Weekly Eye on ISIS in Libya Update – January 24, 2017

ISIS in Action

On 16 January, Brg. Mohammed al-Ghosri, who was last week promoted by the GNA Minister of Defence (MoD) from Head of the BM Operations Room to MoD spokesperson, announced that more than 2,500 bodies of ISIS fighters had been collected from Sirte. He added that hundreds of other bodies may still be under the rubble. Ghosri said that no ISIS members escaped from Sirte during the 8 month siege of the city by BM forces. He concluded that those ISIS fighters who are currently regrouping south of Sirte and in southern Libya were already located out of the BM control perimeter when the Sirte operation began. Ghosri also said he thinks that ISIS proliferation in southern Libya is a real threat, and that a major war in southern Libya is possible if the political situation in Libya remains in limbo.
On 17 January, LNA forces in Nawfaliyah, a town west of Sirte, captured Emhemmed Emrajaa al-Hamali, a senior Libyan ISIS commander from Sirte. Al-Hamali was taken by the LNA, along with his son, to Grenada prison in Benghazi. Al-Hamali was reportedly responsible for attacking Sirte’s Ibn Sina hospital and the Man Made River station. He had been appointed in 2012 to head Sirte’s Supreme Security Committee branch, which became a cover for Ansar al-Sharia in the city.
On 17 January, a convoy of 4 ISIS vehicles reportedly set up a checkpoint along the Man Made River network route at Wadi Bey. A fuel tanker was obstructed, hijacked and transported to an unknown location. The same day, an unexploded IED was found by the bomb disposal unit in Sirte’s first residential area. They successfully defused the device. A suicide belt was also found in one of the farms in al-Gharbiyat area and safely detonated.

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A weekly update of ISIS’s actions, the Western response, and developments pertaining to Libya’s other militias is available by subscribing here.  To read about Western countries’ responses to ISIS in Libya this week, click here. To read the Eye on ISIS in Libya Team’s blog post about the actions of other jihadi actors, click here. And to read their explanation of the developments within the anti-ISIS Coalition of Libyan militias, click here.
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