Car Bombs In Libyan Capital

Car bomb explosions in Tripoli have killed two and injured three. One detonated outside the Interior Ministry and another outside a police academy. A third bomb was found that had failed to explode.

“There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombs, which police said were detonated by mobile phone,” reports Sky News, which also notes that:

Libya has seen a surge in violence during Ramadan following the peaceful transfer of power to the new government after elections in July.

…The International Committee of the Red Cross suspended its activities in Benghazi, Libya’s second biggest city, and Misrata after one of its compounds was attacked with grenades and rockets.

And the fate of seven Iranian relief workers remains unknown almost three weeks after they were kidnapped by gunmen in Benghazi.

Truimphal Western pundits crowing about the clear success of the Libyan intervention seem to have been woefully premature to me, and I fully expect violence to continue escalating. There are too many militias and too many dissafected who didn’t get their hoped-for division of political power in the elections who may now look to get it at gunpoint. The question only remains as to whether levels of violence will be enough to risk Libya’s fragile new governmental system and I fear that is coming in it’s due course, now that Libya has apparently passed the shell-shocked hiatus that often seems to follow a fast and violent overturn of power