Unless they surrendered the weapons held by their security
detail in accordance with embassy policy, the Iraqis said, the
delegation of U.S. diplomats would not be allowed in.

What exactly happened next, two sources who were guests at
the event say, is not entirely clear. At least one shot was
fired, likely a warning shot by the Iraqi police. The Americans
got back into their vehicles and disappeared into the night.

After all of the violence and bombing of the last decade,
the confrontation went barely noticed. But it points to the way
the United States has watched its influence in Iraq dwindle.

A year after U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq, American
officials and their vehicles have all but disappeared from the
streets of Baghdad. When U.S. officials emerge from their
fortresslike embassy compound, they are clearly no longer the de
facto rulers of the country they once were.

Many keep themselves to themselves, preferring to fly over
Baghdad rather than drive through it and increasingly avoiding
contact with the government of Nouri-al Maliki. One US official
told Reuters he had not left the compound in almost 3 years
except to return to the United States for leave.

“Americans?” said one Iraqi official asked about U.S.-Iraqi
cooperation. “I’d like to see some.”

In Washington and other Western capitals, there are mounting
worries a failure to negotiate a permanent U.S. military
presence may leave them sidelined for good. To make matters
worse, they worry Maliki’s majority Shi’ite government is
quietly moving ever closer to Washington’s premier regional foe
Tehran.

Reports Tehran was using Iraqi airspace – and perhaps even
airports and trucking routes – to supply weapons to ally Bashar
al-Assad in his battle to retain control of Syria have only
deepened that perception. For some, it is yet another sign that
ousting the minority Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein and
attempting to increase greater democracy was never truly in the
U.S. interest.

Washington says the relationship remains close. On December
6, U.S. and Iraqi officials met in Baghdad for their latest
meeting on security cooperation, discussing military sales and
regional crises such as Syria. Strains, however, remain clear.

“Does Iran have influence? Absolutely. Do we have influence?
Absolutely,” one U.S. official told Reuters.

“But the Iraqis are the first to say they are pursuing their
own interests.”

The sprawling U.S. embassy – the largest in the world,
almost the size of Vatican City and which cost some $750 million
to build – was supposed to be a sign of an enduring presence.
Instead, it has become a sign of how greatly Washington
overestimated its post-war clout.

TROOP AGREEMENT FAILURE

Current and former U.S. officials say it is not all bad
news. Increasing Iraqi oil output has provided enough additional
supply to the global oil market to allow the United States and
Europe to ratchet up sanctions on Iran. The conflict in Syria,
some argue, shows how bad Iraq’s ultimate collapse might have
been had Saddam Hussein not been removed in 2003.

That Washington would find its influence waning was, they
say, always inevitable.

“I don’t know why we have been surprised,” says Douglas
Ollivant, a former U.S. Army officer then National Security
Council director for Iraq under both George W. Bush and Barack
Obama, now a senior fellow at the New America Institute. “Now
Iraq is less dependent on us, it is going its own way.”

Even as late as last year, those with knowledge of events
say U.S. officials simply never envisaged Washington would be
left with no troops at all left in Iraq. Having initiated a
“status of forces” agreement in 2008 at the height of the
“surge” launched to smother rampant insurrection, they always
believed Maliki’s government would acquiesce.

“We’ll get a deal, We’ll get a deal,” was always their
response,” said one non-U.S. diplomat.

Most U.S. and Iraqi sources believe the Iraqi leader would
have liked just that. But, they say, both sides ended up talking
themselves into a corner and the ultimate sticking point -
Washington’s desire its troops retain immunity from local
prosecution – was too much.

DOOR OPENING AGAIN?

“A status of forces agreement would have been good,” says
Jim Jeffrey, U.S. ambassador to Baghdad until last year and now
a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “And
we should have got one. But getting any Arab parliament to agree
to (immunity for U.S. troops) was always going to be difficult.
The only example would have been the 2008 agreement, and that
was only because they needed us so badly.”

Private U.S.-hired security contractors were now providing
many of the functions – such as military training – that would
have been provided by U.S. forces, he said.

After hitting a low point last year, U.S. officials say they
believe the relationship is now once again improving.

“The door was almost closed on us, they kept it open a crack
because they had to; now it is halfway open, maybe more, and
they are throwing it open further,” said the U.S. official.
“They are asking for cooperation across the board.”

But there seems little doubt other countries in the region
saw the U.S. departure as something of a defeat.

“The Western governments have certainly lost weight,” said
one Arab diplomat based in Baghdad. “There are no troops. Their
war here is gone. The only reason they remain here is because
they want to do business and they want oil contracts. But, even
there, the special treatment is gone.”

For all the talk of U.S. oil firms benefiting from the Iraq
invasion, the Americans have been almost completely frozen out.
Instead, concessions have gone to Chinese and other firms -
although Exxon in particular continues to step up its operations
in the Kurdish dominated north.

