From Revolution To Ruin: Libya's Battle With IS

A line of fighters snakes down a deserted street in Benghazi, firing as they go, ducking behind shrubs and keeping close to brick walls for cover from watching snipers.

This could easily be a scene from 2011, the year of the so-called Arab Spring.

But it's four years on, and the men who spearheaded Libya's rebellion from the city most synonymous with the revolution are still fighting.

The enemy is no longer the soldiers and mercenaries of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Now they're battling Islamic State extremists.

"Within a month or two months, we will have cleared Benghazi," Colonel Ali El-Mahdi told me, as the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells resonated around us.

"What about the rest of Libya?" I ask. Nearby Derna and Gaddafi's home town of Sirte are among the Libyan strongholds of IS. The extremists have posted videos of multiple beheadings from the cities.

He replies: "Benghazi is the most difficult and the most important (city to cleanse of IS militants). After Benghazi, then everything will be easy."

The confidence on the ground may be bolstered by outside help the fighters in the country's east appear to be getting.

Some of the arms and weaponry is believed to come from the authorities in Egypt who have a similar anti-Islamist and anti-Muslim Brotherhood agenda.

The Pentagon this week announced that American forces had mounted an airstrike inside Libya for the first time since the revolution in 2011.

The strike is said to have hit a gathering of top-level extremist commanders allied to al Qaeda, including Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who was accused of masterminding the raid on a foreign-run oil rig in Algeria where dozens of workers were held hostage and killed.

The soldiers in the east are led by a military commander who was once Gaddafi's chief-of-staff.

General Khalifa Haftar took part in the coup against Libya's King Idris, which helped propel the young Gaddafi into power.

He eventually fell out spectacularly with Gaddafi in the late 1980s over the war with Chad, which Libya lost.

Haftar went into exile in the US for more than two decades and only emerged in his homeland again when he announced his support for the rebel revolution.

He is now commander of the armed forces of the internationally-recognised Libyan Government, based in Tobruk in the country's east.

But many Libyans don't even know who the government leaders are. They all know who Haftar is though - the man widely believed to hold the reins of power, at least in the east.

In the west of the country, in Tripoli, there are very different feelings about Haftar. The Prime Minister of Libya Dawn, which says it controls 85% of the country, including the capital, denounces him as a criminal.

"There is a warrant for his arrest here in Tripoli, Prime Minister Khalifa al Ghweil told Sky News.

"If he left Libya, within 48 hours things would be better."

Mr al Ghweil is not alone in viewing a man who once served as a trusted Gaddafi military commander with suspicion.

The beaches of Tripoli are packed with families enjoying the afternoon sun.

A couple of jet skis are being spun around in the water. Children are digging sand holes at the sea's edge and families are gathered beneath umbrellas.

Yet this is the city where most embassies have withdrawn their staff in response to the high kidnapping threat and because law and order is considered to have deteriorated so dramatically.

It is also an area flooded with migrants who are taking advantage of the power vacuum to try to make their way across the sea to Europe.

The smugglers - whether acting as individuals or in networks - are making financial gains out of the migrants' desperation.

Some networks are run like multi-national businesses, with massive profits to match. Among those profiteering and thriving from this human trade are the IS extremists.

An hour's drive from Tripoli, in Zawiyah, far away from the near-idyllic scene of calm and contentment on the capital's beaches, is a scene of hell.

In this case it is an unfinished building housing hundreds of migrants who have been picked up by the Libya Dawn authorities.

These are the unfortunates who are now non-people. Their embassies are non-existent. Nobody wants to take responsibility for them and their families often do not know if they are alive or dead, never mind where they are now.

"Please, please get word to my family," one detainee says and scribbles down a telephone number for us to call.

"We want to go back to our country," others say, many times, as we walk through the centre.

The guards, the cooking staff and some of the migrants tell us how armed men who they believed to be IS fighters arrived at the centre 10 days earlier.

"They were wearing black with black masks," the centre's cook says.

"I have to be honest with you, I thought they were Daesh (IS)."

The armed men loaded about 300 migrants onto the back of trucks and drove away. They need the migrants in order to secure the next payment for their smuggling route into Europe.

A small group of four who were left behind tell us how they would have preferred to have gone away with the extremists, rather than be left in the hot detention centre with no prospect of being let out anytime soon, if at all.

"No one even knows we are here," said Mohammed Jamal Ahmedin.

"Our families don't know if we are died or alive."