2011 – Present
ONGOINGThe Arab Spring uprising of February 2011 shattered Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year grip on Libya, igniting a revolution that drew NATO airpower and toppled one of Africa's most idiosyncratic dictatorships in eight months. With Gaddafi dead and no functioning institutions beneath him, the country fragmented into competing militias, rival parliaments, and regional power centers, collapsing into a second civil war in 2014 between the UN-recognized government in Tripoli and Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army in the east — a proxy contest drawing in Turkey, the UAE, Egypt, and Russia's Wagner Group. A UN ceasefire in October 2020 stopped the large-scale fighting and produced a Government of National Unity in 2021, but the elections it was created to hold were postponed indefinitely and have never been scheduled. Libya has been frozen ever since: two governments, one in Tripoli under Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and one in the east under Osama Hamad, each backed by armed forces and foreign patrons. The violence that remains is largely between the militias that nominally make up the Tripoli government itself — as in May 2025, when the killing of the militia leader Abdul Ghani al-Kikli set off two days of fighting across the capital. Fifteen years after the revolution, the country is neither at war nor at peace.
Chapter-by-chapter narrative with maps, primary sources, and key events.
Explore battles on a live map with a timeline slider and territory overlays.
Deep-dive into every major engagement — commanders, casualties, significance.
Biographical flip cards with real portraits, facts, and full biography pages.
Trace each figure's full life journey — birth, education, battles, and death — on a live map.
Scroll-driven visualization of casualties — each dot a thousand lives.
Weapons, war machines, and the military innovations that defined how this conflict was fought.
Cause-and-effect chains tracing the war's long shadow on history.
War crimes, massacres, and the darkest chapters of this conflict — documented for history.
The Arab Spring uprising of February 2011 shattered Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year grip on Libya, igniting a revolution that drew NATO airpower and toppled one of Africa's most idiosyncratic dictatorships in eight months. With Gaddafi dead and no functioning institutions beneath him, the country fragmented into competing militias, rival parliaments, and regional power centers, collapsing into a second civil war in 2014 between the UN-recognized government in Tripoli and Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army in the east — a proxy contest drawing in Turkey, the UAE, Egypt, and Russia's Wagner Group. A UN ceasefire in October 2020 stopped the large-scale fighting and produced a Government of National Unity in 2021, but the elections it was created to hold were postponed indefinitely and have never been scheduled. Libya has been frozen ever since: two governments, one in Tripoli under Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and one in the east under Osama Hamad, each backed by armed forces and foreign patrons. The violence that remains is largely between the militias that nominally make up the Tripoli government itself — as in May 2025, when the killing of the militia leader Abdul Ghani al-Kikli set off two days of fighting across the capital. Fifteen years after the revolution, the country is neither at war nor at peace.
Libyan Civil War was fought from 2011 to the present day.
Libyan Civil War was fought between GNA → GNU (Tripoli, UN-recognized) and Gaddafi → LNA / Haftar & the East.
An estimated 40,020 people died in Libyan Civil War, including roughly 25,020 military and 15,000 civilian deaths. Figures are scholarly estimates and vary by source.
Major engagements included Battle of Benghazi, LNA Offensive on Tripoli, Fall of Tripoli, and Battle of Misrata.