“NEVER OURS TO LOSE”

In general, U.S. officials and their Iraqi counterparts have
tried to manage their differences in private. But the fact the
Obama administration was willing to brief U.S. reporters on
suspected Iranian weapons shipments to Syria suggests some may
have simply decided they have little goodwill left to lose.

“It’s clear that Maliki has higher priorities than his
relationship with the United States,” says Stephen Biddle,
professor of political relations and international affairs at
George Washington University and a former adviser to U.S.
generals in Iraq. “We clearly pressured Maliki to prevent the
overflights and he refused.”

Simply painting Maliki’s Iraq as an Iranian proxy, however,
was hugely over-simplistic, he said. On Syria, both Maliki and
leaders in Tehran had a vested interest in supporting fellow
Shi’ite Assad against a largely Sunni uprising. On other
matters, however, he is seen increasingly playing Washington and
Tehran off against each other.

Some in Washington fear Maliki might go too far, alienating
his own Sunni and Kurdish minorities, particularly with
President Jalal Talabani, an Iraqi Kurd, now ill and leaving the
country for medical treatment.

What the U.S. may have to accept, however, is that there may
now be little it can now do to shape events.

“We never had as much influence in Iraq as either our
friends believed or our adversaries charged,” said David Mack,
another veteran former State Department official with did two
stints as a diplomat in Iraq. “Some Americans were guilty of
imperial hubris… In reality, Iraq was never ours to lose.”

The New York-based watchdog and other critics of the administration of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accuse it of pushing Iraq back towards authoritarianism by cracking down on protests, harassing opponents and torturing detainees.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the prison, known as Camp Honor, is inside Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone, an area that houses most government offices and foreign embassies.

Camp Honor is a former U.S. military base of more than 15 buildings that was handed over to Iraqi forces in 2006. The last U.S. forces left the country in December.

A spokesman for Iraq’s human rights ministry told Reuters that the information received by Human Rights Watch was inaccurate and politically motivated.

“Camp Honor was closed at the start of 2011 and all inmates were transported to other official jails,” Kamil Ameen said.

“Last week a monitoring team from the human rights ministry went to Camp Honor detention center and found it totally empty.”

Human Rights Watch said its latest report was based on interviews with 35 former prisoners, witnesses, family members, and government officials.

The report alleged that, in addition to Camp Honor, there were two other secret prisons inside the Green Zone.

Ameen said the ministry would not “sit on its hands” if it had reports of secret detention facilities.

HIDING PEOPLE AWAY

Human Rights Watch said that, since October 2011, the government has carried out several waves of detentions, surrounding neighbourhoods and going door-to-door with lists of people marked for imprisonment.

“Iraqi security forces are grabbing people outside of the law, without trial or known charges, and hiding them away in incommunicado sites,” Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

It called on the Iraqi government to reveal the names and locations of all prisoners, free those not yet charged with any crime and set up an independent judicial authority to try those who had been charged.

Human Rights Watch said in a February 1 report that security forces were torturing inmates at Camp Honor, citing interviews with former detainees.

As well as electrocution, asphyxiation and beatings, the group said prisoners were packed into windowless cells that “reeked of human excrement”.

Torture was widespread in Iraq under Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, who was ousted in the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and executed in 2006. Disclosures in 2004 that U.S. jailers had abused and sexually humiliated Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison outraged many Iraqis.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

The envoy, Younis Demerer, heard the Iraqi complaint on
Sunday after several days of charge and counter-charge.

Erdogan accused his Iraqi counterpart Nuri al-Maliki on
Thursday of stoking conflict between Shi’ite Muslims, Sunni
Muslims and Kurds through “self-centred” behaviour.

Maliki fired back that Turkey was becoming a “hostile state”
with a sectarian agenda, saying it was meddling in Iraqi affairs
and trying to establish regional “hegemony”.

Erdogan returned to the fray on Saturday, saying: “If we
respond to Mr. Maliki, we give him the opportunity to show off.”

Analysts say mainly Sunni Turkey is worried that growing
tensions in Iraq and violence in their mutual neighbour Syria
may lead to a wider Sunni-Shi’ite conflict in the region.

Erdogan’s government has also recently forged close ties
with Masoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish
region, which is embroiled in a row with the Baghdad government
over claims to the city of Kirkuk and the region’s oil.

“(Foreign ministry undersecretary) Mr. Labeed Abbawi
acquainted the Turkish Ambassador with the Iraqi government’s
intense protest against the recent statements,” the Iraqi
foreign ministry said on its website.

“Undersecretary Abbawi expressed hope that the Turkish
government will stop giving statements that affect Iraq’s
sovereignty and internal affairs.”

Erdogan has criticised Maliki several times since sectarian
tensions flared in Iraq in December when the Shi’ite-led
government tried to remove Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh
al-Mutlaq and sought an arrest warrant for Sunni Vice President
Tareq al-Hashemi on charges he ran death squads.

