How U.S., European allies raced to keep ISIL from chemical weapons material

Late last year, as fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant battled to expand their stronghold on Libya's coast, militants came within 45 miles of the country's sole remaining chemical-weapons site, unnerving Libyan and American officials who feared that potentially deadly chemicals could fall into extremist hands.

In May, when the fighters struck a mile from the lightly guarded desert facility, killing two security officersat a checkpoint, they decided it was time to act.

ISIL's encroachment on an installation outside the remote oasis town of Waddan, where 500 metric tons of chemical-weapon precursor materials were stored, set off a hurried chain of events culminating in a disarmament operation involving the United States, European countries and the United Nations.

The international effort, which concluded last week when a Danish ship unloaded the materials at a German port for destruction, is one of the rare successes that Western nations can claim in Libya since dictator Moammar Gadhafi's ouster in 2011 pitched the North African country into lawlessness and civil war.

The mission was also a sign of the risks posed by vulnerable chemicals, even if they have not been weaponized, in former dictatorships and failed states throughout the Middle East.

"We were worried about this very dangerous material," said Mohamed Taher Siyala, foreign minister of Libya's unity government. If ISIL were to capture the chemicals, he said, "it would be dangerous not [just] for us but for the international community."

The rush by the United States and its European allies to help Libya remove chemicals stored at the Ruwagha site, which had been Gadhafi's chemical-weapons farm, was also an indication of President Obama's administration's uneasiness about whether the shaky unity government would be able to secure materials that could be made into mustard gas.

The removal comes as U.S. warplanes continue daily strikes on Libya's coastal city of Sirte, where a small group of ISIL fighters has managed to hold off militia forces affiliated with the Western-backed government for months.

Recent progress to weaken ISIL has not ended the prolonged political crisis that has spawned competing governments in Libya's east and west and pushed the country to the brink of civil war. This week, a powerful eastern commander seized major oil ports, further inflaming tensions that have prevented the unity government — which the United States and its allies see as the sole path to stabilization — from consolidating its power.

According to a second U.S. official, links between the officials responsible for Ruwagha and the unity government were tenuous at best, adding to the sense of insecurity about the stockpile.

"Not to suggest that there was friction … but they didn't have somebody that they would report to with clear distinction and chain of command," the official said.

The material at Ruwagha, which included phosphorus trichloride and 2-chloroethanol, was the final remnant of a once-formidable chemical-weapons program built up by Gadhafi.

While some precursor materials were destroyed in 2015, nearly 500 tons of dual-use, toxic industrial chemicals remained at Ruwagha.

There was also an environmental hazard: The materials were stored in containers so corroded that chemicals were leaking into the soil.

Officials from the Libyan office responsible for chemical weapons had hoped to destroy the precursors domestically, using sophisticated plasma technology, but that proved impossible as a wave of kidnappings, insurgent attacks and militia clashes surged across the country.

Ali Gebril, who has been Libya's representative to the OPCW since 2010, said officials' fears about the remaining material increased in December 2015, when ISIL fighters attacked a checkpoint at a site named Kheshoom al-Khail, about 45 miles from Ruwagha.

While U.S. and Libyan officials believed ISIL did not know about the presence of the chemicals, they feared the site, which had also been used to store conventional weapons, might be targeted away. Already, ISIL fighters were suspected of employing chemical weapons in Iraq and Syria; this week, U.S. warplanes destroyed a chemical-weapons factory in northern Iraq.

In mid-July, the unity government renewed an earlier request to the OPCW, more urgently this time, for help in removing the material. But securing international support to transport the chemicals would not be simple.

Under international rules, moving chemical-weapon material across international boundaries would require authorization from the United Nations. But officials worried that involving the world body might draw unwanted attention about the existence of the chemicals, including from ISIL.

Libyan officials also had a template as they made their request — the international collaboration to remove Syria's chemicals weapons in 2014. "We told them it was an investment in world peace and security," Gebril said. "We got huge support."

Rebecca Hersman, a former Pentagon official overseeing chemical-weapons issues who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Libya operation, like the one in Syria, showed that such transport operations to remove chemicals could be cost-effective and safe, "rather than importing people and capabilities into that dangerous environment" to destroy them at the site.

In Washington, U.S. officials received regular intelligence information and satellite imagery of the site. In mid-July, Libyan officials piled about 20 barrels — Canada had helped the government purchase new, safer containers — onto a small convoy of trucks and drove them across the desert to the coastal city of Misrata.

At the same time, U.S. and European officials were scrambling to coordinate a way to get the chemicals out of Libya. On July 22, the U.N. Security Council voted to adopt a British-drafted resolution authorizing member countries to transport the material from Libya.

The White House decided it would not call attention to the unanimous vote until the materials had safely left Libya. "Everything we did we wanted to be just as low-profile as we possibly could," the second U.S. official said.

In late August, the materials were loaded at the port of Misrata onto a Danish ship, which was accompanied across the Mediterranean by Danish and British naval ships. They were bound for the German city of Münster, where the chemicals will be destroyed in a commercial facility over six to nine months.

While Libya remains perilously unstable, U.S. officials hope the operation can strengthen the unity government at a time when its future remains in doubt.

"The lesson learned is that the international community still really cares about making sure that we put threats like chemical weapons back in the box and we can come together in difficult circumstances to make that happen," the first U.S. official said.