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发帖数: 29846 | 1 U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands
By JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms
shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials
later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the
weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and
foreign diplomats.
No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during
the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four
Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in
September.
But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about
the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants,
concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from
Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a
destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.
The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration
considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where
weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries.
The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began
shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer
encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But
they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya,
the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants.
The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya
during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms
shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in
spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to
Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line,
closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in
Libya, said a former Defense Department official.
The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States
demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing
with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest
movements while avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on
surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations,
but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American
interests.
“To do this right, you have to have on-the-ground intelligence and you have
to have experience,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser who
is now dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,
part of Johns Hopkins University. “If you rely on a country that doesn’t
have those things, you are really flying blind. When you have an
intermediary, you are going to lose control.”
He said that Qatar would not have gone through with the arms shipments if
the United States had resisted them, but other current and former
administration officials said Washington had little leverage at times over
Qatari officials. “They march to their own drummer,” said a former senior
State Department official. The White House and State Department declined to
comment.
During the frantic early months of the Libyan rebellion, various players
motivated by politics or profit — including an American arms dealer who
proposed weapons transfers in an e-mail exchange with a United States
emissary later killed in Benghazi — sought to aid those trying to oust
Colonel Qaddafi.
But after the White House decided to encourage Qatar — and on a smaller
scale, the United Arab Emirates — to ship arms to the Libyans, President
Obama complained in April 2011 to the emir of Qatar that his country was not
coordinating its actions in Libya with the United States, the American
officials said. “The president made the point to the emir that we needed
transparency about what Qatar was doing in Libya,” said a former senior
administration official who had been briefed on the matter.
About that same time, Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan
transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials
that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to
the new leadership, according to several American officials. They, like
nearly a dozen current and former White House, diplomatic, intelligence,
military and foreign officials, would speak only on the condition of
anonymity for this article.
The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid for
by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials said.
Qatar is believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms, including
machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it has demanded
reimbursement from Libya’s new government. Some of the arms since have been
moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical
jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country
, the former Defense Department official said. Others have gone to Syria,
according to several American and foreign officials and arms traders.
Although NATO provided air support that proved critical for the Libyan
rebels, the Obama administration wanted to avoid getting immersed in a
ground war, which officials feared could lead the United States into another
quagmire in the Middle East.
As a result, the White House largely relied on Qatar and the United Arab
Emirates, two small Persian Gulf states and frequent allies of the United
States. Qatar, a tiny nation whose natural gas reserves have made it
enormously wealthy, for years has tried to expand its influence in the Arab
world. Since 2011, with dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa
coming under siege, Qatar has given arms and money to various opposition and
militant groups, chiefly Sunni Islamists, in hopes of cementing alliances
with the new governments. Officials from Qatar and the emirates would not
comment.
After discussions among members of the National Security Council, the Obama
administration backed the arms shipments from both countries, according to
two former administration officials briefed on the talks.
American officials say that the United Arab Emirates first approached the
Obama administration during the early months of the Libyan uprising, asking
for permission to ship American-built weapons that the United States had
supplied for the emirates’ use. The administration rejected that request,
but instead urged the emirates to ship weapons to Libya that could not be
traced to the United States.
“The U.A.E. was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,” said one
former official. “We told them it’s O.K. to ship other weapons.”
For its part, Qatar supplied weapons made outside the United States,
including French- and Russian-designed arms, according to people familiar
with the shipments.
But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the emirates
could not be completely hidden. NATO air and sea forces around Libya had to
be alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters transporting the
arms into Libya from Qatar and the emirates, American officials said.
Concerns in Washington soon rose about the groups Qatar was supporting,
officials said. A debate over what to do about the weapons shipments
dominated at least one meeting of the so-called Deputies Committee, the
interagency panel consisting of the second-highest ranking officials in
major agencies involved in national security. “There was a lot of concern
that the Qatar weapons were going to Islamist groups,” one official
recalled.
The Qataris provided weapons, money and training to various rebel groups in
Libya. One militia that received aid was controlled by Adel Hakim Belhaj,
then leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was held by the C.I.A.
in 2004 and is now considered a moderate politician in Libya. It is unclear
which other militants received the aid.
“Nobody knew exactly who they were,” said the former defense official. The
Qataris, the official added, are “supposedly good allies, but the
Islamists they support are not in our interest.”
No evidence has surfaced that any weapons went to Ansar al-Shariah, an
extremist group blamed for the Benghazi attack.
The case of Marc Turi, the American arms merchant who had sought to provide
weapons to Libya, demonstrates other challenges the United States faced in
dealing with Libya. A dealer who lives in both Arizona and Abu Dhabi in the
United Arab Emirates, Mr. Turi sells small arms to buyers in the Middle East
and Africa, relying primarily on suppliers of Russian-designed weapons in
Eastern Europe.
In March 2011, just as the Libyan civil war was intensifying, Mr. Turi
realized that Libya could be a lucrative new market, and applied to the
State Department for a license to provide weapons to the rebels there,
according to e-mails and other documents he has provided. (American citizens
are required to obtain United States approval for any international arms
sales.)
He also e-mailed J. Christopher Stevens, then the special representative to
the Libyan rebel alliance. The diplomat said he would “share” Mr. Turi’s
proposal with colleagues in Washington, according to e-mails provided by Mr.
Turi. Mr. Stevens, who became the United States ambassador to Libya, was
one of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11.
Mr. Turi’s application for a license was rejected in late March 2011.
Undeterred, he applied again, this time stating only that he planned to ship
arms worth more than $200 million to Qatar. In May 2011, his application
was approved. Mr. Turi, in an interview, said that his intent was to get
weapons to Qatar and that what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from
there was between them.”
Two months later, though, his home near Phoenix was raided by agents from
the Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials say he remains
under investigation in connection with his arms dealings. The Justice
Department would not comment.
Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his
proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama
administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed
no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,
” he said. |
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