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Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was shot 19 times inside his compound in Zintan, a mountain town in western Libya, where he had lived since his capture in 2011. Four masked men entered the compound after disabling the security cameras. Roughly 90 minutes earlier, his guards had withdrawn from the area for reasons that remain unexplained. When the shooting ended, the assailants did not flee. They left. No gunfight. No pursuit. No claim of responsibility. The perpetrators vanished into the kind of silence that, in Libya, usually means the killers have nothing to fear from an investigation.
Saif was the son of Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled Libya for more than four decades before being overthrown and killed in the 2011 revolution. Since 2014, the country has been divided between two rival power centres. In the west, successive governments in Tripoli, the latest led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, derive their authority from United Nations recognition. In the east, renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar controls territory through military force, backed by the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Egypt, while a paper government in Benghazi provides civilian cover for what is effectively military rule. Neither side has faced a national election, nor intends to.
The mechanics of the killing tell their own story. This was not violence born of chaos. It was an operation, executed within a narrow window by actors who understood Saif’s movements, his protection, and the informal rules governing both. Members of his inner circle have described it as an inside job. Reaching him required more than weapons. It required access to his routines, to his guards, and to the layered arrangements that had kept him alive in secret. For years, Saif had lived in varying degrees of concealment, protected by local understandings and, at times, by Russian-linked security support. By the night of the attack, all that protection had been withdrawn. Whoever planned the operation knew it would be.
Motive alone is not evidence. But method and capability narrow the field.
When Abdelghani al-Kikli, the commander of Tripoli’s largest militia, Stabilisation Support Apparatus (SSA), was assassinated last year by a rival brigade, the result was immediate chaos. Armed clashes shut down large parts of the capital – factional and noisy, and instantly legible. The Zintan operation bears no resemblance. Its precision and the silence that followed point to a different kind of actor. Critics, liabilities, and inconvenient figures within Haftar’s orbit have often been removed quietly. Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a senior officer in Haftar’s forces and a man wanted by the International Criminal Court, was shot dead in broad daylight in Benghazi in 2021. No serious investigation followed. Others have disappeared in a similar fashion. These operations do not require total territorial control. They rely on networks, intimidation and the expectation of impunity.
None of these constitutes proof. Libya rarely offers proof. Only patterns. But patterns have infrastructure.
The political order Muammar Gaddafi built did not disappear in 2011. It was disassembled and repurposed. Haftar took its fragments, tribal patronage networks, security hierarchies, and the militia economy, and reassembled them around his own family, anchored by a praetorian guard, the Tariq bin Ziyad Brigade, commanded by his son Saddam, the recently appointed deputy general commander of the self-styled Libyan National Army and the most likely successor to his father.
Former loyalists of the old regime were not excluded from this system, but they were never trusted within it. Pro-Gaddafi political figures and commanders were encouraged to return under Haftar and absorbed after 2014 only on strictly conditional terms. Figures such as Hassan Zadma, once aligned with Saif’s brother Khamis’s infamous 32nd Brigade, were coopted for their utility, not integrated as partners. When their presence threatened Haftar’s control, they were marginalised or dismantled.
Saif himself was never offered even that conditional inclusion. He remained outside the system, tolerated, contained, and watched, a reminder of an alternative line of inheritance that could never be fully neutralised. He had lived under the persistent threat of assassination since 2017.
Saif did not represent change. He represented an alternative. The danger he posed was structural. Haftar’s coalition is held together not by ideology but by patronage, and patronage is distributed unevenly. Some tribes and armed groups receive more than others. Loyalty is transactional, calibrated to what each faction can extract. In the event of Haftar’s death, those who feel short-changed would see succession as an opportunity to renegotiate their terms, or defect to whoever offers a better deal. The only figure with a history and surname symbolic enough to draw them in was Saif, heir to the very system Haftar had repurposed. He would not have dismantled it. He would have ruled through it, with the same patronage logic and the same authoritarian reflexes. Same system, different family.
That made him extraordinarily difficult to accommodate. Forty-eight hours before the killing, Saddam Haftar met Ibrahim Dbeibah, the prime minister’s nephew and head of Libya’s national security apparatus, secretly at the Elysee Palace in Paris. There was no official readout. Leaks suggest a single agenda: whether Libya’s rival camps could form yet another interim unity government, one that would bring the LAAF formally under the state, divide ministries and institutions between the Haftar and Dbeibah families, and postpone elections for what would now be over a decade. Libyans have not voted since 2014. That grievance has deepened with every failed transition, every broken promise of elections, every new interim arrangement designed to keep the same people in power. A family carve-up negotiated in Paris would have made it volcanic. Saif did not need a programme to exploit that. He only needed to be on the ballot. In the aborted 2021 presidential election, he polled significantly ahead of Haftar. If the only viable candidates are authoritarians, the anti-establishment authoritarian wins. He could not be absorbed into such an arrangement without destabilising both sides, and he could not be left outside it without becoming the vehicle for every Libyan’s rage against it.
Five days after his killing, Saif’s tribe buried him in Bani Walid, a town long associated with loyalists of his father. They had wanted Sirte, his father’s tribal seat. Haftar’s forces denied them. Condolence receptions were blocked. Public mourning was prevented. Saif spent a decade being told where he could live, who he could see, and when he could speak. His killers decided where he could die. His rivals decided where he could be buried. No one has been arrested. No one will be. In Libya, silence after a killing is never the absence of an answer. It is the answer.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