Hashemi fled Baghdad and has since met Erdogan in Istanbul.

The rift between Baghdad and the Kurds worsened this month
when the Kurdistan Regional Government said it was halting oil
exports because the central government was not paying oil firms
operating in the north.

Iraq is Turkey’s second largest trading partner after
Germany, with trade reaching $12 billion last year, more than
half of which was with the Kurdish region.

(Editing by Serena Chaudhry and Alistair Lyon)

Maliki was responding to comments made by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday in which Erdogan accused the Iraqi leader of fanning tensions between the country’s Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds with his “self-centered” ways.

“The recent announcements by Mr. Erdogan represent another return to flagrant interference in Iraqi internal affairs,” Maliki said in a statement on his website.

“His announcements have a sectarian dimension. To insist on continuing these internal and regional policies will harm Turkish interests and make it a hostile state for all.”

Maliki accused Turkey of trying to establish “hegemony” in the region.

Sectarian tensions flared in Iraq in December when the Shi’ite-led government tried to remove Sunni Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq and sought an arrest warrant for Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi on charges he ran death squads.

Erdogan made his comments on Thursday after a meeting in Istanbul with Masoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, who has cultivated close relations with Ankara.

WORRIES OF WIDER CONFLICT

“(Maliki’s) self-centered ways … are seriously disturbing Shi’ite groups, Barzani and Iraqi groups,” Erdogan said.

Erdogan has warned before that Turkey, which is mainly Sunni but officially secular, would not remain silent if a sectarian conflict were to erupt in Iraq.

The city of Kirkuk is at the center of a dispute between the central government and the Kurdish region, which claims the city and the region’s rich oil reserves.

The rift between Baghdad and the Kurds recently worsened when the Kurdistan Regional Government said it was halting oil exports because the central government was not paying oil firms operating in the north.

Turkey is worried that the violence in Syria and growing tensions in Iraq could lead to a wider conflict between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims in the region.

Iraq is Turkey’s second largest trading partner after Germany, with trade reaching $12 billion last year, more than half of which was with the Kurdistan region.

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

Centuries on, memories of Imam Ahmad Gragn still haunt both countries, and echoes of that long and bloody history still ripple across the Horn of Africa region which considers Somalia the greatest threat to its stability.

Back then, the Ethiopians were beleaguered as the invaders occupied some two-thirds of the country. Help eventually came in the form of 400 Portuguese musketeers, who sailed into Massawa port and embarked on a six-day march to the front.

Gragn had his backers too. Reinforcements from Arabia soon rolled in alongside a gift from the Ottoman Empire: 900 of its famously hardened musket experts. The war lasted over a decade.

Fast forward to the present day, and with Ethiopian troops deploying over the border again last month to fight Islamist rebels linked to al Qaeda, the latest chapter of a book with few uplifting passages was written.

Though present-day incursions and clashes are driven by strategic motivations and regional politicking against the backdrop of the global war on terror, those centuries-old grudges, raids and musket-battles still shape events.

“In Ethiopia, the damage which Gragn did has never been forgotten,” Ethiopia expert, Paul Henze, wrote in a book on the country’s history, Layers of Time.

“Every Christian highlander still hears tales of Gragn in his childhood. I have often had villagers in northern Ethiopia point out sites of towns, forts, churches and monasteries destroyed by Gragn as if these catastrophes had occurred only yesterday.”

Though Gragn’s ethnicity is disputed by historians, Ethiopians know his army was overwhelmingly manned by ethnic Somalis, and that stings.

DELICATE RELATIONS, COMPLEX HISTORY

Somalis, too, are haunted by past Ethiopian invasions.

Ethiopia and Somalia still hand-pick powerful allies keen to win clout in the Horn of Africa.

Its location on the Gulf of Aden and its potential as a base for militant Islam make it an ideal arena for proxy wars, influence-peddling and diplomatic skullduggery.

The two countries – Ethiopia then supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba and Somalia supported by the United States – fought one of their many wars over Ethiopia’s mainly ethnic-Somali Ogaden region in 1977-1978.

Ethiopia’s victory was helped by some crack Cuban troops, a modern day echo of the foreigners who helped in the sixteenth century. Since then, Western and Eastern powers have switched allegiances, depending on the politics of those in power.

These days, Ethiopia, seen as a critical bulwark against the rise of Islamist militancy in the strategic region next to the world’s busiest shipping lanes, is Washington’s main ally.

“An unstable Horn of Africa could have a destabilizing effect on the world,” a Western diplomat in the region told Reuters. “The U.S., Britain, China – and increasingly Turkey -are all trying to get a foothold here for both security reasons and economic reasons. Ethiopia makes the best ally right now.”

But despite the leadership changes, and the temporary alliances in a region that is no stranger to pragmatic politics, that old animosity is playing out again.

