On my last visit to Tripoli, this past June, the city often felt as if it had left the protracted conflicts of Libya’s post-Qaddafi era behind. At night, families were out in the streets catching a respite from the heat of the day. The occasional blasts were not gunfire but fireworks at wedding celebrations. Incoming flights were carrying foreign businessmen and engineers working on contracts for the state oil company or other public bodies. The last serious clashes in the city, in May 2025, seemed to lie in the distant past. If something was weighing down the public mood, it was the relentlessly increasing cost of living. The inflationary shockwaves radiating out from Hormuz have compounded the dinar’s continuous slide against the dollar, leaving most Libyans unable to make ends meet with their public-sector salaries. Since I left, mounting temperatures have increased demand for electricity, and long power cuts—mostly caused by intentional load-shedding—have prompted sporadic protests. But that, after all, is a dynamic Libya shares with countries as varied as Bangladesh or South Africa.

And yet the semblance of normality is deceptive. Since 2020, when Turkish-backed western Libyan forces defeated an attempt by Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces to capture Tripoli with support from Russia and the United Arab Emirates, a fragile stalemate has kept Libya’s conflict frozen. Haftar’s forces control most of the country, including most of its oilfields, and sponsor their own government. Libya’s internationally recognized ruling body, however, is the Government of National Unity, led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, which owes its name to the UN-led process that created it in 2021, though it has long since abandoned any pretense of a unity government. Dbeibah holds varying degrees of sway in the northwest, most noticeably in Tripoli, where the state institutions that manage the country’s oil wealth are headquartered. Any ambitions to alter this situation by force have been discouraged by, respectively, the Turkish military presence in the northwest and a Russian deployment in Haftar’s territory.

Even as Libya remains divided between two competing governments, the families that rule them have brokered notable deals that bind them to one another. The two main figures in this connection have been Dbeibah’s nephew Ibrahim—the éminence grise behind the throne—and Haftar’s son Saddam, his octogenarian father’s designated successor and the de facto leader of his forces. Saddam, mustachioed and taciturn, is in his mid-thirties and notorious for his brutality and rapacity. (Born during the first Gulf War, he was named after the Iraqi dictator.) In 2022 Saddam and Ibrahim agreed on the appointment of a Haftar nominee as head of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) in Tripoli; in exchange, Haftar’s forces lifted a partial blockade on oil exports they had imposed in the months before. Since then, well-informed sources have told me over the years, the Dbeibahs and Haftars have carved up the boards of numerous state-owned companies and banks among themselves.

Today, however, there is growing uncertainty about whether that balance still holds. The Haftars have used the stalemate of the past years to vastly expand their arsenal, war chest, and foreign relations—far more than western Libyan forces have been able to do. Many close observers in Tripoli now see the endgame drawing close.

The latest threat to the country’s precarious status quo comes from a mediation effort led by Massad Boulos, Donald Trump’s senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos, a Lebanese Christian who moved to Texas as a teenager, had spent years working as a truck salesman in Nigeria before he joined the Trump administration in 2025, three years after his son Michael married Tiffany Trump. Since assuming his current position, he has made Libya one of his priorities. In the process, he has brushed aside a decade of largely fruitless efforts by the UN to consult widely among the country’s political class and develop the legal basis for a unified democratic government. Instead, he has tried to broker a power-sharing deal directly between the Haftar and Dbeibah families. Whatever the outcome, that initiative may well hasten the return to war.

Tripoli is a microcosm of the unresolved conflict. Ever since the demise of the Qaddafi regime in 2011, the capital has been the site of a long, deadly game of musical chairs among the countless armed groups that filled the vacuum left by his forces. Each of their periodic clashes, in constantly changing arrangements, has resulted in the elimination of one or more factions, with the victors sharing the spoils and growing stronger. Weak governments have relied on these groups for protection, according them official standing as state security forces and enabling them to gradually infiltrate—and eventually dominate—public institutions.

By the time Dbeibah took office in 2021, the participants in the contest over the capital had been reduced to around a dozen powerful armed groups. Dbeibah has excelled at playing these factions against one another, temporarily empowering some to eliminate others. In 2022, when a competing government backed by Haftar and some of the capital’s armed groups tried to oust Dbeibah, he warded off the challenge by relying on two forces in particular: a faction led by a former baker who went by the nickname “Ghnewa,” and a unit that controlled Mitiga, the city’s only functioning international airport, led by a Salafi sheikh named Abderrauf Kara.

