CIA-Backed Militias Linked to Benghazi, Libya Attack

A lengthy front-page report in the Sunday edition of New York Times provided additional confirmation that the attack on a US facility in Benghazi, Libya in September 2012 was the outcome of the Obama administration’s use of Wahhabi Salafi terrorists in its war against the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
The Times article, based on dozens of interviews in Benghazi, asserts that the attack that killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, was carried out by Libyans who had previously been allied with the US government in the 2011 war that overthrew and murdered Gaddafi, the World Socialist Web Site reported.

Times correspondent David D. Kirkpatrick wrote that the attack was not organized by the Al-Qaeda or any other group from outside Libya, but “by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi”.

The main US facility in Benghazi was not the small mission building in which Stevens and an aide died, but a larger unmarked compound described as “the Annex” that housed at least 20 people from the CIA. Two security guards at this building were killed by a mortar barrage eight hours after the attack that killed Stevens.

The disparity in staffing between the CIA compound and the diplomatic outpost is telling that the main mission of the US government in Benghazi was the CIA operation, which had spearheaded by the campaign against Gaddafi in 2011, but by 2012 was devoted to a different and even bloodier operation, recruiting manpower and supplying weapons to the Wahhabi Salafi and Takfiri Jihadists fighting against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

“There is every reason to believe that the robust CIA presence in Benghazi after Gaddafi’s fall also involved more than just surveillance. Libyan Islamists make up the largest single component of the ‘foreign fighters’ who are playing an ever more dominant role in the US-backed sectarian civil war being waged in Syria with the aim of toppling the government of President Bashar al-Assad,” the World Socialist Web Site report said.

The website said these foreign fighters have been infiltrated into Syria from as far away as Chechnya and Pakistan.

The Times article identifies one militia leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala, as a principal figure in the Benghazi attack, although Khattala has admitted only being present outside the building at the time. He also names another militia leader, Abdul Salam Bargathi, head of the Preventive Security Brigade, as the man who told the Libyan guards at the US facility to flee when attacked.

Both these individuals, and many others named in the Times account, worked in close collaboration with the CIA and Stevens personally during the six months of the NATO bombing and seesaw fighting that culminated in the overthrow of the Libyan government and the lynch-mob murder of Gaddafi.