Egypt Hosting High-profile Libya Talks to Ease Deadlock

Thursday, July 28, 2016

CAIRO (AP) - Egypt is hosting high-profile talks among Libya’s top political and military figures aimed at resolving the war-ravaged country’s political deadlock, officials said Thursday.

The head of Libya’s U.N.-brokered unity government, Fayez Serraj, has met over the past two days with Aqila Saleh, the head of the Libyan parliament. Saleh is also to meet the head of the Cairo-based Arab League later Thursday.

The Saleh-Serraj meeting - the first in months - sought to “open direct channels of communications after a period of separation,” said Abdullah Behlek, the spokesman for Saleh’s parliament, which is based in the eastern Libyancity of Benghazi.

Libya’s powerful Gen. Khalifa Hifter, backed by Saleh’s parliament, is holding separate meetings with both Saleh’s and Serraj’s deputies.

Egypt has backed Hifter in the war against Islamic militias in eastern Libya over the past two years, including with training and weapons and logistics supplies.

Libya is bitterly divided among rival factions. Since 2014, it has been split between two governments and two parliaments, based in western and eastern Libya, respectively.