Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. The word internment is also occasionally used to describe a neutral country's practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907.
Bani Walid is a city in Libya located in the Misrata District. Prior to 2007, it was the capital of Sof-Aljeen District. Bani Walid has an airport. Under the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, it was divided into two Basic People's Congresses: Dahra – Bani Walid, and Zaytouna – Bani Walid.
Slavery in Libya has a long history and a lasting impact on the Libyan culture. It is closely connected with the wider context of slavery in North African and trans-Saharan slave trade.
Libya is a transit and destination country for men and women from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. While most foreigners in Libya are economic migrants, in some cases large smuggling debts of $500–$2,000 and illegal status leave them vulnerable to various forms of coercion, resulting in cases of forced prostitution and forced labor.
The Libyan civil war or the 2011 Libyan revolution, also known as the First Libyan Civil War was an armed conflict in 2011 in the North African country of Libya that was fought between forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and rebel groups that were seeking to oust his government. The war was preceded by protests in Zawiya on 8 August 2009 and finally ignited by protests in Benghazi beginning on Tuesday, 15 February 2011, which led to clashes with security forces who fired on the crowd. The protests escalated into a rebellion that spread across the country, with the forces opposing Gaddafi establishing an interim governing body, the National Transitional Council.
Khamis Gaddafi was the seventh and youngest son of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and the military commander in charge of the Khamis Brigade of the Libyan Army. He was part of his father's inner circle. During the Libyan Civil War in 2011, he was a major target for opposition forces trying to overthrow his father.
Moussa Ibrahim Gaddafi is a Libyan political figure who rose to international attention in 2011 as Muammar Gaddafi's Information Minister and official spokesman, serving in this role until the government was toppled in the Libyan Civil War. Ibrahim held frequent press conferences in the course of the war, denouncing rebel forces and the NATO-led military intervention, often in defiant and impassioned tones. His status and whereabouts remained unknown following the Battle of Tripoli in which the Gaddafi government was overthrown, although there were several claims and subsequent refutations of his capture. Eventually, in late 2014, it was discovered he was in Egypt before he was deported and fled to Serbia. On 12 January 2015 Moussa Ibrahim spoke publicly by video link at a political event hosted at the Committee Rooms Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London from an undisclosed location, also the Director of Private Security Company.
The timeline of the Libyan civil war begins on 15 February 2011 and ends on 20 October 2011. The conflict began with a series of peaceful protests, similar to others of the Arab Spring, later becoming a full-scale civil war between the forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi's government and the anti-Gaddafi forces. The conflict can roughly be divided into two periods before and after external military intervention authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.
The Battle of Bani Walid was a military operation in the Libyan Civil War conducted by anti-Gaddafi forces in September and October 2011, in an effort to take control of the desert city of Bani Walid from pro-Gaddafi forces. It began following days of force buildup on the part of the attackers, as well as skirmishes around the city.
The 2012 Bani Walid uprising was an event which started on 23 January 2012 due to an incident in the city of Bani Walid in which the "May 28 Brigade" militia wished to arrest local men in unclear circumstances. The May 28 Brigade and their compound were then attacked by local fighters who then took control of the town. The incident, the combatants, and the motives of the two main belligerents — the May 28 Brigade and Brigade 93 — remain uncertain and contentious. The conflict was originally reported to be an attack by Gaddafi loyalists by local NTC officials. However, tribal leaders and residents have denied any affiliation with Gaddafi's remnants, stating their goal was the establishment of their own council in the city. Similarly Britain's Foreign Office has dismissed claims of this incident representing a pro-Gaddafi attack against the NTC, stating that this was a dispute between tribal leaders of the Warfalla tribe and the NTC.
Following the end of the First Libyan Civil War, which overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, there was violence involving various militias and the new state security forces. This violence has escalated into the Second Libyan Civil War (2014–2020).
Gaddafi loyalism, in a wider political and social sense also known as the Green resistance, consists of sympathetic sentiment towards the overthrown government of Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed in October 2011, and his Third International Theory. Despite Muammar Gaddafi's death, his legacy and Jamahiriya ideology still maintains a popular appeal both inside and outside Libya into the present day. Regardless, the Western sentiment has largely been that this continued support may contribute to some of the ongoing violence in Libya.
Large numbers of refugee kidnappings in Sinai occurred between 2009 and 2014. Refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea were transported to Sinai and held hostage by members of Bedouin tribes. Typically, the hostages were forced to give up phone numbers of relatives and were tortured with the relatives on the phone, in order to obtain ransoms in the range of $20,000–$40,000. If the families could not pay, the hostages were killed. The Egypt–Israel barrier, designed to keep out African migrants, caused the Rashaida traffickers to lose income from transporting refugees to the border, so they started to concentrate on kidnappings.
This is a detailed timeline of the Libyan civil war (2014–2020) which lasted from 2014 to 2020.
The Bani Walid detention camp is a secret prison in northwest Libya near the town of Bani Walid operated by human traffickers since at least 2009. Prisoners at the center often come from subsaharan Africa en route to Europe, and include adolescents and women. In order to extort their families, detention guards reportedly torture, rape, or threaten prisoners, who face similar conditions in other camps in the region. In May 2018, many Bani Walid prisoners attempted to escape, with most being shot or recaptured.
The Libyan Coast Guard is the coast guard of Libya. Organizationally part of the Libyan Navy, it operates as a proxy force of the European Union (EU) in order to prevent migrants from endangering their lives during attempts to cross Mediterranean sea by illegal means of entry the EU Schengen territory. As of 2015, the Libyan Coast Guard consists of over 1,000 personnel. Since 2015, it has received $455 million in funding from the EU. The Libyan Coast Guard is being accused of being involved in human trafficking, enslavement, torture, and other human rights violations.
The Western Libya campaign was a military campaign initiated on 4 April 2019 by the Operation Flood of Dignity of the Libyan National Army, which represents the Libyan House of Representatives, to capture the western region of Libya and eventually the capital Tripoli held by the United Nations Security Council-recognised Government of National Accord. The Government of National Accord regained control over all of Tripoli in June 2020 and the LNA forces withdrew from the capital, after fourteen months of fighting.
On 2 July 2019 at 23:30, during the 2019–20 Western Libya campaign, an airstrike hit the Tajoura Detention Center outside Tripoli, Libya, while hundreds of people were inside the facility. The detention center was being used as a holding facility for migrants and refugees trying to reach Europe when a storage hangar that it used as a residential facility was destroyed in an aerial bombing. The United Nations Human Rights Council stated that "It was known that there were 600 people living inside" the facility.
Meron Estefanos is a Swedish-Eritrean human rights activist and journalist. She first became known in the Eritrean refugee community in 2011 for helping people who had been kidnapped and tortured by human traffickers on their way to Israel in order to extort ransom money from their relatives, exemplified in the 2013 documentary film Sound of Torture. After the migrant and trafficking routes changed to Libya, her efforts continued and uncovered criminal networks reaching into Europe. As of 2022, Estefanos deplored that no traffickers had been brought to justice, with little interest from national governments and international organisations.
