TARHUNA – The dead of Tarhuna will not be forgotten. It is not possible. Also because not all of them have yet been found. They are missing. Burned, dismembered, buried still alive, or killed with a single blow to the head. All buried by African migrants who at night were taken out of the sheds where they were prisoners to go and do their dirty work. They found 183, hundreds of them still missing. Dozens and dozens are still hidden in the red and sandy earth where the olive trees planted by the Italians in the 1930s still grow strong and luxuriant.
This country village 100 kilometers from Tripoli was for months a reign of terror ruled by the mafia gang of 7 Kanyat brothers. Mafiosi who have imposed themselves with the methods that Daesh, the Islamic State has used in Mosul in Iraq or in Sirte, here in Libya. Mafiosi who had previously managed to become even the Tripoli “Police”, a militia that the government paid as long as it controlled the city. And then, in 2019, after having betrayed Fayez Serraj, they threw themselves on the side of General Haftar, opening the city to the militias that besieged the capital for a year and a half.
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“Yes, the Kanyat did as the Daesh terrorists did: they terrorized, robbed, kidnapped, killed and dumped the bodies of my fellow villagers in public, to terrorize and subdue everyone”. Abubaker Saed, the local deputy in the Libyan House of Representatives, speaks. To him the Kanyat had kidnapped and tortured a brother. To get paid a ransom, make his whole family flee and take over houses and farms. The first bodies did not hide them: they unloaded them in the “triangle of death”, a large flowerbed at the intersection of the road that comes from the sea.
It was a genocide, “and the peak was reached a few weeks before Haftar’s militias withdrew,” continues the deputy. Then the Kanyats went to track down their enemies even in hospitals. They were all witnesses. They dumped women, old people and even children into mass graves. While digging, the volunteers also found hospital sheets and even IVs that someone still had attached to their arm.
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These 7 damned brothers from 2012, little by little, had managed to take over the city. Tarhuna was a happy town south of Tripoli: a good aquifer had allowed good agriculture for years. At the time of the Italians, many colonists had farms around Tarhuna, citrus fruits, olives, livestock. Yesterday, arriving for long minutes, we skirted a huge farm, 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers, “it is the Fattoria Napoli, the largest olive grove in all of North Africa”. Gaddafi for years maintained good relations with some local clans, which guaranteed him loyalty, and also for this reason Jamahiria had always treated the municipality of Tarhuna with special regard.
In 2011, at the outbreak of the revolution, this Kanyat family, desperate, people without art or part, realized that the void left by Gaddafi could be filled quickly. “These seven brothers were miserable people, a herd of hyenas who quarreled with each other as soon as possible, beat each other with sticks even while they were at funerals or weddings,” they tell Tarhuna.
When the revolution broke out, much of Tarhuna initially remained loyal to Gaddafi. The Kanyat had bills to settle with a family of their cousins who had always been Gaddafi, and began killing them one at a time, then passing themselves off as revolutionaries. But this started a feud, a cycle of vendettas, and Ali, the youngest of the Kanyat brothers, was murdered. Immediately the other brothers transformed him into a legend, a “martyr”: the Kanyat then responded by hunting not only for murderers, but also killing dozens of people, exterminating the entire families of their rivals.
Faster and faster, they were able to seize weapons, take control of the local police, rake in heavy weapons. They managed to be baptized as the “Seventh Brigade”, in Tripoli they knocked on the Ministry of Defense and of the Interior and were recognized as an “authorized militia”. They began receiving thousands and thousands of dollars from the government to keep order in Tarhuna and keep Tripoli’s rival militias away from the capital.
The head of their small state had become Mohammed, the second in age, a staunch Salafist, the only one with a minimum of education. In the large barracks that he had conquered from the regular police, the chief had had a portrait painted, calling himself “Minister of Defense”. Under him was Abdul Rahim, in charge of “internal security” in the city. He was the first among the killers, the leader of the militia death squads.
Abdulhakim Ahmed Naama, 35, had four brothers: one was killed, another disappeared. “Many of us went to Tripoli, told what was happening in our city. But in Tripoli they were weak, they had enlisted the Kanyat, they were their police ”.
In September 2019, a Turkish drone struck a militia convoy, killing Mohsen Al Kanyat and younger brother Abdul Adhim. It is the beginning of total terror: dozens and dozens of killings, kidnappings every night, to keep the city in its grip. June 2020, Tripoli troops free Tarhuna: what remains of the Kanyat brothers and Haftar’s militias retreat to Benghazi. “In Benghazi there are still 3 Kanyat brothers, protected by someone in that city”, says Yaseen: “But above all there are at least 100 of their cutthroats, their“ soldiers ”: we all know them, one by one, name by name. They were the killers who obeyed the orders of the Kanyat. And they are still there ”.
Since the summer of 2020, the Tripoli government has started an excavation campaign, with forensic experts. They used DNA tests to identify the decayed covers, but soon the chemical reagents ran out, the tests are unusable. And no one knows how to identify the piles of bones pulled out of the earth. Other bodies, such as those recomposed buried yesterday with name and surname, were recognized because they had been hidden for a short time. They were still almost recognizable, or they were identified by shoes, a little girl’s dress, a father’s clothes.
Hamza Q. is considered one of the leaders of the “real” rebels, those who revolted against Gaddafi and then were forced to flee from the Kanyats. He explains what these months have been: “Since June the new police have captured some of the criminals, they have interrogated them and they have revealed the places of the first mass graves. Then the neighbors started talking, who had seen Africans bury the victims by the dozen. They hadn’t talked for months, because the Kanyats terrified everyone. Then again we also began to consult Google Earth: we compared the recently moved earth, we invented satellite photography analysts. We are still looking ”.
Yesterday, while this collective funeral was taking place in the main square, broadcast live on television, a delegation from Benghazi came to Tarhuna to try to dialogue with survivors and relatives. Those of Benghazi have no faults, but the 3 surviving Kanyat brothers, a hundred criminals identified with name and surname along with 10,000 citizens of Tarhuna, evidently compromised with the Kanyat, all still live in that region. Today in Libya there is an attempt at a government of national unity. Tarhuna cannot be reunited. Without justice and without having also uncovered the last mass grave.
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