In the years after Dbeibah prevailed, Kara increasingly lost his favor. Ghnewa, meanwhile, became the most powerful militia leader in Tripoli, building an empire of shell companies through which he siphoned funds from state institutions under his control. But his voracity inevitably brought him into conflict with the Dbeibah family, and on May 12, 2025, he was killed at the headquarters of the Tripoli-based 444th Brigade after imprudently accepting an invitation from its commander, Mahmoud Hamza, the head of military intelligence—and one of Dbeibah’s closest allies. Within hours Dbeibah’s forces had taken over Ghnewa’s territory.

The following day Dbeibah-aligned groups, emboldened by their success, tried to press their advantage against Kara’s militia as well. This time they met heavy resistance, and in a matter of hours forces hostile to the government from the neighboring city of Zawiya mobilized at the gates of the capital to join Kara’s side of the fight. It quickly became clear that the clashes risked provoking a war that neither side could rapidly win. Less than twenty-four hours after the fighting had begun, a fragile cease-fire took hold that persists to this day.

Critical to this yearlong détente has been Turkey, which has had a military presence in the capital—including at Mitiga Airport—since it intervened in 2019 to stop Haftar’s Tripoli offensive. Hoping to keep the peace, Turkey prevented the government from using Turkish drones in the clashes with Kara’s forces and subsequently brokered arrangements that kept both sides frozen in their positions. The underlying conflict remains unresolved, but for the past year most observers have assumed both that Turkey’s influence will help maintain the fragile balance and that Dbeibah and the commanders supporting him have no interest in resuming the fight unless they can be sure of winning quickly and decisively.

And yet throughout the past year both sides have been preparing for the next confrontation. Kara has rallied a motley crew of factions that had previously been defeated by Dbeibah’s current or erstwhile allies. Among them are remnants of Ghnewa’s group as well as a unit commanded by Haitham al-Tajuri, a Tripoli militia leader who is widely known to have defected to Saddam Haftar after Ghnewa expelled him from the capital several years ago. On my last two visits, people on different sides of the conflict told me that Saddam has sent al-Tajuri’s recruits to Belarus for training, then deployed them under Kara’s protection in Tripoli. The buildup has been going on for months: last November one contact recounted to me that his son had sought his permission to escape the boredom and lack of economic opportunities in Tripoli by joining al-Tajuri’s soldiers for a stint in Belarus.

In Dbeibah’s camp, political and military leaders downplay the threat posed by Kara and his allies, questioning their loyalty to Saddam Haftar. But on Dbeibah’s side, too, preparations for the next round of fighting are unmistakable. His two most powerful commanders, Hamza and Deputy Defense Minister Abdulsalam Zubi, have learned from past experience and, I was told, have bought large numbers of drones they can operate on their own, without needing Turkish approval. They also control the capital’s official international airport, which has been closed since two competing militia coalitions fought over it in 2014 but is expected to reopen in the coming months. When that happens, interlocutors in the Dbeibah camp believe, their adversaries in Mitiga will lose much of their leverage and either slide into irrelevance or be contained more forcefully.

Such talk will be familiar to anyone who has followed the prolonged elimination contest among armed groups in the capital. Few military commanders or close observers doubt that the next round will happen eventually. Now that the government’s adversaries are looking to the Haftars for help, however, the struggle over Tripoli has the potential to reignite conflict across the country as a whole.

These are the fraught circumstances under which Boulos is angling to secure another peace deal for Trump. Boulos first arrived in the country in July 2025, focusing on deals for American energy companies. This required securing funding from the Dbeibah government so that the National Oil Corporation could honor its commitments to its US partners. According to Libyan officials involved in the talks, Boulos soon found himself confronted with the tug-of-war over state finances between the Dbeibahs and the Haftars, whose parallel government has spent vast sums in total opacity by taking out debt from banks in the east covered by dubious treasury bills, printing counterfeit currency, and changing vast sums into dollars on the black market (which did much to push down the dinar’s value). 

