10 years after Benghazi attack, US struggles to calm Libya chaos

Ten years after the US ambassador to Libya was killed in the eastern city of Benghazi, the country remains in turmoil and Washington is vying for influence with other foreign powers.

Militants armed with automatic weapons and grenades stormed the US compound on the evening of September 11, 2012, at a time when the oil-rich North African country was torn by civil war.

They set the building ablaze, killing ambassador Christopher Stevens and IT specialist Sean Smith through smoke inhalation, and then also attacked a CIA annex where two contractors died, both former Navy Seals.

The assault, the first to claim the life of an American ambassador since 1979, deeply shocked the US and caused a political storm for then president Barack Obama's administration.

The State Department, then headed by Hillary Clinton, was accused by its political foes of deadly mistakes and negligence over the bloodshed, which came 11 years to the day after Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks.

Two years after the Benghazi attack, as more violence rocked Libya's capital Tripoli, the United States, like many other countries, shuttered its embassy there and has not reopened it since.

The diplomatic vacuum, and a disengagement from Libya under the next US president, Donald Trump, left the door open for other actors.

The main players have been Turkey, which has politically and militarily backed the Tripoli government, and Russia, Egypt and the UAE, which supported a rival camp based in the country's east.

The US embassy remains based in neighbouring Tunisia, but this has not stopped Washington from seeking to wield "crucial influence on the Libya file," analyst Jalel Harchaoui said.

"There have been positive moments such as the UN agreement in Skhirat in 2015, on which the Americans had worked hard," he said about the deal struck in Morocco on forming a Libyan national unity government.

There were also "darker moments", Harchaoui said, such as when Trump supported the eastern-based strongman Khalifa Haftar who launched a failed 2019-20 offensive against Tripoli.

US forces in Libya captured two militants in connection with the Benghazi attack and tried them in the United States. Mustafa Al Imam and Ahmed Abu Khattala were sentenced to 19 and 22 years in prison respectively.

The Benghazi attack had come almost a year after the fall of former dictator Moamer Gadhafi's regime, which was swept away by a popular uprising backed by a controversial NATO-led intervention.