Libyan Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a prominent opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood, has defeated an Islamist legal effort to bankrupt him. The Libyan American Alliance (LAA) has been conducting a lawfare campaign against Haftar since 2019, admitting that it played “a major, active role in the lawsuits, with our legal and research team’s work collecting records of Haftar’s crimes, atrocities, and human rights abuses.”
Haftar proved that standing one’s ground works.
LAA’s loss marks a major setback for the post-9/11 Islamist lawfare campaign to silence counter-Islamists in the United States. Haftar has been a stalwart anti-jihadist leader since Libya’s civil war began in 2011.
Haftar’s opponents in the court cases had deep ties in the American Muslim Brotherhood. LAA leader Esam Omeish declared his support for the al-Qaida linked Shura Council of Derna in 2016 that Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) later besieged and defeated in 2018. Omeish sided with the jihadists in his social media. He also has built close ties with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan whose government supports the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Government of National Accord in Tripoli, Libya.
Omeish posted a graphic on his Facebook page in June 2020 that, among other things, mourned the death of Tawfik al-Zadam, a former member of the Benghazi Revolutionaries Council, which oversaw the Ansar al-Sharia terrorists responsible for the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in 2012.
Omeish is a Derna native who built an influential political network that enjoys access to high-ranking members of both parties. His lobbying led to the passage of the Libya Stabilization Act aimed at sanctioning aid to Haftar in September 2021, who turned to Russia after being forsaken by the U.S.
On July 29, 2022, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found Haftar liable by default for claims pursuant to the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (TVPA). The judge, however, reversed herself in April and tossed the suits with prejudice. She also said the court lacked jurisdiction over the suits.
Consequently, the cases of Elzagally, et. al. v. Hifter and al-Sayid, et. Al. v. Hifter cannot be refiled. The plaintiffs sought to obtain proceeds from the forced sale of 17 properties owned by Haftar and his sons in Northern Virginia.
Brinkema found Haftar liable by default in 2022, noting that “despite the gravity of the claims at issue, [the] defendant has steadfastly refused to sit for a properly noticed and scheduled deposition after several years of litigation.”
Contrary to reports in the media that Brinkema had found that Haftar was a war criminal, she had instead found him liable by default. She never ruled on the merits of the plaintiffs’ accusations.
The Elzagally plaintiffs had claimed that Haftar was accused of “indiscriminate bombing of civilians.”
“He has killed numerous men, women and children through bombings, and has tortured others,” the Elzagally plaintiffs said in their initial June 2019 filing.
The lawfare campaign against Haftar, which included a failed effort to seize property he owns in Northern Virginia to collect on damages, shows the lengths Islamists will go to punish their political enemies in the U.S. Lawfare has become a key means of political intimidation that the Islamists pioneered after 9/11 to put enemies and potential enemies in their places. Haftar proved that standing one’s ground works. Others intimidated by the same Islamists could learn from it.
LAA President Omeish expressed outrage on his Facebook page at U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s decision to toss the case against Haftar and promised to appeal. “This sudden decision was against all prior assertions in previous hearings over more than four and a half years that this law is eligible in the trial of Khalifa Haftar and moving through all stations of the judicial process.”
Haftar, a dual Libyan-American citizen, was among the Libyan Army officers who participated in the 1969 coup that ended the Libyan monarchy and brought Col. Muammar Qaddafi to power. He came to oppose Qaddafi and became an ally of the Reagan administration in its effort to remove the Libyan dictator from power. The CIA brought him to the U.S. where he spent two decades in exile and became an American citizen after Qaddafi threatened to kill him.
He returned to Libya after the revolt against Qaddafi. His hometown of Benghazi had him lead the armed resistance against the invasion by the same jihadists who killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012.
Haftar commands the Libyan National Army (LNA), a military force subject to the Libyan House of Representatives, the legislature of Libya resulting from the June 2014 elections that was exiled to Tobruk by Islamist forces. The Libyan House of Representatives promoted Haftar to the rank of field marshal in 2016. His men defeated the jihadists and freed Benghazi and eastern areas in Libya from their oppression. Three years later, LAA, which has deep ties to Islamists in Libya, filed suit against him.
Libya’s 13-year-old civil war has been particularly brutal with accusations of war crimes leveled on all sides. Amnesty International found evidence of war crimes being committed by forces loyal to the Omeish-supported Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli as well as by forces loyal to Haftar.
The LAA has worked with Faisal Gill, previously the spokesman for the American Muslim Council (AMC), to file lawsuits on behalf of several plaintiffs.
AMC was founded and run by Abdurrahman Alamoudi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who was convicted in 2004 of his involvement in a money-laundering plot to assassinate then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Gill got into trouble for failing to report his employment with AMC on a security clearance form in 2004. AMC was founded in part by Mahmoud Abu Saud, who helped Hassan al-Banna found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
Fortunately for Haftar, and for the people of both the United States and Libya, the LAA’s attempt to turn the U.S. court system into a battleground of the Libyan civil war has failed.
John Rossomando has written extensively about national security, counter-terrorism, and counter-Islamism.