In The New Yorker, English professor Hisham Matar writes about the continuing civil war in Libya, and how persistent violence in the city of Benghazi impacts the daily lives of millions of people. An excerpt:
"Libya has all but disappeared from the news, yet what is taking place there is of deadly importance. The Libyan National Army, under the leadership of Khalifa Haftar—a former general who defected to the exiled opposition in the mid-eighties, and who returned, in 2011, to take part in the rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi—is battling Ansar al-Sharia, a Benghazi-based militia that has expressed deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic views. Benghazi, the second-largest city in the country and the capital of the fraught eastern region, is seeing more extreme violence than it has since the Second World War."
Read the full article.
Prof. Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then Cairo. He is the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted novel In the Country of Men, and more recently, Anatomy of a Disappearance. Prof. Matar is the founder and principal curator of The Barnard International Artists Series, a forum for considering the world through the works of living artists.
