# Rival factions in Libya

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "Rival factions in Libya," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/rival-factions-in-libya/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*John Kiriakou's account of the CIA and the State Department backing opposing factions inside Libya, proxies funded by two arms of the same government that end up fighting each other, an arrangement he calls insane and treats as characteristic of American intervention in places nobody is reporting on.*

- **Arrangement:** CIA supports one faction, State Department another
- **Result, per Kiriakou:** The two proxies fight each other
- **His verdict:** "Which is just nuts. It's insane"
- **Comparable theatres named:** Afghanistan, the Sahel, Somalia, Central Asia

**Rival factions in Libya** is [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)'s shorthand for an arrangement he describes as routine and indefensible: two arms of the United States government arming opposite sides of the same civil conflict.

## The arrangement

Describing the pattern in Libya and Afghanistan, Kiriakou said: *"In Libya, the CIA supports one faction and the State Department supports another faction, and they actually fight each other, which is just nuts. It's insane."*[1]

He placed it inside a longer complaint about coverage. The Wagner Group draws attention because it is Russian, he argued, whereas *"we don't have any idea what our own private armies or our own special forces for that matter are doing in places like the Sahel or Somalia or Central Asia. We just don't know. It's not being reported."*[2]

## What the silence covers

Kiriakou accepted the interviewer's account of the mechanics, that Wagner's appearances across central and western Africa go unexplained in the press because explaining them would require saying which American department funds which armed group, and that some of those groups fight each other.[1] His own contribution was to name Libya and Afghanistan as the cases he knew, and to call the result insane rather than merely inefficient.

The observation sits immediately before [the Afghan woman's lesson](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-afghan-womans-lesson), which he offered as the corresponding explanation of why the intervention could not have worked in the first place.

## See also

- [The Libya policy reversal](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-libya-policy-reversal)
- [The Wagner Coverage Asymmetry](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-wagner-coverage-asymmetry)
- [The Afghan woman's lesson](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-afghan-womans-lesson)

## Sources

1. False Flags & Real Terrorists w/ John Kiriakou (2023-07-06), at 24:00. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vv7g6&t=1440s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-07-06-am-wakeup-false-flags-real-terrorists-w-john-kiriakou/
2. False Flags & Real Terrorists w/ John Kiriakou (2023-07-06), at 15:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vv7g6&t=949s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2023-07-06-am-wakeup-false-flags-real-terrorists-w-john-kiriakou/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/rival-factions-in-libya/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt