After six months of defiant resistance, fiery speeches, chilling threats and blood-curdling brutality, Gaddafi has finally fallen on his sword. His collapse, however, is far from the end of the story. Instead, it heralds the start of a more complicated chapter in his country’s history. As tanks surround Gaddafi’s last outposts in Sirte, the cold war over the country’s future gathers pace. The common enemy has been forced out of the scene, and now the vast differences between those he had brought together return to occupy the center stage.

Anti-Gaddafi fighters from the Warfallah tribe prepare to advance to the town of Bani Walid, currently held by pro-Gaddafi forces, in southeast Tripoli September 8, 2011. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

The vacuum created by Gaddafi’s departure is now filled by two polarized camps. The first is the National Transitional Council (NTC), made up largely of ex-ministers and prominent senior Gaddafi officials who jumped from his ship as it began to sink. These enjoy the support of NATO and derive their current power and influence from the backing of Western capitals. The second is composed of political and military local leaders who have played a decisive role in the liberation of the various Libyan cities from the Gaddafi brigades.

The thousands of fighters and activists these command are now convened within local military councils, such as the Tripoli council, which was founded following the liberation of the capital and which recently elected Abdul Hakim Belhaj as its head. Ironically, this hero of the liberation of Tripoli is the same man who, a few years back had been deported, along with other Libyan dissidents, by MI6 and the CIA to Gaddafi, their close ally at the time.

There could be no more striking indication of the rift between the two sides than the words of Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the head of the council and former justice minister, on the eve of Tripoli’s conquest. Amid the jubilation and euphoria, a downbeat Abdul Jalil emerged to warn that there exist “extremist fundamentalists within the ranks of the rebels,” threatening to resign if they didn’t hand over their weapons. His colleague Abdurrahman Shalgham, who still presides over the Libyan delegation to the UN and who had served as foreign minister under Gaddafi, criticized Belhaj, dismissing him as “a mere preacher and not a military commander,” statements reiterated by NTC member Othman Ben Sassi, who said of the elected military council president: “He was nothing, nothing. He arrived at the last moment and organized some people.”

The war of words went on as Ismail Sallabi, head of the Benghazi military council, called on the NTC to resign, castigating its members as “remnants of the Gaddafi era” and “as a bunch of liberals with no following in Libyan society.”

Many fighters, such as Sallabi, are insisting that they played the key role in toppling Gaddafi. Some go further, saying that their swift capture of Tripoli had taken the NTC by surprise and that they had defeated what they claim was NATO’s real plan for the country: its partition into east and west. NATO’s strategy, they maintain, was to freeze the conflict in the west, effectively turning Brega into the dividing line between the liberated east and Gaddafi’s west.

Two sources of legitimacy now confront each other in Libya: a legitimacy derived from armed struggle on the one hand, and the de facto legitimacy of a self-appointed leadership with Western support on the other. The two are locked in a cold (and potentially hot) conflict over Libya’s future, the nature of its political order and its foreign policy.

This conflict is played out in various ways throughout the region. In each case the internal dynamics of the various revolutions are threatened by foreign powers’ logic of containment and control. What is at stake is whether the Arab spring leads to a calculated, limited, and monitored change, where new players replace old ones while the rules of the game remain intact, and where proxy wars are manned via allied local elites in order to recycle the old regime into the new order. This is what various foreign powers would like to see.

Gaddafi has gone, but Libya is now set to be a scene of multiple battles: not only conflicts between NATO’s men and the fighters on the ground, but also between the foreign forces that have invested in the war – the French, who are determined to have the upper hand politically and economically; the Italians, who regard Libya as their backyard; the British, who want to safeguard their contracts; the Turks, who are keen to revive their influence in the old Ottoman hemisphere; and of course the losing players in the emerging order, the Chinese and the Russians.

Among the new Libyan leadership are radical Muslims with links to al-Qaeda. Revelations are surfacing also of a close collaboration of Western governments with the deposed dictator.

The overwhelming presence of radical Muslims among the rebel Libyan leadership has been known in Paris at least since early March. But the dangers from this are now beginning to be discussed openly in Western capitals. 

On Mar. 8, François Gouyette, ambassador to Tripoli until late February, told a select group of deputies at a closed session of the French parliamentary commission of foreign affairs that the rebellion, especially in the east of the country, comprised mostly “radical Muslims.” 

“In the east of the country, especially in the city of Derna, which was taken very easily by the insurrection, there is without question a high concentration of radical Muslims,” Gouyette told the deputies. “Hundreds of Libyan combatants taking part in the international jihad in Afghanistan and in Iraq originate from this region. 

“Many of these combatants are back in Libya,” Gouyette warned. IPS has the minutes of the meeting. 

Gouyette recalled that some 800 members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) banned by the United Nations after the terror attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, and who were recently released after being incarcerated by the Gaddafi regime for many years, “have joined the liberated areas of the country. They can represent a problem in the future.” 

