International Crisis Group

Egypt’s Sisi presses wider intervention against ISIL in Libya | Michael Pizzi

Egypt’s president Abdel Fatteh el-Sissi is calling for a United Nations intervention in Libya against Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) affiliates, an escalation in rhetoric that analysts say could foil a delicate peace process and push tumultuous Libya into full-scale civil war.

Sissi made the remarks in an interview with France’s Europe 1 Radio on Tuesday, a day after his government launched unilateral airstrikes in the Libyan city of Derna, where a local militia that calls itself the “Barqa Province” of ISIL is based. Those strikes, Sissi explained, were “a kind of self-defense” for the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian migrant workers — albeit by a separate ISIL affiliate elsewhere in Libya — depicted in a graphic video this week.

“We will not allow them to cut off the heads of our sons,” Sissi said. “I think there is no choice” but for a U.N.-backed coalition to join Egypt in stamping out the “terrorist” militias.“

FULL ARTICLE (via Al Jazeera America)

Photo: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe