A one-way explosive drone destroyed an electricity substation near Zawiya in western Libya early on Wednesday, cutting off supply to wide areas south of the city, the national power company said.
Zawiya's energy infrastructure has faced repeated drone attacks as fighting continues between two militias from the area that are nominally affiliated to the government in Tripoli. Wednesday's attack was the sixth in five days and the first to affect power supply. A strike on an adjacent generation station on Tuesday damaged a firefighting system but spared the network.
The General Electricity Company of Libya (Gecol) said the entire substation hit on Wednesday was burnt.
More than 700 megawatts of the Zawiya power plant's 1,300MW capacity has been offline since June, when Gecol withdrew its technical teams during a previous phase of fighting. The company said it has now withdrawn engineers for a second time, pending security guarantees, and warned persisting attacks could lead to “a partial or general blackout of the electricity grid”.
Since Saturday, drones have hit a tanks holding naphtha, petrol and diesel, an oil-blending plant at the Zawiya refinery and a desalination plant. No group has claimed responsibility for these strikes.
The National Oil Corporation has warned it may declare force majeure should attacks continue. All fires caused by the attacks have been extinguished, it added. The Zawiya Municipal Council chief said 18 people have been treated for smoke inhalation. Some people living near the refinery were moved away but the refinery itself was undamaged. No one was killed.
Investigators sent to the refinery by the Interior Ministry have recovered drone wreckage and 82mm mortar shells, according to a statement carried by the Libya Herald.
According to the Petroleum Facilities Guard militia, initial findings suggest the use of first-person-view drones. These are controlled by an attached fibre-optic cable that makes them impossible to jam but limits their range.
Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, whose Government of National Unity controls western Libya, called the attacks “a serious crime and an escalation that will not go without a response”. In a statement carried by the state news agency Lana, he vowed that “no one's status, position or influence” would shield the perpetrators.
Mr Dbeibah has held a meeting with his Interior Minister and the chiefs of several Tripoli armed groups to discuss the situation.
Much of western Libya is governed by militias formally affiliated to the Tripoli government but operating with wide autonomy. One of the militias involved in the Zawiya clashes, the First Support Division, is nominally under Interior Ministry command, while the other, the 103rd Battalion, is under the auspices of the Defence Ministry. The fighting began after a drone strike killed at least five fighters of the 103rd on August 4.
The country's east and south are controlled by a rival administration based in the eastern city of Benghazi.
Hakan Fidan, Foreign Minister of Turkey, which advocates political and military unification of the rival administrations, held talks with Mr Dbeibah and his national security adviser, Ibrahim Dbeibah, on Tuesday.
Mr Fidan was expected in Benghazi on Wednesday, two days after the intelligence chief of the Libyan National Army was killed in a car bombing. The assassination, responsibility for which has not been claimed by any group, has raised fears of further instability in Libya.
