After terrorizing Libya’s Tarhuna for several years during their rule over the city, the Kaniyat militia has still not been held accountable for its war crimes as authorities continue to locate mass graves.
“They spared no child, no woman, no old man,” said Mohamed Amer, mourning the murdered under the reign of terror by six brothers who ruled the Libyan city with bloodshed.
“I am the father of the martyr Moaid, cold-blooded killed by the criminal gang Kaniyat,” said Amer, a silver-haired father in his fifties.
Kaniyat was a gang of six brothers who commanded a militia that traumatized the city of Tarhuna in war-torn Libya and systematically not only executed its opponents but slaughtered their entire families. Those they did not kill, they slaughtered to submit. The brothers paraded through the city in a show of power – with a couple of connected lions roaring at the audience.
Libya has been ravaged by conflict since the fall and assassination of veteran dictator Moammar Gadhafi in a NATO-backed 2011 uprising, and a number of armed groups and militia forces emerged to fill the vacuum. In Tarhuna, it was the Kaniyat militia that took power in 2015.
Now the brothers are gone, overthrown last year, but their shadow still hangs over the city. After they were thrown out, diggers began digging up the bodies of the people they slaughtered. Several mass graves have been excavated in the agricultural city about 80 kilometers (50 miles) southeast of the capital Tripoli. Some bodies were found blindfolded with their wrists tied.
Amer, like many of the dusty city dwellers, asks for the latest bodies unearthed. Near a mosque, where a row of ten ambulances are parked on a palm tree, posters on the wall have pictures of Tarhuna’s “martyrs”. Some of the posters are by young children. The last convoy removed 13 bodies.
“Most of Tarhuna’s sons are in the earth,” Amer said.
To date, 140 bodies have been excavated in a slow process that began in June 2020 after the city was captured from eastern-based forces loyal to Putist general Khalifa Haftar. Kaniyat had first supported the internationally recognized National Accord Government (GNA) based in Tripoli, which was mainly supported by Turkey and Qatar.
But when Haftar’s forces used Tarhuna as a starting point for an offensive against the capital in April 2019, Kaniyat changed his loyalty. They chose the losing side.
“The truth has now come out,” Amer said. “We now ask that they be arrested and tried, otherwise there can be no reconciliation.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says at least 338 people were abducted or reported missing during Kaniyat’s five-year rule. “Residents reported that the militia often abducted, arrested, tortured, killed and (caused) the disappearance of people who opposed them or were suspected of doing so,” HRW said.
Human rights activist Issa Harouda, who herself lost family members from the militia, said the Kani brothers recruited armed men from Bedouin shepherds and guarded them from fighting with weapons and cash. “They surrounded themselves with merchants to whom they gave weapons and money and exploited their poverty,” he said.
Several hundred people recently gathered in the square to see the latest bodies dug, wrapped in casings and carried on stretchers. “The kaniyate ruled the city with an iron fist,” said Milad Mohamed Abdelgader, an elderly man wearing a black cloak, who remembered two of his cousins who disappeared while the brothers were in charge. “No one had the right to speak … They had eyes everywhere.”
Few of the bodies could be identified immediately, but forensic experts gathered what evidence they could, including DNA samples, before formal burials. The audience recited prayers for the dead, and then, after a long silence, shouted a voice through a megaphone to demand that “Kaniyat terrorist criminal gangs” be tried.
“God will do them justice, sooner or later,” Abdelgader said quietly before bursting into tears, pointing to the sky. But the militia has so far avoided justice. Two of the brothers have been killed, while the remaining four are on the run. Many in Tarhuna claim to be hiding in Benghazi in the east.
“No one has yet been held accountable,” said HRW researcher Hannan Salah.
Today, the luxury villas of the militia commanders are in ruins. Down a rough track, the brothers’ lavish marble villas have been smashed by artillery shells and dumped with graffiti in memory of the “martyrs” they massacred.
“Kaniyat seized two factories and several companies, and they forced rich families out to take their fortunes,” said a resident wearing a military uniform.
“They strutted in their pickups with their wildlife and terrorized the city. All this, for what? For the money.”
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