Chemical weaponsLibyan Islamists tried to ship mustard gas to Syrian rebels

Syrian rebels parade with rocket mockup bound for Hamas, Hezbollah // Source: tanwer.org

In early March 2011 Israeli commandos killed two Hamas operatives near the city of Port Sudan in Sudan. These operatives were on their way back from Libya after negotiating a deal with anti-Qaddafi rebel leaders to sell Hamas and Hezbollah chemical warheads from Qaddafi’s arsenal. Iran was paying for the chemical weapons to be delivered to the two organizations. The deal involved 600-700 artillery shells filled with nerve and mustard gas which the rebels found in abandoned Libyan military bases in eastern Libya.

The Israeli attack – and two subsequent strikes in Sudan – put an end to this particular venture, but not to efforts by Islamic Libyan anti-Qaddafi rebels to help fellow Islamists.

Times have changed, though. In 2011, Iran supported both the coreligionist Shi’a militants of Hezbollah and the Sunni fundamentalist Hamas militants (Hamas HQ at the time was in Damascus).

Now, with the Arab world divided along Sunni-Shi’a lines, the Sunni Islamists in Libya support the Sunni rebels in Syria against the Alawite Assad regime, a regime dependent on the staunch support of its two closest allies, and the region’s two Shi’a powers, Iran and Hezbollah (the Alawaites a follow a branch of the Twelver school of Shia Islam).

In late 2011, Sunni Hamas moved its headquarters from Damascus to Qatar.

Libyan officials report that they have recently apprehended several members of a Libyan Muslim extremist militia planning to ship chemical weapons to anti-Assad rebels in Syria.

Arutz Sheva reports that a an Israeli Channel 2 TV quoted Colonel Mansour al-Mazini of the Libya army to say that the Islamists had been caught with a container of mustard gas. The gas was confiscated by Libyan soldiers.

The New York Times reports that Libya, with international assistance, finished destroying its mustard agent stockpile in January, but hundreds of tons of chemical-arms ingredients are still awaiting destruction in the country.

Since the killing of Col. Qaddafi in November 2011, Libya has not had a functioning government structure. The army, police, and security services have disbanded. Different parts of the country are ruled by different militias who are fighting each other over territory and the control of oil resources.

Western intelligence services say that dozens of Libyan veterans of the fight against Qaddafi are now in Syria fighting Assad.  

— Several reports and studies have raised questions about who was responsible for the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack on the outskirts of Damascus which killed more than 1,400 people. These reports say that the initial assertion that the Assad regime was behind the attack is open to question. See Seymour M. Hersh, “Whose sarin?” London Review of Books 35, no. 24 (19 December 2013): 9-12; and Richard Lloyd and Theodore A. Postol, Possible Implications of Faulty U.S. Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013 (MIT Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group, 14 January 2014); also see Theodore A. Postol, A Preliminary Analysis of the Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013 Against Unprotected Civilians in the Suburbs of Damascus, Syria, 17.477 (The Politics and Technology of Weapons of Weapons Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no date); and Richard M. Lloyd, Initial Investigation on Potential Chemical Weapons Found in Syria (no date).