As Islamic State forces lose ground in Iraq and Syria, fighters loyal to the group have seized territory in oil-rich Libya, levying taxes at gunpoint and creating sanctuaries to launch possible attacks in North Africa and Europe, U.S. officials say.
The Pentagon has sent special operations teams to gather intelligence and launched at least one airstrike. But the White House so far has resisted calls from some senior aides to escalate the U.S. military role in another Muslim country to counter the potential threat.
Spy satellites and reconnaissance drones have shown the militants building fortifications around Sirte, on the central Mediterranean coast, and training bases for foreign fighters farther inland, the officials said.
A U.S. intelligence estimate last week concluded Islamic State has attracted more than 5,000 fighters in Libya, double the official estimate last fall, making it the extremist group’s largest and most potent affiliate outside Syria and Iraq.
Islamic State threatens to gain a “stranglehold” in Libya and “access to billions of dollars of oil revenue,” Secretary of State John Kerry said, one of several alarms the administration has raised in recent days.
He spoke at a conference last week in Rome where the U.S. and 22 other nations agreed to support the formation of a unity government in Tripoli, the capital, in an effort to restore stability and take on the militants.
Libya has had no functioning central government since the NATO bombing campaign helped a popular uprising oust ruler Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.
It has faced political chaos and a civil war ever since, with two rival governments battling for power and squabbling militias exploiting the power vacuum.
“In the absence of a true government, (militant groups) have grown unchecked,” said a U.S. defense official, not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s like Syria all over again.”
Islamic State “has a bad habit of growing in places that are ungoverned,” Tina Kaidanow, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator said last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
She cited an urgency at the White House and its allies to move quickly before the group expands beyond its current foothold, which extends about 100 miles east and west of Sirte.
“We don’t want to see the growth of (Islamic State) outpace what will be a long-term effort to build out a successful Libyan government,” she said.
The group’s rise comes as foreign fighters from Tunisia and elsewhere in Africa have moved to Sirte and other strongholds in Libya, rather than to the war zones in Syria and Iraq, where the militants have suffered several military setbacks in recent months from the U.S.-led coalition.
The Pentagon wants to ensure “Libya not get on a glide slope” where it “gathers a piece of territory from which it’s able to tyrannize people and plot operations elsewhere,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said last week at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
Any military intervention probably would be led by France and Italy, the former colonial powers. Options include sending troops from Italy to help protect the new government, using U.S. and French advisers to train Libyan counterterror forces and launching airstrikes.
British and U.S. special operations teams and intelligence services have focused on identifying Islamic State leaders, assessing their networks and strongholds, and reaching out to local militias willing to fight against them, officials said.
But intelligence officials said the militias are unreliable, poorly organized and divided by region and tribe, as well as by outside support, the same complex problem that has crippled U.S. attempts to unify opposition groups in Syria.
Islamist and Berber militias in the west, assisted by Qatar, have engaged in brutal clashes with more secular forces in the east apparently led by former Gadhafi loyalists and supported by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Islamic State fighters have attacked oil fields and installations in some cases, hobbling a major source of income for the fledgling government. Oil production has fallen in half from a year ago, according to the state-run National Oil Corp.
The only known U.S. airstrike was in November, when F-15 fighter jets killed a senior Islamic State commander known as Abu Nabil near the eastern city of Derna. Officials said the Iraqi national narrated a video released last year that showed militants beheading 21 Egyptian workers, all Coptic Christians, in Libya.
Some national security experts warn that Islamic State is quietly taking root in Libya much as it did in Syria prior to the militants’ blitz across Iraq in early 2014, seizing cities, oil fields, military bases and banks.
“I think its increasingly a national security priority for us to limit the spread of (Islamic State) in Libya given the expansion that’s been seen recently,” said Ben Fishman, former top National Security Council official on North Africa affairs.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, urged the White House to launch airstrikes against the militants’ leaders. He warned that Islamic State could use Libya “as a gateway into southern Europe.”
