Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has warned Western powers Libya could spiral out of control if they try to intervene militarily in the conflict-wracked North African state. Speaking in a rare interview, the Egyptian president said the West and its allies should instead concentrate on strengthening the army of Libya's Western-backed government and let it do the job of stabilizing the country. The army is commanded by Khalif Haftar, an officially retired general who spent 20 years in exile in the United States and has been described as a potential 'Libyan Sisi' because of his fierce opposition to opposition groups. "If we provide arms and support to the national Libyan army it can do the job better than anyone else, better than any outside intervention which would risk dragging us into a situation that risks getting out of hand and triggering uncontrollable developments," Sisi told Italy's La Repubblica in an interview published Thursday. Sisi said history had "spoken clearly" about the difficulty of trying to impose peace from outside. "Two lessons must be kept in mind: that of Afghanistan and that of Somalia," he said. "Those were long foreign interventions (that started) more than 30 years ago and what progress has been made since?. "The results are there for everyone to see." "Europeans look at Libya as if ISIS was the only threat," he said. "That is a serious mistake. We have to be aware that we are up against different acronyms with the same ideology: what do we say about al-Qaeda networks like Ansar al-Islam, like Somalia's Shebab or Boko Haram in Africa." He has long had close relations with the Egyptian military having served alongside their forces in the Sinai desert as a young Libyan officer during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
