Christopher Stephen is Libya correspondent for the Guardian.

The Islamic State announced its arrival in Libya in brutal fashion this week with the slaying of an American contractor in a suicide attack on a Tripoli hotel, an act that will make it harder for Washington to continue ignoring the conflict and chaos raging in this North African country.

Until now the United States and the European Great Powers have been content to look the other way as Libya had descended into violence and anarchy. Four years ago, NATO bombed the rebels to victory in their war against Muammar Qadhafi, then packed its bags and left the country to its own devices. It’s remained off the Washington radar, even as threats in places like Syria and Iraq have commanded top-level attention and media headlines.


The rapid growth of ISIL may now change that equation rapidly, as the attack underscores the vulnerability of even the few well-protected Western officials left in this splintered country. The United States and European powers can’t allow the group to gain more of a foothold, lest it risk creating a second Mediterranean safe haven for one of the world’s deadliest terror groups.

Radical Islam itself is not new to Libya. In the 1990s the main armed resistance to Qadhafi was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, whose guerrillas were crushed in a bitter ten-year war in the eastern Green Mountains. Many militants then jumped ship to join fights elsewhere. In 2006, U.S. forces captured a roster of foreign fighters in Iraq that declared no town on earth, proportional to its size, had provided more fighters than Derna, on Libya’s eastern coast.

The 2011 revolution saw the Islamists return home, fighting alongside rebel militias from across the land, with NATO bombs acting as midwife. When the fighting was over, the big winners were not Islamic radicals but the non-jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, whose Justice and Construction Party scraped together a fragile coalition after the first post-revolution elections in 2012.

The radicals went their own way, with a campaign of bombings and attacks on foreign targets culminating later that year in the storming of the U.S. Benghazi consulate, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff. The U.S. blamed Ansar al Sharia, or Partizans of Islam, which until last summer was the most powerful of an alphabet-soup of radical groups active in Libya.

Long before ISIL arrived, radicals had established a presence amid Libya’s chaos, bolstered by the arrival of volunteers from across the Middle East. Libya may not loom large in Washington, but its oil has made it an important target for militants. Libya has Africa’s largest oil reserves, with 48 billion barrels under the desert sands, making it a much more lucrative prize than poverty-stricken Mali, Somalia or Yemen.

Libya’s general lawlessness has also allowed radicals freedom of action. In January last year an al-Qaeda group launched from southern Libya an attack on Algeria’s In Amenas gas plant that killed 50 hostages. Last spring, diplomats from Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia were kidnapped in Tripoli in quick succession, their abductors then offering them in a trade for militants held in their respective countries.

By then security for Americans in Tripoli had become onerous. To protect embassy staffers from terrorist attack while they attended a farewell party for a British diplomat, three waves of security were dispatched by the US embassy. First came an pre-advance team to scout the party location. Next came the advance team itself, to establish area security. Finally, Marines and more guards in armored jeeps shepherded the guests in from the fortified embassy on the airport road. Today, that embassy stands deserted, with Washington joining most foreign powers in pulling out its diplomats when full-scale war broke out in the capital last summer.

ISIL arrived around the same time, when ISIL leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi dispatched a Saudi preacher, Abu Nabil an Anbari, from Syria to Libya with orders to spread the ISIL francise. Anbari arrived with a coterie of ISIL fighters hardened in Syria and elbowed aside al Qaeda and other radical outfits in Derna, proclaiming the town an Islamic Caliphate. To ensure the residents get the point, Derna now has blue neon ISIL signs glowing from shop fronts and lampposts. Anbari dispenses justice from the requisitioned courthouse, ordering public floggings on a wooden stage in the street outside, and executions in the city sports stadium.

In December ISIL carried out a night attack on an isolated army base in the Sahara, killing 14 soldiers as they slept and putting a video charting the operation on the internet. At the start of the year they claimed responsibility for the execution of two missing Tunisian journalists, as yet unconfirmed. Soon afterwards, ISIL raided a compound in Sirte housing Egyptian guest workers. Muslims were separated from Christians, and the latter group marched off, never to be seen again. Days later ISIL posted a ghoulish photo montage of their captives faces superimposed on a black background. The good news for their families is that the men were at least photographed alive.

Then came the attack on Tripoli’s sea-front Corinthian hotel, a futuristic soaring structure of glass and sand-colored concrete on the waterfront. A three-strong suicide squad, including what seem to be a Tunisian and a Sudanese, detonated a car bomb outside, then rushed the guards. The hotel is Tripoli’s ritziest location, home for the diplomats and businessmen. The gunmen blazed a path to the 23rd floor, killing a French pilot and David Berry, a 34-year-old former Marine contracted by Fredericksburg, Virginia, security company.