ETHIOPIA. WHO ELSE?

At the centre of the latest episode between the two nations is the Islamist rebel group, al Shabaab, which has declared holy war on the still mostly-Christian Ethiopia, and threatened to launch suicide attacks in its capital, Addis Ababa.

Neighboring Kenya sent troops across the border in October, unsettled by a spate of security attacks it blamed on the militants, with the aim of dismantling the rebels’ networks.

Ethiopia watched closely, analysts say, unsure of whether the Kenyan intervention would work. Finally, a month ago, with the Kenyans stalled, its troops moved into Somalia to arm and train the pro-government militia Ahlu Sunna Waljamaca (ASWJ).

Such is the delicacy, that Ethiopia has not admitted publicly to its latest incursion despite scores of testimony from local witnesses, elders and reporters.

“The knowledge of history as well as the unwillingness to hand al Shabaab the propaganda coup, just when the terrorist group is weakened, probably has a great deal to do with Ethiopia’s reluctance to do more than build up the capacity of local Somali allies like ASWJ and to try to politically unite them in a common effort,” J. Peter Pham, Africa director with the Atlantic Council, told Reuters.

Until now, Ethiopia had seemed reluctant to get involved in Somalia again after a 2006-2009 incursion to overthrow another Islamist group that had taken over Mogadishu sparked such ire among some Somalis that al Shabaab rose from its ashes.

This time, the Ethiopians say, their hand was forced.

“Somebody needed to go in and help. Somalia is the world’s biggest security problem and that threatens everybody,” an Ethiopian official told Reuters.

“We’re aware that, for some Somalis, we are not the best choice and that is why we are being careful. But, yet again, who else?”

(Editing by David Clarke and Maria Golovnina)

The leaders’ rigid stares and sour faces at an African Union summit in 2009, witnessed by journalists peering through a gap in the curtains, showed how most African leaders felt about the continent’s self-styled “King of Kings.” “There goes the sideshow clown,” one African diplomat muttered, as Gaddafi swept out of the room and told the waiting journalists to get some sleep.

Now, the man whose theatrics overshadowed their summits for so long is dead and buried, and sub-Saharan African leaders are trying to assess what a world without Gaddafi will mean for them, according to interviews with a dozen or so African diplomats in Tripoli. Some enjoyed substantial investments and gifts from his oil coffers. But many also hated what they saw as his meddling, even while they paraded solidarity with a fellow African who saw himself as an anti-colonial revolutionary.

African ambassadors and diplomats say they are already starting to feel the impact of the shift in power from Gaddafi to his enemies. Many feel frozen out by Libya’s interim rulers, the National Transitional Council (NTC). Some suspect the new government is even going to want some of Gaddafi’s gifts back. Whatever happens, Gaddafi’s vision of a united Africa — always quixotic — is gone.

“He made us feel important,” one told Reuters. “But there aren’t so many of us being invited to sit and break bread with NTC leaders. They think that we sided with Gaddafi.”

PRIORITIES

That perception has arisen in part from a belief among NTC and western officials that the African Union’s attempt to mediate during the civil war was designed to protect Gaddafi. For Libya’s new leaders, the western allies who helped them to power will be more important.

“The new administration in Tripoli will want to set relations with the AU off right,” said Mark Schroeder, sub-Saharan Africa analyst at consultancy Stratfor. “But the AU will only be a smaller actor they will establish priorities with.”

Western diplomats have become more visible in Tripoli, shuttling back and forth between the two luxury hotels where most meetings with NTC officials take place. Some even wear wristbands in the revolutionary colors, their drivers flashing the “V” for victory sign at checkpoints run by NTC forces.

African diplomats are more rarely seen out and about in a capital where fellow non-Arab Africans can risk arrest, and worse, as suspected pro-Gaddafi mercenaries.

TRACTORS, HOSPITALS, MOSQUES

With Gaddafi gone, others also feel vulnerable.

“There was a sense that we were supporting him at all costs just so that we could protect his investments in our countries,” one sub-Saharan African ambassador in Tripoli told Reuters. While some African leaders may indeed have been keen to keep Gaddafi’s cash, others saw the West’s action in Libya as “an act of colonial aggression,” he said.

Whatever African leaders’ motives in supporting Gaddafi, now could be payback time: “The poorest on the continent will pay.”

Officials in Tripoli say the Gaddafi government’s investments across sub-Saharan Africa were massive, although so far there is no complete picture of them.

He invested widely in projects from donated tractors in Gambia to $90 million telecoms deals in Chad, in what most political analysts saw as an attempt to buy clout on a continent he aimed to unite with anti-colonial rhetoric. Entire hospitals and mosques bore his name.

He gave Gambian President Yahya Jammeh aid and huge herds of camels. Al-Madar, a state-owned Libyan mobile phone operator owned or controlled telecoms operations with assets worth over $100 million in eight other African countries.

