CAIRO – U.S. warplanes bombed an Islamic State training camp in Libya early Friday, killing at least 41 people, most likely including a militant commander linked to attacks on Western tourists, in a strike that highlighted the widening gap between U.S. military and diplomatic efforts in the region.
The airstrikes in Sabratha, a seaside town 50 miles west of Tripoli, targeted Noureddine Chouchane, a Tunisian militant linked to two major attacks on Western tourists in Tunisia last year. He had also facilitated the arrival of Islamic State recruits in Libya, the Pentagon said in a statement confirming the strikes. Chouchane was probably killed in the strike, the Pentagon said.
Since June, the United States has carried out at least three air attacks against Islamist commanders in Libya, usually with a view to preventing the Islamic State from using its expanding territory in the country as a springboard for attacks in the region, or on the West. The Sunni extremist group has been spreading into Libya from its bases in Syria and Iraq.
As elsewhere in the Middle East, the focus on fighting the jihadists with military force has been far more successful than U.S. diplomatic efforts to end the tumult in each country that allowed the jihadis to prosper in the first place.
In Libya, the West has thrown its weight behind a troubled U.N.-led initiative to bring the country’s warring factions into a unity government. In Syria, a combination of airstrikes by the United States and its allies as well as military support for fighters on the ground has weakened the jihadis, undermined their finances and caused them to lose territory.
But those gains come at a time of escalation in the wider Syrian war that U.S. diplomacy has failed to restrain.
Intensive Russian airstrikes have allowed forces loyal to President Bashar Assad to advance, nearly surrounding the city of Aleppo, weakening the opposition and creating a wave of new refugees.
At the same time, the Kurdish-led force the United States has heavily backed to fight the jihadis has begun seizing territory from rebel groups, some of whom are also supported by the United States.
