The potential for more widespread confrontation was apparent on Sunday when gunmen with anti-aircraft cannons attacked parliament, triggering skirmishes across Tripoli among regular forces, and pro- and anti-Islamist factions. Lined up broadly against them are the Misratan brigades, based in the port city of Misrata, who are Islamist-leaning and support the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, along with other Islamist brigades and their allies. On one side, the Zintanis, in the western mountains, and their allied Qaaqaa and Sawaiq brigades in Tripoli, are fiercely anti-Islamist and back the National Forces Alliance, a coalition of nationalist parties led by an ex-Gaddafi official. “I question how coordinated it was between Haftar and others, but they have common interests. Both in Benghazi and Tripoli, security is very fragile,” one Western diplomat said.

“Politically we are in limbo until things become clearer.

Haftar’s movement and the violence in Tripoli and Benghazi may signal an attempt to draw up a broader anti-Islamist front that risks a wider-scale battle over the North African OPEC state still struggling to shape its fragile democracy. With Libya’s new army still in training, two loose confederacies of ex-fighters are lined up with Islamist and anti-Islamist political forces and locked in an uneasy balance of power where neither is able to overcome the other. Two regular military units have already backed Haftar’s self-declared Libyan National Army, making him one more player in an emerging confrontation between rival brigades of former anti-Gaddafi rebels who are Libya’s real powerbrokers. Now he is back centre-stage after groups of militias claiming loyalty to him attacked parliament in Tripoli on Sunday and assaulted Benghazi to clear out Islamist militants. Libyans already knew the grey-haired ex-officer who first rebelled against Gaddafi in the 1980s. But no tanks rolled into the streets, and many dismissed Haftar as a would-be putschist. Quickly, rumours of troop movements fed coup fears.

May 17, 2014.REUTERS/Esam Omran Al-Fetoriįlanked by a Libyan flag and a large map, retired Major General Khalifa Haftar demanded a caretaker government take over from a parliament paralysed by rivalries after the 2011 war that ended Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. General Khalifa Haftar attends a news conference at a sports club in Abyar, a small town to the east of Benghazi.

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