“It wasn’t all cynical,” said another African ambassador in Tripoli of Libya’s spending spree. “He did a lot of good for African countries … There was little racism in him, unlike some other Arabs, who treat us like slaves when we come here looking for work.”

There is real fear in African capitals that the NTC is going to want to take that money back, though it has not yet outlined official policy on the issue.

“Such investments as exist in sub-Saharan Africa are likelier than not to come under pressure to liquidate in order to secure the funds to rehabilitate the war-torn country,” agreed Peter Pham, an analyst with U.S. think-tank the Atlantic Council.

The African Union’s already meager budget may take a hit: the former Libyan strongman paid more than his allotted share. Libya’s formal contribution was 15 percent of the half of the Union’s budget that is put up by Africans themselves. But African Union officials say Gaddafi also paid the contributions of several small west African nations, more than doubling the share of funds coming from Tripoli. In public, officials deny a possible loss of funding is a concern.

PERSONAL CLUB

The African Union, which replaced the Organisation of African Unity, held its inaugural meeting in Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte in 1999. Gaddafi tried in vain to have it move headquarters there from the OAU’s base in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. But he nonetheless treated the Union like a personal club.

Theatrical summit entrances, rambling speeches and buffoonish behavior married with a seemingly genuine desire to encourage African leaders to stand up to their former colonial masters and build more unity among themselves.

Many African heads of state were already tiring of his attempts to dominate them. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni was seen arguing with Gaddafi at a Kampala summit in 2010, after the Libyan’s personal guard, trying to bring concealed guns into the meeting hall, had brawled with the Ugandan president’s own security.

Gaddafi, apparently trying to deflect blame, then slapped his own foreign minister across the face in full view of a group of journalists.

“For us, there was some good and some bad,” an African Union official told Reuters. “But, overall, we won’t miss him.”

Plenty of rebels-turned-presidents — including South Africa’s Jacob Zuma and Uganda’s Museveni — have made a point of remembering how Gaddafi supported them during their days fighting in the bush. With Gaddafi, who himself took power in a military coup in 1969, they would salute each other and talk with pride of being Africa’s “revolutionary” leaders.

So their initial impulse was to close ranks and defend him, even as his forces were attacking demonstrators; and they ensured the African Union dithered as NATO acted.

Since his fall, most have been conspicuously silent. They are trying to build ties with an NTC that seems little interested, beyond calling on its southern neighbors not to shelter the Gaddafi loyalists Libyans want brought to justice.

“Why are you asking me about Gaddafi’s legacy?” one African Union official said in response to a question. “Stop associating us with him. We cannot afford it.”

(Edited by Alastair Macdonald and Sara Ledwith)

Few know anything about their new interim prime minister, Abdurrahim El-Keib, who before his surprise appointment to the most difficult job in post-Gaddafi Libya was an academic and electrical engineer.

As head of the interim government, he has to assert the National Transitional Council (NTC)’s control of a fractured country awash with weapons, revive the economy and introduce Libya to democracy.

“I came back to this country to take this tool in my hands,” Saad Helmi, a 30-year-old revolutionary fighter, told Reuters in Tripoli’s old city, holding up a machinegun with ribbons in the colors of Libya’s new flag wrapped around its handle and his head.

“Now I want to put it down and replace it with a pen or a laptop. I want to stay here for a job,” said Helmi, who lived in Scotland for ten years.

Jobs were regularly mentioned on Tripoli’s streets, many young men saying it was unemployment that made them fight the government of Muammar Gaddafi, now dead and buried.

Libya’s top two politicians, Keib and NTC Chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil, have tough tasks ahead: building institutions from scratch, reviving the oil industry, disarming militias and trying to heal the scars of war in a country with regional and religious divides among its leading politicians.

On top of that, many Libyans are fired up with fresh ambition and looking to the NTC to satisfy it.

“Do you know what I was before the revolution?” said software engineer Mohammed Ashour, 23. “I was somebody without a job who watched Gaddafi’s thug sons parade in my town.”

“Then somebody gave me a gun and there was change. We young men gave the revolution to the older men. It was our gift — we gifted them a country. Now we want them to pay us back.”

Getting rid of the guns that brought a violent end to the old order in Libya is second on the to-do list of Keib and the interim cabinet he has promised to form within two weeks.

That cabinet will sit for eight months after which there will be elections to a national assembly that will spend a year drawing up a new constitution before a parliamentary poll.

But most people in Tripoli’s streets, looking more normal every day, said that the work ahead, including disarming the militias, had to start now.

After “jobs” and “guns,” “normal” was the word most used by Tripolitanians when talking about the future. “I want normal,” a woman called Nabile said in English. “Normal,” a friend agreed. “Normal,” repeated a third.

“Like Europe,” said a fourth.

