Embassy in Libya evacuated

WASHINGTON — With Libya its most violent since its 2011 uprising, the United States drove its embassy staff and military personnel Saturday to neighboring Tunisia with U.S. military escorts flying overhead.

The decision to remove the 158 Americans from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, was an acknowledgment by the Obama administration of a collapsing situation, just three years after U.S. and NATO forces helped rebels bring down the four-decade rule of Moammar Gadhafi.

Violence had once been largely limited to eastern Libya, where in 2012 extremists killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. But in the past few months, western Libya, which includes the capital, battles erupted between Islamist and secular forces seeking control of the country.

“Due to the ongoing violence resulting from clashes between Libyan militias in the immediate vicinity of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, we have temporarily relocated all of our personnel out of Libya,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

Rival militia, paid by Libya’s flailing government and armed with grenades and anti-aircraft launchers, have fought for weeks for control of Tripoli’s main airport, destroying it and most of the airplanes parked there. Islamist militias from the city of Misrata sought unsuccessfully to wrest control of the airport from a rival secular militia from Zintan.

The militias were born during the 2011 uprising that led to Gadhafi’s fall and have since fought for power in Libya’s new government. With no national security force in the early days of the post-Gaddafi period, the government put them on the government payroll.

With the airport shut down, the United States lost a means to evacuate its staff, which in the past few months had been whittled down to the bare minimum. In addition to the battle between militias, there was a number of kidnappings and assassinations of prominent liberal activists across the capital.

The United Nations had already evacuated its personnel.

It was unclear how the United States would secure the embassy, which is the middle of Tripoli, from looting, given that Marines were among those who left. The embassy staff will stay in Tunisia only until another place is found for it to work, a defense official said.

According to a senior administration official, classified documents were destroyed, and in some cases, taken out with the personnel.

Secretary of State John Kerry, in Paris Saturday, said the evacuation was temporary and the United States would return as soon as the security situation would allow. The State Department and Pentagon announced the evacuation after the embassy’s civilian and military personnel arrived in Tunisia.