Libya’s largest operating refinery may go dark as strikes on both coasts shatter a fragile calm

The US drive to broker the unification of Libya just had its worst week since the April budget deal, with the head of Khalifa Haftar’s military intelligence apparatus killed in a Benghazi car bombing and a sustained drone campaign against Libya’s largest operating refinery in the west. The 10 August assassination of Maj. Gen. Fawzi Al Mansouri and an eight-days-and-counting run of strikes on Zawiya’s oil and power infrastructure have rattled the two premises the US-led political unification plan was built on: That Benghazi is safely under Haftar-family control and that fragmented western militias are containable enough to leave the oil complex alone.

In the east, the killing landed inside what was supposed to be Haftar’s safest district. Major General Al Mansouri, who had run military intelligence for the Haftar family’s Libyan National Army in the east since May 2024, is the most senior LNA officer assassinated in Benghazi in years, after the city was largely pacified from 2017 onward. No group has claimed responsibility, but Haftar family member Khaled Haftar said an investigation is ongoing and authorities later said they had arrested a cell in Benghazi allegedly preparing acts of sabotage.

In the west, the target has been the infrastructure that keeps domestic fuel and power flowing. On 8 August, a drone punctured a naphtha tank at the Zawiya oil complex. A strike on a desalination plant followed before 10 and 11 attacks on gasoline and diesel tanks at the 120k bb/d refinery, the largest currently operating in Libya. Power substations were attacked, too, on 12 August and again yesterday, plunging Tripoli and much of Western Libya into the dark.

It’s unclear who’s responsible, but many analysts, including Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) Libya expert Jalel Harchaoui, think the drone attacks in the west of the country are due to tensions between local militias and forces aligned with Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who controls the west. Since the start of 2026, conflict tracking research center ACLED has logged more than 30 armed clashes in Zawiya and warned the escalation could ultimately lead to a state-aligned offensive to bring the city under tighter Tripoli control.

The National Oil Corporation is now openly weighing a shutdown. NOC has warned it may declare force majeure and suspend operations at the refinery if strikes continue. That would be Libya’s most consequential fuel-supply disruption in years and would land squarely on the domestic gasoline market — Zawiya is the country’s main operating refinery for local product.

Why it matters: The attacks in the east and west undermine the relative security on which the US-led push in unifying Libya’s coffers and government is predicated. The April unified-budget signing remains its only tangible achievement. In mid-July, House of Representatives Speaker Aguila Saleh reportedly said the eastern-based legislature had received nothing official regarding the initiative, and no roadmap has been published since Washington’s Arab Affairs envoy, Massad Boulos, ran shuttle diplomacy last month in Malta, Tripoli and Benghazi. Boulos condemned both attacks last week.

REMEMBER: When we dug into April's landmark unified budget, RUSI’s Harchaoui told us its most meaningful shift was a hard expenditure ceiling and, for the first time, written visibility on Benghazi’s spending — but flagged that the document was signed by individual MPs rather than voted through, leaving the central bank’s legal authority to execute it unclear. He also warned the US had pledged to return in August to audit execution, and predicted the political-unification track would prove much slower and messier than the economic one. That August moment has now arrived — under the worst possible security conditions on both sides of the country’s governments.