On one side of the fight are the forces of Operation Dignity gathered around General Khalifa Hifter. Hifter is a former Qaddafi-era officer who defected in the 1980s and returned to the country in 2011. In May, he launched Dignity as a military campaign to root out Islamist militias in the eastern city of Benghazi and exclude Islamists from political power. His allies include disaffected military units, security men from the old regime, prominent eastern tribes, federalists demanding greater autonomy for the east, and militias from Zintan and other western towns.

On the opposing side is the Libya Dawn coalition, born in July as a countermovement to Dignity. It includes ex-jihadists from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, militias from the powerful port of Misrata, and fighters drawn from certain Tripoli neighborhoods, the ethnic Berber population, and some communities in the western mountains and coast. Dawn has forged a tactical alliance with a coalition of Benghazi-based Islamist militias that are battling Hifter’s forces, one of which is the U.S.-designated terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia.

Each side claims its own parliament, prime minister, and army. But the United Nations, the United States, and other world powers only recognize the Dignity-allied government, with its parliament in the eastern city of Tobruk and its cabinet in nearby Bayda. Nearly three and a half years after Libyan rebels and a NATO air campaign overthrew Muammar al-Qaddafi, the cohesive political entity known as Libya doesn’t exist. There is no central government, but rather two competing claims on legitimacy and sovereignty.

The rival factions have all but obliterated Libya’s conduits to the outside world. The nation’s major airports lie in smoking ruins. Merchant ships shun its ports. Most embassies (including America’s) and foreign businesses have ceased their operations in the country. In recent months, the fighting has centered on the nation’s central-bank reserves and oil facilities.

The federalist militias allied with Hifter’s forces currently control the oil-pipeline terminals at al-Sidr and Ras Lanuf. Their commander, Ibrahim Jathran, rose to notoriety in 2013 for seizing the ports to compel the Tripoli-based government to grant easterners more control over oil revenues. Jathran, who was ironically part of the guard force meant to protect those facilities, tried unsuccessfully last year to sell the oil on the black market. After the Dignity-Dawn split, Jathran aligned himself with Hifter and the Tobruk-based parliament.

On December 13, Libya Dawn forces, drawn mostly from Misratan militias, launched “Operation Sunrise” to wrest the terminals from Jathran and his Dignity backers. The fighting shut down the terminals’ operations, cutting Libya’s overall oil production to one-fifth of pre-2011 levels (output was at 325,000 barrels per day in January; last October it was at 900,000). On December 25, a rocket struck a storage tank, igniting an inferno that blotted the sky with thick black smoke and caused the loss of about 1.8 million barrels of oil. The blaze was subdued only after nine days of Herculean firefighting.