war trophies. Watching on as the Cold War hots up. We're talking about a bomb that is unimaginable. 50 megatons. It was so large that some people thought it might even set the Earth's atmosphere on fire.
Some episodes might sound familiar. Other times you won't believe your ears as you find yourself immersed in a barely believable tale that you've never heard before. For your weekly dose of history, find Short History Of wherever you get your podcasts or listen at noiser.com.