In September Boulos brought Ibrahim Dbeibah and Saddam Haftar together in Rome for talks on a unified government. Making little headway, he instead pursued an agreement on a unified budget that, according to people with knowledge of the deal, would both provide funding for the NOC and send billions of dinars from Tripoli to construction funds run by the Haftars—in exchange for an end to their parallel spending. (The Haftars’ irregular financing schemes cannot work indefinitely, which gives them some incentive to agree on a joint budget.) Boulos brokered two such expenditure agreements, in November 2025 and April 2026. Neither shows any signs of being implemented.

This did not discourage him from pushing a more ambitious proposal. The details are blurry and constantly evolving, but its core is the formation of a unified executive that would appoint Saddam Haftar as president while Dbeibah would remain prime minister; several knowledgeable sources told me that Zubi and Saddam Haftar would jointly lead the supreme military command. It is tempting to dismiss the plan as a hopelessly superficial scheme that will evaporate at first contact with Libyan realities. But Boulos’s proposal should be taken seriously, if only for the extent of the damage it could do.

To many Libyans, the whole idea of the talks is offensive: they send the message that the country should be formally subject to family rule. On the Dbeibah side the negotiations are being led by Ibrahim, whose father, Ali, established the Dbeibah family’s reputation for graft by making a fortune leading a state body that managed large construction projects during the Qaddafi era. (One of the main contractors of this body was a state-owned company run by Abdulhamid). For his part, according to a recent UN report, Ibrahim owes much of his influence to his “direct collaboration with armed group leaders,” a field in which he “largely operates without any checks or balances.”

Saddam Haftar, in turn, owes his prominence first and foremost to his father’s violent rise over the past decade, in addition to his own ruthlessness. The unit he has commanded has been accused by Amnesty International of a “catalogue of horrors” against civilians. UN investigators recently identified him as the kingpin of networks that siphon off billions of dollars in state funds each year, including by smuggling fuel—which is heavily subsidized in Libya—outside the country to foreign buyers, and by shadow-operating a private firm that struck a shady deal with the NOC to export vast amounts of crude from the east’s oilfields. The capital, firepower, and political clout Saddam derives from these activities have helped him become his father’s anointed successor, bypassing his older brother Khaled, whom his father named chief of staff as a consolation prize.

Yet Saddam, like Khalifa’s other sons, is tainted in the view of many Libyans for benefiting from his father’s bloody successes. Sibling rivalries, moreover, have put further hurdles in his path: his brothers Khaled and Belgasem have, my sources told me, mobilized their political clients to oppose the Boulos plan. On June 29 Boulos hosted Saddam in Washington for a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to press the deal; the following day he tried to persuade Belgasem, who had traveled separately.

Saddam, by all accounts, is strongly in favor of Boulos’s proposal. It would allow him to cast off his thuggish reputation and hand him the highest national political office without the need for elections he could not possibly win. Far less obvious is what the Dbeibahs stand to gain. They would risk a rebellion from western Libyan forces who are not only opposed to the Haftars but understandably fearful that, sooner or later, Saddam will use his new position to monopolize power. The Dbeibahs’ hometown of Misrata, about 130 miles east of Tripoli, is also the base of several armed groups that weigh heavily in Libya’s military balance, and virtually everyone I spoke with there told me that the city would openly mobilize against the deal if it was indeed formalized. When Boulos visited Misrata in early July, local dignitaries conveyed the same message to him.

Conscious of these risks, the Dbeibahs have sent conflicting messages to their constituencies, at times dismissing the Boulos proposal outright or suggesting that they have been playing for time. It is unclear whether they are negotiating in good faith or are simply wary of alienating an in-law of the US president. They may not be unhappy about Misratan resistance to the proposal, which gives them an excuse for stalling. Yet advisers to the Dbeibahs certainly seem flattered that a senior US official considers them the Haftars’ equal and exclusive interlocutors, after years of convoluted, UN-led political processes led by bureaucrats with limited clout and involving a long cast of Libyan politicians of questionable relevance. They could allow themselves to be coaxed into a deal they do not intend to implement. Having triumphed over numerous powerful challengers over the past five years, they may also believe they will outsmart Saddam once the agreement is in place (and in the meantime, like everyone else in Tripoli, wait for his father to die). Both would be dangerous gambles.

