Guards repel assault on Libya's biggest oilfield

TRIPOLI/BENGHAZI, Libya — An armed group attacked Libya's largest oilfield but was repelled after clashes with its protection force on Monday, while fighting escalated in eastern strongman Khalifa Haftar's bid to capture the capital Tripoli.

The state oil company NOC said unknown gunmen fired a rocket propelled grenade at a control station of El Sharara oilfield, triggering fighting with its guard force, which eventually repelled the attackers, an oil engineer there told Reuters.

There were no casualties among oil workers and production was unaffected, the NOC said in a statement.

Oil output in OPEC member Libya has been repeatedly disrupted by factional conflict and blockades since the 2011 uprising that toppled veteran dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

Haftar's three-week-old offensive to seize Tripoli, seat of Libya's internationally recognised government, has sharpened a power struggle that has fractured Libya since Qadhafi's fall. 

The assault by the Haftar-led Libyan National Army (LNA), which is allied to a parallel government based in the eastern city of Benghazi, stalled on Tripoli's stoutly defended southern outskirts last week.

But fighting intensified again on Monday, with heavy shelling, small-arms fire and a warplane all heard in the centre of Tripoli coming from southern districts, residents said. No more details were immediately available. 

The LNA carried out an air raid overnight on at least one target south of Tripoli, residents said, though it was less intense than one on Saturday night.

The battle for Tripoli has killed 345 people, 22 of them civilians, a World Health Organisation official said on Monday. A Tripoli hospital was evacuated after shelling shattered some windows, he added in a tweet.

The affiliation of the gunmen who targeted El Sharara was unclear. The oilfield is in a southwestern region held by forces loyal to Haftar. His forces have swept westwards since last year are now concentrated in the northwest to try to take Tripoli.

State guards and local tribesmen shut down El Sharara in December to press financial demands before allowing production to reopen in March. The field, operated by the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and foreign partners, has been pumping crude only intermittently due to blockades mostly by armed groups and other incidents.

UN officials say Haftar is backed militarily by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which want to build him up to help fight and neutralise Islamist militants in the region. His opponents see him as a budding new autocrat in Qadhafi’s mould.

But divisions among European and Gulf nations over how to deal with Haftar have scuppered UN efforts to broker a ceasefire between the main armed factions to prepare Libya for elections to help reunify the country.

France and the United States been accused by Prime Minister Fayez Al Sarraj’s government in Tripoli of playing both sides since Haftar launched his offensive. Paris has backed Haftar’s efforts to curb radical Islamists while at the same time formally supporting Serraj’s UN-recognised government.

Serraj is backed emphatically by Italy, the former colonial power which has oil assets in Libya, and Turkey, two among the few countries that have kept their embassies open in Tripoli. Qatar, a Gulf rival of the UAE, also supports Sarraj.

UN Libya peace envoy Ghassan Salame warned nations tempted to continue supporting Haftar that he was no democrat and his political agenda was not favoured by most Libyans.

“He is no Abraham Lincoln, he is no big democrat, but he has qualities and wants to unify the country,” Salame told France Inter radio, mentioning the revered 19th-century American president who steered the nation through its Civil War, preserving the union, and abolished slavery.

Salame said his peacemaking effort was suffering from deep divisions within the UN Security Council that led to a British draft resolution on stopping the fighting over Tripoli being blocked last week by Russia and the United States.

France was criticised by analysts and diplomats earlier this month for holding up a European Union communique that it deemed to be too one-sided against Haftar. The statement was eventually approved after additions and amendments to the text, although it remained critical of Haftar’s advance on Tripoli.