TRIPOLI, Libya — Mohamed Hossain Akari was at home with his parents one day last week when armed robbers drove up and started shooting — an all-too-familiar attack these days in Libya’s increasingly violent capital city.
Akari, 26, fired back with the AK-47 assault rifle he keeps at home, killing one attacker and wounding another. He jumped into his car to report the shootings but said he drove right past the police station and headed instead to the capital’s real center of justice: the Supreme Security Committees, a private militia that controls the streets of Tripoli.
“We all know the police don’t have the power to protect me,” he said.
Akari speaks from experience. He is a police officer.
Akari is now detained in a prison run by the militia while a judge considers whether to bring charges against him.
“Here,” he said, “I feel safe.”
Two years after the Arab Spring revolution that toppled longtime dictator Moammar Khadafy, and one year after the assault on a U.S. compound in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others, Libya’s fragile government has little control over the nation’s security.
Even minor disputes escalate into frequent gun violence on the streets. Kidnappings and armed robberies are increasing, and government officials and others have been assassinated with guns and bombs. Militants and arms smugglers easily cross poorly protected borders shared with Niger and Chad.
As the postwar government struggles to rebuild after 42 years of dictatorship, it has left security primarily in the hands of hundreds of private militias, which are far larger and better armed than the country’s poorly trained and equipped police and army.
The militias, most of which were formed to oust Khadafy in the 2011 revolution, range from ragtag outfits of a couple of dozen men to organized forces of thousands of fighters.
During the revolution, they sprang up in villages, towns and cities across this country of 6.4 million people. Mechanics, merchants and farmers formed militias based on family, tribal, neighborhood or religious ties. They took weapons from Khadafy’s vast arsenals and became a wildly diverse network united only by the goal of removing Khadafy.
After the dictator’s death in October 2011, many militia fighters — suddenly regarded as war heroes and liberators — never laid down their weapons.
Many still fight — with guns blazing — over long-standing rivalries. Some have morphed into criminal gangs, some are religious extremists. Many are a mix of everything — cops and robbers, patriots and jihadis — making it hard to identify which are helping Libya’s post-revolutionary transition and which are hindering it.
Perhaps the most powerful man in this baking-hot capital city is Hashim Bishr, 42, the head of the SSC in Tripoli. Charismatic and wearing military fatigues with the sleeves rolled up, Bishr said he earned a degree in library science at a Libyan university and later studied Islamic law, known as sharia, in Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Tunisia.
He greeted guests in a nearly empty office next to a runway on a sprawling complex in Tripoli that was a U.S. Air Force base from 1948 to 1970. The huge base, seized from Khadafy’s forces in the civil war, is headquarters for the SSC, which runs its law enforcement operation here and a prison with 260 inmates — including Akari.
Because the police are so weak, Bishr said, the SSC was the only option for filling the “security vacuum left after the war.” He said the SSC gets requests to do everything from investigating kidnappings to mediating between feuding husbands and wives.
Many people interviewed in Tripoli said that even if they fear and dislike the militias, they accept them as the de facto authority. In an emergency, many said, they are more likely to dial 1515 to reach the SSC than to dial 193 to reach the police emergency line that is often out of service.
“I wish nobody would come and knock on my door and ask for help,” Bishr said, constantly reading and responding to messages on his phone. “But the police are not doing their job, so I have to.”
The government is trying to bring some of the militias under government control. It is now paying salaries of about $5,700 a year to thousands of fighters whose brigades are nominally joined under two large umbrella organizations, the SSC and Libya Shield.
