BLUF Tucked between the Mediterranean and the Sahara, the Libyan town of Brega was a rather somnolent back-of-the-beyond place on the Gulf of Sidra in the north of the country. Oil workers went there for its high wages and decent schools—an engineer at the Sirte Oil Company earned ten times more than his counterpart in the armed forces.
No longer. Brega, which sits on an oil lake, has become a battlefield in the fight against the government of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Bombs drop among oil depots filled with hundreds of thousands of barrels, and in the past two weeks, the company managers have had to deal with four changes of regime. To hedge bets they keep in touch with both the rebels in Benghazi, to the east, and the Qaddafi regime in Tripoli, to the west.
The battle for Brega and a nearby but larger terminal, Ras Lanuf, has significantly upped the stakes in Libya's conflict. It is being fought halfway between Colonel Qaddafi's tribal heartland of Sirte and the rebel base in Benghazi, a city of 800,000, and has drawn traditional desert tribes into the revolution, including the large Maghraba and Zawiya clans, on whose coastal scrubland Brega lies. It also threatens to draw in an outside world jittery that southern Europe's nearest oil supplies are now jeopardized.
Much more at The New York Review of Books
Comments
Perhaps a good side bar note to the above article is although many sit on lakes of oil around the world, not all sit on Brent light sweet crude that southern European refineries are set-up to crack, and the ramification that has on the world market by those that must make up the shortfall by competing against Americas traditional sources.
Further, a quick check last Friday would show that Brent crude neared $116.00 a barrel as Libya's civil war has taken a bit over a million barrels of this fungible commodity off the market each day, leaving it up to the Sa'uds and other OPEC countries to make-up the shortfall, only heightening the anxiety in the market place. . .