Turkey’s Libya Deal Puts Oil Majors in a Bind

Turkey has finally gotten both sides of a divided Libya to sign the maritime map it has pushed for seven years. Ankara signed the boundary deal with Libya's Tripoli government in 2019, and the rival parliament in the east rejected it in 2020. On October 20, that same parliament, the Haftar-aligned House of Representatives in Benghazi, ratified the deal unanimously.

Both of Libya's governments now recognize a boundary that runs between Crete and Cyprus, leaving Greek islands in the area with no sea beyond their territorial waters. Ankara is pursuing the same kind of deal with Damascus. The vote passed after the camp of Saddam Haftar, son of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, pushed out the speaker who had blocked it for years.

Aguila Saleh, close to Cairo and speaker of the eastern parliament for 12 years, had refused to bring the memorandum to ratification. On October 6, lawmakers voted him out and elected Al-Salhin Abdelnabi al-Obeidi, who chaired the parliament's Libyan-Turkish friendship committee. Ankara had laid the groundwork in July, when it signed an agreement with Haftar's Libyan National Army LNA covering military facilities, surveillance systems and training for eastern officers.

Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin was in Tripoli the day the vote passed, and he thanked Dbeibah, the new speaker, and Saddam Haftar for securing it. Saddam Haftar wants to be president of a united Libya, east and west. Washington's plan to merge Libya's two governments would reportedly keep Abdulhamid Dbeibah as prime minister in Tripoli and put Saddam at the head of the Presidential Council.