GIVE BORING MEN A CHANCE

That desire is breeding growing discontent with the once worshipped NTC militiamen who still roam the streets.

“I’m tired of the fighters, really,” Fatima Gdour told Reuters on a street crammed with jewelry shops.

“They’re still going around at night arresting people they say are for Gaddafi. I’ve heard they steal cars. The NTC is promising they will take their guns, so why not yet?”

Political analysts and other Tripolitanians said the answer is that getting the country up and running after war is not the only thing they expect to occupy the NTC in the roughly 20 months before elections. They think that jostling for position may be even more important.

“They need their militias so that they can get the best government jobs. Everybody is scared that, if they disarm, they will be threatened and lose some power,” teacher Ayman Abdulgader told Reuters, laughing when a heavily armed group of fighters from the city of Misrata drove past.

“So we have to put up with them.”

Armed brigades from Misrata, the country’s second city Benghazi, and other places, hurtled into Tripoli on the night of August 23, and Gaddafi fled. But since seizing the capital, and setting up armed checkpoints through the city center and suburbs, they have refused to leave.

They are unlikely to go until the most prominent cities and regions — to which the armed men are allied — decide that their place in what is often termed “new Libya” is assured.

The choice of Keib, a scion of a nationalist family from Tripoli’s old city, as prime minister may be a first attempt to bridge those divides and deflect accusations that the NTC is biased in favor of Benghazi, Tripolitanians said.

“I can’t see any other reason why they would have chosen him,” said lawyer Hamza Mohammed, drinking tea with friends under a sign that proclaimed ‘Libya united’. “He’s just a nobody without (Abdel Jalil). I wonder whether these NTC men can do the job. What are they except against Gaddafi?”

His friend Mustafa chipped in, to laughter, that he should have said “boring” NTC men.

“But that’s a good thing,” he said. “For years the world knew us for a man nobody said was boring. He was exciting every day, it’s true. Let’s see if, as they say in England, the ‘grey men’ can do better.”

(Editing by Tim Pearce)

The nature of the man’s death – insulted, battered and abused before being shot dead – has done some damage to its standing, with many observers asking themselves, just who are the men who have replaced him?

“The good guys,” one Western diplomat insisted when asked that question in Tripoli last week.

But the halo awarded to the so far unelected National Transitional Council (NTC), hurriedly put together as the war against Gaddafi started, is under temporary review by their foreign backers as the headaches of state-building emerge.

The selection by the NTC of little known academic Abdurrahim El-Keib as interim prime minister on Monday also highlighted how mysterious the internal workings of the new ruling group can be to perplexed diplomats, journalists and Libya analysts, as well as – especially – to an increasingly impatient Libyan public.

“Your time is done, NTC,” a young Libyan blogger wrote this week. “Thank you – the Libyan people.”

Many of them are worried about whether a coalition of armed factions that were bound mostly by hatred of Gaddafi can hold together now his regime has crumbled and he has been buried.

Rights groups are attacking the NTC, too. First it was accusations of the illegal detention and torture of thousands of pro-Gaddafi fighters and, now, reports from Human Rights Watch that fighters loyal to the NTC may have executed scores of captured Gaddafi loyalists in his hometown.

Revenge attacks are common in other parts of the country.

Reuters reporters have heard residents of one Tripoli suburb shout, “You’re just the same as he was! One dictatorship for another!” at a patrol of NTC fighters, combing the neighbourhood for locals they say still worship a dead man.

Another sign that the road ahead for post-Gaddafi Libya could be rocky is the wrangling and political horse-trading that took place over Gaddafi’s corpse – four days of haggling about its fate before it was finally buried in a secret grave.

It all adds up to a clock of patience slowly ticking down – amid a potentially dangerous power vacuum – as the NTC faces its biggest challenge so far – shepherding the country peacefully to what it has promised will be a functioning democracy.

Keib has promised he will select an interim cabinet over the next couple of weeks after which it will serve for an eight-month run-up to an election for a national assembly charged with drawing up a new constitution.

That will then sit for a year before elections proper – what kind of elections will depend on the form of the constitution.

The question for Libya is whether or not the country can get there without regional, religious and policy divisions knocking things off course or back towards violence.

“A basic problem is that the allegiance of most fighters who helped defeat the pro-Gaddafi forces is firstly to their own militias, whose identity is mostly based on specific towns, and only second to the NTC,” Alex Warren, of Frontier MEA, a Middle East and north Africa research and advisory firm, told Reuters.

“That raises the question of who could maintain stability in the case of any major clashes between the different armed groups themselves. I don’t think those will necessarily happen, but it is vital that the NTC take steps to form a centralised armed force or disarm the militias, both of which will be very delicate and difficult tasks in the current environment.”

“WHO GETS THE TOFFEE?”

Leaders of those cities, the most powerful being Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, are all heavily involved in the debate over the future direction of both the NTC and Libya. Most attend political meetings with heavily armed bodyguards.