The stated reason for the attack, by a group calling itself Islamic State for Tripolitania, was revenge for the death, in US custody on January 2, of Libyan Abu Anas Al Libi. Libi was arrested by US special forces in Tripoli in October 2013, and died from an illness before he was due to go on trial in New York for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But some think the targets were Americans staying at the Corinthia. The day before the attack, Omar Al Hasi, head of a militia coalition controlling Tripoli boasted of a US Justice Department delegation arriving to establish links with him. The story was quickly denied in Washington, but there were certainly Americans in the hotel, with Berry assigned to guard them. Who they were has not yet been revealed, but reports suggest he died holding off the attackers while the other Americans escaped through a rear exit. All three attackers were later cornered in the upper floors and killed, one apparently with a grenade.

With the attack, ISIL has almost certainly ensured no more Americans will be arriving in the capital. The State Department has issued its third warning in a year to avoid travel to Libya.

Some in the West are already agitating for Libya to be a priority in the fight against ISIL. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has spent the past year claiming the Sahara is a viper’s nest—his words—of jihadists. His fear is that Libya-based militants are moving south to cause mischief in Mali. To this end, France has deployed 3,000 troops close to Libya’s southern border. Days before the Corinthia attack, former chairman of the House intelligence committee Pete Hoekstra wrote: “Libya is deteriorating into a veritable Somalia on the Mediterranean. This is a critical issue that NATO and the United States cannot continue to ignore.”

Yet ignore it they do, consumed with the crises elsewhere. Hoekstra and Le Drian worry that Libya’s chaos is providing a fertile breeding ground for ISIL to grow unchecked, as it did for so long in Syria. As it grows, the country’s chaos continues to worsen.

Libya has never really been at peace ever since the end of the 2011 revolution, as the various rebel militias fought a mosaic of interlocking conflicts. Last summer, those conflicts polarized into a single fight, triggered by national elections.

Those elections, for a House of Representatives to replace the former congress, saw a sharp defeat for Islamist candidates. They reacted by rebelling against the parliament, joining with allies to form a militia coalition, Libya Dawn, and seizing Tripoli. Al Hasi was proclaimed “prime minister,” the elected government decamped to the eastern city of Tobruk, and the country has been at war ever since.

Until now, the outside world has been content to leave the problem in the hands of a UN special envoy, Bernadino Leon. Leon, a Spanish diplomat, has tried to mediate between the Tripoli rebels and the elected government without success.

His first problem is that the two sides have mutually-exclusive demands. Tobruk demands that, as the recognized government, it controls the country. Libya Dawn, whose Islamists fear persecution if they agree, are demanding at least a chunk of territory that includes Tripoli.

Leon’s other problem is that Tobruk is winning the war, and sees no reason to sign a ceasefire. It may have lost Tripoli but, by dint of international recognition, it controls something much more valuable—the oil.

Two-thirds of Libya’s oil production is in the east of the country, which is firmly allied with the elected government. International recognition status means only the Tobruk authorities are entitled to the oil revenues. The past months have seen its military forces expand, notably its air force, supplied by neighboring Egypt.

In Benghazi, army attacks have pushed Ansar al Sharia into a small area around the port in a brutal campaign that has left hundreds dead and some districts pulverized. The air force, loyal to Tobruk, broke a Libya Dawn attempt to capture Libya’s biggest oil port, Es Sider, in December.

Not surprisingly, the fighting is tearing the country apart. Towns are smashed, thousands are dead and 400,000 of the six million population displaced. A Libya Dawn speedboat attack on Es Sider saw seven giant storage tanks go up in smoke. Oil production is falling fast and the country is depending on money from fast-depleting foreign reserves.

Leon has tried to mediate a peace deal for five months. This week he opened peace talks in Geneva, with the government sending a delegation, but Libya Dawn staying away, leaving Leon in the role of a marriage counselor with only one spouse at the counseling session.

Leon’s other problem is the lack of any kind of leverage from the outside world. It is a problem UN staffers in Geneva know well. Two decades before, UN mediator Cyrus Vance and EU envoy David Owen spent three fruitless years in the Swiss city failing to mediate a peace deal for Bosnia. Only when American dealmaker Richard Holbroke showed up was peace made, and then only after he secured a promise from Bill Clinton of air strikes and fifty thousand troops to enforce it.

For the moment, Leon has no such “big stick” to jam through a deal. Until he does, the war is likely to grind on, Libya will continue to disintegrate, and ISIL will find fertile soil to grow amid the growing despair and desperation.