From Gaza to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Trump administration has shown a proclivity for announcing flashy peace deals and an utter lack of interest in implementing them. There is no reason to expect that Libya, a country that matters little in Washington, will be any different. But in Libya the two sides have not fought directly for six years, which means that the Boulos initiative could do worse than merely fail to solve the conflict or further entrench its causes—it could unsettle the fragile equilibrium that has maintained the stalemate.

Saddam, eyeing the position of president, would suffer a serious disappointment if the talks fail, strengthening the position of advocates for a military alternative in the Haftar camp. If the negotiations do result in a deal, Saddam could use his official position to rally rivals of the Dbeibahs from western Libya around him. One military commander in Tripoli likened that scenario to the temporary power-sharing arrangement that prevailed between two Sudanese generals before they turned on each other in 2023, provoking that country’s devastating, ongoing civil war. In that case, given the Trump administration’s record, nobody would expect the US to intervene and stop the deal from unraveling. Even an agreement that remains a dead letter carries risks: Saddam could still claim the prerogatives offered to him on paper, and justify military action as necessary to take what is rightfully his.

Underpinning these scenarios are broader changes in Libya’s balance of power and regional relations. The Haftars and Dbeibahs both benefited from the informal arrangements they maintained over the past five years, but the former made out much better. Each year billions of dollars washed into the Haftars’ coffers from oil exports, fuel smuggling, printing counterfeit currency, and pillaging state-owned banks. In Tripoli, these schemes caused widening fiscal and balance-of-payments deficits, as well as a slide in the dinar’s black-market exchange rate, all of which harmed the Dbeibah government politically. The Haftars, meanwhile, went on a shopping spree, buying heavy military equipment from abroad, cultivating political loyalties across the country, and launching a grand reconstruction program run by Belgasem, who is said to hand out Rolexes to Western businessmen and diplomats. Many of the building contracts went to Turkish and Egyptian companies with close ties to their countries’ rulers, evidently in order to buy foreign support.

Over the past two years, meanwhile, Turkey has cultivated warmer relationships with the Haftars, above all because it wants the east-based parliament to ratify a maritime agreement it signed in 2019 with the government in Tripoli. The most alarming sign of those deepening ties has been a string of considerable Turkish defense deals with the Haftars. In April, Reuters reported that Saddam’s forces seemed to have acquired Bayraktar TB2 combat drones—the very drones that Turkey has at times restricted the Dbeibah government from using in battle. The only plausible targets of these weapons are the western Libyan factions that have enjoyed Turkish military support since 2020. The leaders of those factions are torn between the conviction that Turkey could not possibly have an interest in the Haftars seizing power—which would remove any need for a Turkish military presence in the country—and their suspicion that they can no longer count on their erstwhile protector.

In other respects, too, the international environment has become permissive toward renewed escalation. European states are mostly uninterested in Libya, with the exception of Italy and Greece, which have defined an EU policy that prioritizes migration control over everything else. In practice, this has meant cultivating close ties both with Dbeibah and Zubi in Tripoli and with the Haftars in the east, ignoring the military buildup on both sides, looking the other way as fuel smuggling drains the state’s coffers, and implicitly condoning the brutal detention of migrants in prisons run by the Tripoli government and Haftar’s forces alike.

The latest illustration of European collusion concerned the EU naval mission Irini, formed in 2020 to inspect ships suspected of violating the Libya arms embargo—a task for which it had a mandate from the UN Security Council. For months the Dbeibah government’s foreign ministry had demanded that the mission expand that mandate and also intercept ships believed to be smuggling fuel, but European diplomats cautioned that doing so would damage their relations with the Haftars. Instead, this past May, France and Greece—the current European members of the UN Security Council—allowed the council’s mandate for Irini to expire. And in a country where the biggest and glitziest new structures are military bases and where military power serves private interests, the EU recently funded the construction of yet another base, for a unit reporting to Zubi. The likely European response to renewed war would be polite silence, in expectation of an accommodation with whoever the victors are.

As both sides of the conflict build up their arsenals and collude in defrauding the state, they are inexorably pushing Libya toward crisis. Boulos, seeking to cement the status quo by entrenching the rule of the two families, may turn out to be the harbinger of its collapse. “If the Boulos initiative fails, the alternative will probably be war,” one person close to the Dbeibahs’ negotiators told me in July. War would also be the predictable consequence if Boulos succeeds.