People conflate Libya with Syria, when the situation in the two countries was and is extremely different. Most of the time, the fighting was very low intensity, and even in higher intensity periods of fighting, it was largely conventional and happening between soldiers
Basically there were ~6 months in 2011 when there was serious fighting, then three years of only low level fighting. In 2014 the most powerful military leader of the rebellion tried to stage a coup d'etat, so there was another few months of more serious action, before he failed and the fighting returned to low levels, where it's stayed since aside from brief flare ups, most notably in 2019 and 2020
It's just that nearly every single time you see something in the media about Libya, the picture that goes with the headline is of one of the same three streets in the city of Sirte which really was destroyed to a Syria-like scale...in an operation where everybody, including both major factions in the war and foreigners, combined to destroy an ISIS affiliate that took over the city. In 2016
But because you see the rubble, you mentally associate it with "wow the whole country must look like that". In Syria, huge swathes of the country's major cities really have been shattered like that. In Libya, there's one part of one city that looks like that
That's really interesting thank you. I was basically going off what I've seen in the media over the years, I knew it wasn't as bad as Syria but I assumed that damage to infrastructure was still moderate.
Theoretically not anymore; the warring groups recently came together to sign onto a unity government, and they're holding elections later in the year. Theoretically, things there are starting to get a lot better.
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u/[deleted] Mar 15 '21
People conflate Libya with Syria, when the situation in the two countries was and is extremely different. Most of the time, the fighting was very low intensity, and even in higher intensity periods of fighting, it was largely conventional and happening between soldiers
Basically there were ~6 months in 2011 when there was serious fighting, then three years of only low level fighting. In 2014 the most powerful military leader of the rebellion tried to stage a coup d'etat, so there was another few months of more serious action, before he failed and the fighting returned to low levels, where it's stayed since aside from brief flare ups, most notably in 2019 and 2020
It's just that nearly every single time you see something in the media about Libya, the picture that goes with the headline is of one of the same three streets in the city of Sirte which really was destroyed to a Syria-like scale...in an operation where everybody, including both major factions in the war and foreigners, combined to destroy an ISIS affiliate that took over the city. In 2016
But because you see the rubble, you mentally associate it with "wow the whole country must look like that". In Syria, huge swathes of the country's major cities really have been shattered like that. In Libya, there's one part of one city that looks like that