An article in Ireland’s Sunday World has drawn attention to relations between Mahdi al-Harati, former leader of the Tripoli Brigade of the National Transition Council which played a central role in the NATO assault on Libya, and an unnamed US intelligence agency. According to anunattributed article of Nov 6, €200,000 in cash was stolen from al-Harati’s Dublin house a month previously. The Sunday World reported that a criminal gang working the area found two envelopes stuffed with €500 notes during a raid on the al-Harati’s family home on Oct 6. Jewellery was also stolen. The article, apparently relying on police sources, stated that al-Harati, who has been a Dublin resident employed as an Arabic teacher for 20 years, claimed, when contacted by police, that the stolen cash was given to him by a US intelligence agency. The article continued:
Astonished officers made contact with Mahdi al-Harati who told them that he had travelled to France, the US and Qatar the previous month and that representatives of a US intelligence agency had given him a significant amount of money to help in the efforts to defeat Gaddafi. He said he left two envelopes with his wife in case he was killed and took the rest of the cash with him when he went back to Libya.Al-Harati’s Tripoli Brigade was one of a number of military units put together in conjunction with the NTC to participate in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. The brigade was formed in Apr 2011, following a trip by Al-Harati to Benghazi simultaneous with the eruption of mass protests against Gaddafi in Feb 2011. From the first, the brigade appears to have been developed, and paid for, as a well-trained assault force, designed to operate alongside NATO for an attack on Tripoli. Co-ordinated by al-Harati and his Irish born brother-in-law Husan al-Najar, a building contractor from Dublin, the Tripoli brigade rapidly recruited a core of English-speaking Libyan exiles from Ireland, Canada, the UK and the US. These made their way to Nalut University in Libya, from where they recruited local opponents of the Gaddafi government. By Aug 2011, the brigade had over 1,000 fighters trained by Qatari special forces, equipped with light modern weaponry, uniforms, body armour, communication equipment, and boasted an eight-man sniper unit. . Prior to his Libyan adventure, al-Harati was quite well known in such circles in Dublin. He was on board the Challenger 1 vessel in its 2010 voyage to Gaza as part of the Free Gaza Flotilla. Al-Harati reportedly suffered a diabetic attack during the Israeli raids and was hospitalised. He returned to Dublin a hero. The Irish Anti-War Movement (IAWM) unequivocally called for the NTC to be armed and internationally recognised. On Mar 28, the IAWM stated:The best use that Egypt could make of the $1.3b of military aid that it gets from the US would be to arm the Libyan rebels.
The same statement called on the newly installed Fine Gael/Labour government to recognise the NTC, something they did in August. Throughout the summer, when al-Harati and his brigade were undergoing combat training in Nalut and being lauded in the mainstream Irish press, the IAWM maintained complete silence on the Tripoli Brigade’s activities. More recent IAWM statements and articles have maintained that despite unfortunate episodes, the NTC has in fact “liberated” Libya. An Oct 26 posting on their website from Eamonn McCann of the Irish Socialist Workers Party sought to excuse the public lynching of Gaddafi, saying:The maiming and killing wasn’t done in cold blood.Nor do the IAWM’s pro-imperialist activities stop at Libya. The IAWM’s website currently hosts a petition calling for the German and Turkish governments to use their leverage with the government of Russia to force it to drop support for the Assad regime in Syria. This position, notwithstanding the repressive character of Assad’s government, serves only to assist in US, UK, French and Turkish efforts to emulate their Libyan military model in Syria, at the expense of triggering a new and even more disastrous regional bloodbath.
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