The U.S. launched a new bombing campaign in Libya on Monday — just five years after another disastrous bombing campaign that plunged the country into chaos.
This makes Libya the seventh Muslim-majority country the U.S. is presently bombing.
President Obama personally approved the open-ended air strike campaign, using George W. Bush-era legislation.
The air strikes are meant to target ISIS, which in Libya has carved out its largest territory outside of Iraq and Syria. It was the U.S.-backed 2011 NATO war in Libya that destabilized the country in the first place, however, empowering extremist groups and allowing the self-proclaimed Islamic State to take hold in the oil-rich North African nation.
Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said in a press briefing on Monday that the U.S. is carrying out precision airstrikes on ISIS targets in Sirte, a northern coastal city that has become the extremist group’s Libyan stronghold.
Cook said the strikes were requested by Libya’s interim government, the Government of National Accord, or GNA. They were authorized by Obama after recommendations by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Cook noted that the request and approval were made “in recent days.”
Libyan Prime Minster Fayez Seraj said on state TV that “these operations are limited to a specific timetable and do not exceed Sirte and its suburbs,” Reuters reported. But the Pentagon has suggested otherwise.
“We don’t have an end point at this particular point of time,” a Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged, according to Council of Foreign Relations senior fellow Micah Zenko.
Zenko said the “U.S. military is effectively serving as the Libya Air Force,” providing close air support at the request of Libya’s interim government.
The legal authority for the open-ended airstrikes in Libya, according to a Pentagon spokesperson, comes from the Bush-era Authorization of the Use of Military Force, which was passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, Zenko reported.
The U.S. is presently bombing seven Muslim-majority countries: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and now Libya.
In 2015, the Obama administration dropped 23,144 bombs on the other six countries.
In Iraq and Syria, the U.S. is bombing ISIS targets, which emerged out of the catastrophic U.S. war in Iraq and the ongoing war in Syria.
The war in Afghanistan is one of the longest conventional wars in U.S. history. Violence, displacement and hunger are on the rise in the country as the Obama administration has extended the war for a third time.
For years, the U.S. has also been carrying out drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. In July, the Obama administration released a report claiming that just 64 to 116 civilians were killed in its secretive drone program. Experts and watchdog groups say the number is significantly higher.
The new bombing campaign in Libya has been coming for some time. In February, Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Obama administration was “on the verge of taking action” in the country.
That same month, the U.S. carried out airstrikes on an ISIS-controlled area in western Libya, killing two Serbian embassy workers who had been held hostage by the extremist group. The Serbian government had been working on securing their release.
