“Urgent — Soldiers of the Islamic State captured 21 Christian Crusaders in various areas of Tripoli Province,” declared a caption below three photographs of the hostages posted by the militants and first reported by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Last month, the same Islamic State outfit claimed responsibility for bombing an empty foreign ministry building in Tripoli in retaliation for a public wishing of “Merry Christmas” by a ministry official.
The statement came on the same day that hackers linking themselves to the Islamic State temporarily seized control of the Twitter account of the United States military’s Central Command, and just days after the emergence of a video-recorded vow of allegiance to the group by one of the perpetrators of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris. There are now Islamic State affiliates in each of Libya’s three provinces. The group claiming to have seized the hostages identified itself as the Tripolitania Province of the Islamic State, named for the region around the capital, Tripoli, in western Libya.
One of several militant groups in Derna, an eastern city known for extremism, swore allegiance to the Islamic State last fall. A few days ago, that affiliate claimed responsibility in the killing of two Tunisian journalists.
The third Islamic State affiliate, in the southern province of Fezzan, recently claimed responsibility for killing a dozen soldiers.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry confirmed that 20 Egyptians had been abducted in the mid-coastal city of Surt, in Tripolitania Province. All migrant workers, the Egyptians were seized at different times in two groups. The Associated Press reported on Monday that friends of the missing confirmed the authenticity of the photographs.
Surt has been under the control of Islamist militants for at least several months. The city was a hometown to the former Libyan ruler Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and he fled there for his last stand in the fall of 2011. One of the rebel groups that conquered the city ultimately evolved into the extremist group Ansar al-Sharia of Surt and came to dominate the city. That group shares the same name and general jihadist ideology with two other Libyan groups, Ansar al-Sharia of Derna and Ansar al-Sharia of Benghazi, but they are not believed to belong to a common organization.
The captives, as both Christians and Egyptians, were doubly vulnerable. In addition to the sectarian animosity many Muslim extremists feel toward Christians, Libya’s Islamist militias and their allies are currently battling a rival coalition backed in part by the government of Egypt, across the eastern border.
An Egyptian Christian teenager and her parents were found dead last month in Surt, and the bodies of another seven Egyptian Christians were discovered last February in the eastern city of Benghazi.
Many Egyptians have long sought work in Libya, their oil-rich neighbor. A spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Badr Abdelatty, said that the government was exploring all channels to retrieve the captive workers.
Each of Libya’s two militia factions is aligned with a rival government. The Islamist militias and their allies, including the powerful militia from the city of Misurata, recognize a rump Parliament and government in Tripoli. Egypt, however, has thrown its support behind the other internationally recognized government, headquartered in the eastern city of Tobruk. It is allied with Gen. Khalifa Hifter, who previously sought to dissolve Parliament and lead a military coup.
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Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.
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