Marshal Khalifa Haftar has recently rejected a plan to overthrow Speaker of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives (HoR) Aqila Saleh from his position and move the current HoR headquarters in the easternmost city of Tobruk to Benghazi, the largest city in the east of the country, informed Libyan sources said.
Haftar received Monday British ambassador to Libya Frank Baker and discussed with him developments, especially with regard to the counter-terrorism file.
Meanwhile, commenting on Haftar’s unannounced meeting with military officials and US diplomats in Jordan recently, senior official in the US Department of State told Asharq Al-Awsat that the United States has been talking to a wide range of Libyan political and security commanders to push the political process forward and restore stability.
“We are fully committed to working with Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj in the Government of National Accord (GNA) and UN Special Envoy Ghassan Salama,” the US official said.
For their part, highly informed Libyan sources said that Haftar met in February, at an informal meeting in his office in Rajmeh, with a group of members of the House of Representatives affiliated with Sarraj in western Libya, who submitted a proposal to dismiss Saleh from his post.
“The main idea was to agree to transfer the headquarters of the parliament from Tobruk to Benghazi and hold a meeting of its members during which another person would be elected to chair it,” sources said.
They added that Saleh was not wanted for this post because he has been refusing to pass Sarraj government or grant it legitimacy under the internationally recognized parliament.
They pointed out that Haftar rejected the proposal and quoted him as saying that “the parliament speaker is a national figure who does not accept the abandonment of the fundamentals of the homeland - and he is one of the most important supporters of the national army”.
