--- title: "The Son Who Would Be Ushered Into Tripoli on the Document of His Father’s Defeat" description: "Saddam Haftar has spent his best cards to make himself Libya’s president; the decision now rests in Washington" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-26T16:01:19Z modified: 2026-10-26T23:27:14Z url: https://rews.cc/a/the-son-who-would-be-ushered-into-tripoli-on-the-document-of-38a0e1 language: en tags: ["libya", "politics", "turkey", "egypt", "usa", "mideast", "world"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # The Son Who Would Be Ushered Into Tripoli on the Document of His Father’s Defeat *Saddam Haftar has spent his best cards to make himself Libya’s president; the decision now rests in Washington* By Jan Sokol · October 26, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-son-who-would-be-ushered-into-tripoli-on-the-document-of-38a0e1 ## In brief - Libya’s eastern House of Representatives ratified the Turkish maritime memorandum on October 20, after seven years of rejecting it - Analyst Emadeddin Badi argues the vote was orchestrated by Saddam Haftar to win Ankara’s backing for his presidential ambitions - Washington, through adviser Massad Boulos, is brokering a Tripoli-Benghazi power-sharing deal that could make Saddam president - Speaker Aguila Saleh was ousted two weeks before the vote after 12 years in office, clearing Saddam’s path to succession - Egypt could instead promote Saddam’s brother Khaled, the LAAF chief of staff, who criticised the US initiative in April For almost seven years, eastern Libya denounced the maritime memorandum that Turkiye had signed with its rivals in Tripoli, treating the document as an affront to be resisted at all costs. Last week it needed only a single sitting of the legislature to embrace it. On October 20, the House of Representatives in Benghazi ratified the deal — a pact [condemned at once by the European Union, Greece, Israel and Egypt](https://rews.cc/a/libya-s-rival-halves-finally-agree-on-something-turkey-s-map-428604). [Writing in Al Jazeera](https://aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/10/26/saddam-haftar-is-eyeing-the-throne-in-libya), the analyst Emadeddin Badi reads the vote not as a Turkish triumph but as the final act of a sequence choreographed by one man: Saddam Haftar, son of Khalifa Haftar, the military commander who controls the east. The prize at the end of the choreography, Badi argues, is the Libyan presidency. The machinery is American. Washington is currently attempting to broker a power-sharing arrangement between Tripoli and Benghazi, an effort championed by Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, and the deal could install Saddam as president. But no such arrangement can stand without Ankara, whose sway over western Libya gives it a decisive voice. The ratification of the memorandum, in this reading, is tribute — the price of Turkiye’s blessing. ## The speaker who had to fall The opening move, Badi writes, was a palace coup. A fortnight before the vote, the chamber unseated its speaker, Aguila Saleh, after 12 years in the post. The removal felled two birds with one stone: Saleh was Cairo’s principal ally in the east and the most stubborn obstacle to the memorandum, but he was also, as speaker and nominal supreme commander, the embodiment of the de jure authority from which Khalifa Haftar’s own command flows. Tribally weighty among the Obeidat, he was one of the few men capable of complicating, or even arbitrating, any transfer of power — a handover already quietly under way, which the elder Haftar’s advanced age could hasten at any moment. Saleh’s successor tells its own story. Al-Salhin Abdulnabi, a fellow Obeidi able to defuse the risk of tribal backlash, chaired the chamber’s Libyan-Turkish friendship committee — a signal, as clear as a flag over a fortress, of where the legislature now takes its cues. ## Weighed in Washington Whether the gambit pays off will be decided in Washington. Saddam is counting on the Trump administration’s appetite for a Libyan deal, sharpened by Turkish and Emirati lobbying and by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rapport with Trump, to prevail over the objections of Athens and Nicosia and the displeasure of an Israel uneasy about Ankara’s reach. It is, Badi observes, a direct contest between Trump’s transactional instinct and a longstanding American partnership with the Greek-Cypriot-Israeli axis. The broadside against Israel may even pay Saddam a domestic dividend, letting him pose as standing up to Israel while dispelling perceptions of a covert channel to it. Europe, meanwhile, has sidelined itself into near-irrelevance. When Benghazi expelled the EU’s migration commissioner and three member-state ministers on arrival in July 2025, European capitals answered with something closer to grovelling than resolve. Less than a year later, Athens itself hosted Saddam, who duly sidestepped any commitment on an alternative maritime memorandum. A Union whose Libya policy has shrunk to counting the boats that leave the eastern coast for Crete, Badi notes witheringly, is in no position to make him pay for redrawing the waters it implores him to police. Abu Dhabi has every reason to look the other way: none of Khalifa’s sons has been more faithful to the Emiratis, and installing their most loyal client at the apex of the Libyan state would cap a decade of investment in the Haftar project — a maritime line drawn in Ankara’s favour being a modest price, though the closeness of that embrace may yet constrain him. Egypt is the true question mark. Cairo’s objection was framed almost entirely in legal terms, chiefly the memorandum’s encroachment on Egypt’s exclusive economic zone, perhaps a sign it is keeping its options open. Its relationship with Ankara has meanwhile been transformed, the two now aligned on Sudan and the Red Sea and drawn closer by a shared wariness of Israel’s expansionist ambitions. And Cairo holds a spare heir. Saddam’s brother Khaled, the Libyan Arab Armed Forces’ chief of staff, is considerably closer to Egypt and publicly criticised the US initiative in April. Should Cairo champion him instead, Badi warns, Saddam would have little left to bargain with — he has already cashed in his most valuable chip with the Turks. The strongest card he still holds, cutting off support for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, would win favour in both Ankara and Cairo, but Abu Dhabi would never let him play it. He is squeezed between a patron he dare not cross and a partner that has already pocketed its reward. > History, in Libya, has a mordant sense of humour. The memorandum itself was the price Tripoli paid for the Turkish intervention that halted Khalifa Haftar’s offensive at the gates of the capital in 2020 and sent his forces and mercenaries into headlong retreat. Where the father tried and failed to storm Tripoli, Badi concludes, the son now hopes to be ushered in on a red carpet woven from the very document that sealed his father’s defeat. If he succeeds, the instrument of the family’s most humiliating setback becomes the cornerstone of its dynasty. If Washington baulks, it becomes instead the epitaph of the son’s ambitions.