“They’re treating government like a big chocolate box where they’re bargaining over who gets the toffee,” one diplomat said.

“‘You give us defence and you can have internal affairs’. But what are they arguing about really? There still haven’t been any elections. They can’t keep the jobs long term.”

It is those regional divides that are seen in Libya as being potentially fractious – and the biggest challenge the NTC faces – rather than the debate between secularists and Islamists that has provoked some alarm in the Western media.

Many analysts believe that as long as the organisation around the interim arrangements can stay cohesive until the elections, the outcome can be good for ordinary Libyans.

With Gaddafi gone, the mantle of the glue holding the NTC together has been handed to its chairman, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, a consenus-builder respected by people from all regions and by moderates, conservatives, Islamists and secularists.

It is not clear, however, what Abdel Jalil’s ambitions are.

“He’s tired,” one NTC official said of Gaddafi’s former justice minister. “I don’t think he wants to lead Libya. I think we’ll see him go for any of the top jobs when we have the elections.”

With the spectre of Abdel Jalil perhaps stepping aside and with an unknown appointed as prime minister for the interim, it is proving difficult for potential investors and for other Libyan officials to know whom to do business with at this stage – let alone who may emerge once full elections are held.

“It’s hard to know which horses to bet on when you don’t have very accurate odds on them,” a diplomat from an Arab state told Reuters. “But countries are making bets, anyway.”

On how long the NTC glue can hold, prognoses vary wildly.

Some see a return to all out civil war between rival militias. Others bet on the emergence of a fledgling democracy with the potential to become a regional powerhouse.

Most analysts, though, fall somewhere between the two, predicting peaceful politicking with some low-level skirmishes possible as Libya moves down a bumpy path of change.

For many, it would be a worry if the men at the top were not openly arguing over the spoils of war or engaging in debates about what role Islam should play in politics – secularists lining up against, for now, their Islamist allies.

“It’s good because it’s the essence of democracy,” said Libyan political scientist, Ahmed al-Atrash. “But we’re learning. Libyans are not aware of how democracy works yet. But we are very serious about moving this forward – to establish a democracy without this international criminal in charge.”

(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

The nature of the man’s death – insulted, battered and abused before being shot dead – has done some damage to its standing, with many observers asking themselves, just who are the men who have replaced him?

“The good guys,” one Western diplomat insisted when asked that question in Tripoli last week.

But the halo awarded to the so far unelected National Transitional Council (NTC), hurriedly put together as the war against Gaddafi started, is under temporary review by their foreign backers as the headaches of state-building emerge.

The selection by the NTC of little known academic Abdurrahim El-Keib as interim prime minister on Monday also highlighted how mysterious the internal workings of the new ruling group can be to perplexed diplomats, journalists and Libya analysts, as well as – especially – to an increasingly impatient Libyan public.

“Your time is done, NTC,” a young Libyan blogger wrote this week. “Thank you – the Libyan people.”

Many of them are worried about whether a coalition of armed factions that were bound mostly by hatred of Gaddafi can hold together now his regime has crumbled and he has been buried.

Rights groups are attacking the NTC, too. First it was accusations of the illegal detention and torture of thousands of pro-Gaddafi fighters and, now, reports from Human Rights Watch that fighters loyal to the NTC may have executed scores of captured Gaddafi loyalists in his hometown.

Revenge attacks are common in other parts of the country.

Reuters reporters have heard residents of one Tripoli suburb shout, “You’re just the same as he was! One dictatorship for another!” at a patrol of NTC fighters, combing the neighborhood for locals they say still worship a dead man.

Another sign that the road ahead for post-Gaddafi Libya could be rocky is the wrangling and political horse-trading that took place over Gaddafi’s corpse – four days of haggling about its fate before it was finally buried in a secret grave.

It all adds up to a clock of patience slowly ticking down – amid a potentially dangerous power vacuum – as the NTC faces its biggest challenge so far – shepherding the country peacefully to what it has promised will be a functioning democracy.

Keib has promised he will select an interim cabinet over the next couple of weeks after which it will serve for an eight-month run-up to an election for a national assembly charged with drawing up a new constitution.

That will then sit for a year before elections proper – what kind of elections will depend on the form of the constitution.

The question for Libya is whether or not the country can get there without regional, religious and policy divisions knocking things off course or back toward violence.

“A basic problem is that the allegiance of most fighters who helped defeat the pro-Gaddafi forces is firstly to their own militias, whose identity is mostly based on specific towns, and only second to the NTC,” Alex Warren, of Frontier MEA, a Middle East and north Africa research and advisory firm, told Reuters.

“That raises the question of who could maintain stability in the case of any major clashes between the different armed groups themselves. I don’t think those will necessarily happen, but it is vital that the NTC take steps to form a centralized armed force or disarm the militias, both of which will be very delicate and difficult tasks in the current environment.”