Gouyette recalled that Gaddafi’s regime had “closely cooperated” with “all Western intelligence services in the fight against (Muslim) terrorism represented by al-Qaeda.” Discussions at the meeting were not made available to French media. 

Five months after the closed session in parliament, Gouyette’s warnings have been officially confirmed. It is now no longer a secret that four of the military leaders of the Libyan rebellion have had long-term links with radical movements. 

On the other hand, secret documents found recently in Tripoli confirm that both the British and the U.S. governments collaborated closely with Gaddafi in the fight against radial Muslims. 

The secret Gaddafi files were discovered by researchers from the Washington-based Human Rights Watch in the private offices of former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa. Koussa fled Libya at the beginning of the insurrection last February, and has apparently found political asylum in Qatar. 

Prominent on the other side is Belhaj himself, also known as Abu Abdallah al-Sadek, founder of the LIFG, and veteran of the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s in Afghanistan. Following the triumph over Gaddafi, Belhaj is currently military governor of Tripoli. 

U.S. secret services had captured Belhaj in Malaysia in 2003. They detained and interrogated him in a secret Bangkok prison until 2004, when he was handed over to the Gaddafi regime. Gouyette confirmed in the French parliament that Gaddafi released him in March 2010. 

Among other well-known radical Muslims in the new leadership are Ismail as-Salabi of Benghazi, Abdelhakim al-Hasidi of Derna, and Ali Salabi, members of the National Transitional Council which now controls the Libyan government. All of them are founding members of the LIFG. 

Salabi led the LIFG in negotiations with the Gaddafi regime that led to the release of practically the whole of the present rebel leadership from Gaddafi’s prisons. 

Hasidi, who has admitted that some of his militia “are members of al-Qaeda…good Muslims and patriots fighting the invader (sic)”, also has a long past as jihadist. Hasidi fought in Afghanistan against the U.S.-led intervention, was captured in 2002 in Peshawar in Pakistan, and handed over to the Libyan government in 2004. 

According to the secret Libyan files found in Tripoli, the British MI6 foreign secret service delivered information to Gaddafi on exiled opponents over many years. The files confirm that the CIA captured several Libyan Muslim militants abroad, such as Belhaj and Hasidi, interrogated them in secret prisons, and later handed them to Gaddafi. 

Peter Bouckaert, director of the emergencies division at Human Rights Watch, told journalists that the role of the CIA went beyond “abducting suspected Islamic militants and handing them over to the Libyan intelligence. The CIA also sent the questions they wanted Libyan intelligence to ask and, from the files, it’s very clear they were present in some of the interrogations themselves.” 

Meanwhile, Cann has reported that a potent stash of Russian-made surface-to-air missiles is missing from a huge Tripoli weapons warehouse amid reports of weapons looting across war-torn Libya.

They are Grinch SA-24 shoulder-launched missiles, also known as Igla-S missiles, the equivalent of U.S.-made Stinger missiles.

A CNN team and Human Rights Watch found dozens of empty crates marked with packing lists and inventory numbers that identified the items as Igla-S surface-to-air missiles.

The list for one box, for example, written in English and Russian, said it had contained two missiles, with inventory number “Missile 9M342,” and a power source, inventory number “Article 9B238.”

Grinch SA-24s are designed to target front-line aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones. They can shoot down a plane flying as high as 11,000 feet and can travel 19,000 feet straight out.

Fighters aligned with the National Transitional Council and others swiped armaments from the storage facility, witnesses told Human Rights Watch. The warehouse is located near a base of the Khamis Brigade, a special forces unit in Gaddafi’s military, in the southeastern part of the capital.

The warehouse contains mortars and artillery rounds, but there are empty crates for those items as well. There are also empty boxes for another surface-to-air missile, the SA-7.

Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same pattern in armories looted elsewhere in Libya, noting that “in every city we arrive, the first thing to disappear are the surface-to-air missiles.”

He said such missiles can fetch many thousands of dollars on the black market.

“We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya, and I’ve seen cars packed with them.” he said. “They could turn all of North Africa into a no-fly zone.”

Gen. Carter Ham, chief of U.S. Africa Command, has said he’s concerned about the proliferation of weapons, most notably the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. He said there were about 20,000 in Libya when the international operation began earlier this year and many of them have not been accounted for.

“That’s going to be a concern for some period of time,” he said in April.

Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union counterterrorism coordinator, raised concerns Monday about the possibility that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, based in North Africa, could gain access to small arms, machine guns and surface-to-air missiles.

The missing weapons also conjure fears of what happened in Iraq, where people grabbed scores of weapons when Saddam Hussein’s regime was overthrown.

Bouckaert said one or two of the missing artillery rounds are “enough to make a car bomb.”

“We should remember what happened in Iraq,” he said, when the “country was turned upside down” by insurgents using such weaponry.

There have been similar concerns in Afghanistan, where the United States provided thousands of Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahedeen when they were fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy them back, fearful that they would fall into the hands of terrorists.