The ICC issues six arrest warrants for people it says committed war crimes in Libya

Six members of a Libyan military group were charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court on Friday. Arrest warrants were made public for them.

In 2023, Karim Khan, the prosecutor for the ICC, said that judges had given arrest warrants for war crimes in Libya since 2011. However, these warrants were sealed, so it wasn’t clear who was being targeted or what the charges were.

Six people, all from Libya, were charged with war crimes on Friday. These crimes included murder, torture, cruel treatment, sexual violence, and some of them were also charged with rape.

Libya hasn’t had much peace since a NATO-backed uprising in 2011. In 2014, the oil-producing country was split into two fighting groups in the east and west. Major fighting stopped in 2020, but there hasn’t been much work toward a political solution, and there are still a lot of armed groups on the ground.

The ICC says that the six suspects in the arrest warrants were all part of the Kaniyat militia, which was a part of the eastern Libyan National Army and helped it launch a failed 14-month attack on the western city Tripoli.

The US and UK punished them in 2020, when the attack failed, and 2021, when they were accused of violating human rights.

The U.N. Security Council brought the trouble in Libya to the attention of the ICC in 2011. The court said that it was looking into claims of crimes against humanity and war crimes that happened since February 15, 2011.