“WHO GETS THE TOFFEE?”

Leaders of those cities, the most powerful being Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, are all heavily involved in the debate over the future direction of both the NTC and Libya. Most attend political meetings with heavily armed bodyguards.

“They’re treating government like a big chocolate box where they’re bargaining over who gets the toffee,” one diplomat said.

“‘You give us defense and you can have internal affairs’. But what are they arguing about really? There still haven’t been any elections. They can’t keep the jobs long term.”

It is those regional divides that are seen in Libya as being potentially fractious – and the biggest challenge the NTC faces – rather than the debate between secularists and Islamists that has provoked some alarm in the Western media.

Many analysts believe that as long as the organization around the interim arrangements can stay cohesive until the elections, the outcome can be good for ordinary Libyans.

With Gaddafi gone, the mantle of the glue holding the NTC together has been handed to its chairman, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, a consenus-builder respected by people from all regions and by moderates, conservatives, Islamists and secularists.

It is not clear, however, what Abdel Jalil’s ambitions are.

“He’s tired,” one NTC official said of Gaddafi’s former justice minister. “I don’t think he wants to lead Libya. I think we’ll see him go for any of the top jobs when we have the elections.”

With the spectre of Abdel Jalil perhaps stepping aside and with an unknown appointed as prime minister for the interim, it is proving difficult for potential investors and for other Libyan officials to know whom to do business with at this stage – let alone who may emerge once full elections are held.

“It’s hard to know which horses to bet on when you don’t have very accurate odds on them,” a diplomat from an Arab state told Reuters. “But countries are making bets, anyway.”

On how long the NTC glue can hold, prognoses vary wildly.

Some see a return to all out civil war between rival militias. Others bet on the emergence of a fledgling democracy with the potential to become a regional powerhouse.

Most analysts, though, fall somewhere between the two, predicting peaceful politicking with some low-level skirmishes possible as Libya moves down a bumpy path of change.

For many, it would be a worry if the men at the top were not openly arguing over the spoils of war or engaging in debates about what role Islam should play in politics – secularists lining up against, for now, their Islamist allies.

“It’s good because it’s the essence of democracy,” said Libyan political scientist, Ahmed al-Atrash. “But we’re learning. Libyans are not aware of how democracy works yet. But we are very serious about moving this forward – to establish a democracy without this international criminal in charge.”

(Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

Mohammed al-Alagi said he did not want Saif al-Islam, now on the run, to meet the same fate as his father, former leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was beaten, abused and shot after forces of Libya’s National Transitional Council captured him on October 20.

But he said anything could happen if there was a battle when Saif al-Islam was found.

“It depends when and where they got him. If he was under fire, in crossfire, for example, nobody could guarantee he would survive. But if they arrested him, I think he would be safe,” Alagi told Reuters in an interview.

NTC officials have said Gaddafi was killed in crossfire, but widely circulated video footage of him in the hands of his captors suggests otherwise.

“It’s better if he (Saif al-Islam) faces trial in Libya but that needs guarantees of a fair trial of international standards. The Libyan justice system is normal. The Libyan justice system should try him here first and then, if he needs to, he can face international justice,” Alagi said.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) wants to try the 39-year-old for crimes against humanity. Its prosecutor said on Sunday he had “substantial evidence” that the London-educated Saif al-Islam had helped hire mercenaries to attack Libyan protesters against his father’s 42-year rule.

Alagi said he would like to see him tried by the Hague-based court to show the world what he had done, but said the legal process would depend largely on where he was found.

“If he’s in Libya we will arrest him. If he’s outside, the ICC will arrest him. If he’s in a country that has signed the Rome statute (that set up the court), he will be arrested. I’m not worried that he’ll escape,” he said.

He will be charged with “killing people, stealing money, corruption … They will find many things to charge him with.”

Alagi said he had been in contact with the ICC but declined to say what had been discussed.

Saif al-Islam may be heading for Niger, which risks upsetting its own pro-Gaddafi Tuareg nomads if it hands him over to the ICC in line with its treaty obligations. It has promised to do so if the wanted man shows up on its territory.

The fugitive Libyan has been in indirect contact with the ICC over a possible surrender, although he may hope that mercenaries could spirit him to a friendly African country.

Algeria, which took in Saif al-Islam’s mother, sister, brother Hannibal and half-brother Mohammed, is not a signatory to the treaty that set up the ICC. Nor is Sudan or Zimbabwe.

Alagi said he did not know which intermediaries Saif al-Islam was using and that Libya’s new rulers were not involved.

Asked if he believed NTC fighters would kill Saif al-Islam, he said: “I hope not really. I would not like to see that happen, I think he will face trial in Libya or outside Libya.

“Myself, I want to see him tried in the ICC. I want the international community to see what he did.”

(Writing by Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Alistair Lyon)