Islamic Legion - The Legion

The Legion

This Islamic Legion was mostly composed of immigrants from poorer Sahelian countries, but also, according to a source, thousands of Pakistanis and some Bangladeshis who had been recruited since 1981 with the false promise of civilian jobs once in Libya. Generally speaking, the Legion's members were immigrants who had gone to Libya with no thought of fighting wars, and had been provided with inadequate military training and had sparse commitment. A French journalist, speaking of the Legion's forces in Chad, observed that they were "foreigners, Arabs or Africans, mercenaries in spite of themselves, wretches who had come to Libya hoping for a civilian job, but found themselves signed up more or less by force to go and fight in an unknown desert."

According to The Military Balance published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the force was organized into one armored, one infantry, and one paratroop/commando brigade. It had been supplied with T-54 and T-55 tanks, armored personnel carriers, and EE-9 armored cars. The Legion was reported to have been committed during the fighting in Chad in 1980 and was praised by Gaddafi for its success there. However, it was believed that many of the troops who fled the Chadian attacks of March 1987 were members of the Legion.

Gaddafi dispatched legionnaires to Uganda, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, but the Legion was to be mostly associated with the Chadian-Libyan conflict, where already in 1980 7,000 legionnaires participated to the second battle of N'Djamena, where its fighting record was most noted for its ineptitude. To this force Benin's Marxist regime is said to have provided legionnaires during the 1983 offensive in Chad. At the beginning of the 1987 Libyan offensive into Chad, it maintained a force of 2,000 in Darfur. The nearly continuous cross-border raids that resulted greatly contributed to a separate ethnic conflict within Darfur that killed about 9,000 people between 1985 and 1988.

The Legion was disbanded by Gaddafi following its defeats in Chad in 1987 and the Libyan retreat from that country. But its consequences in this region can still be felt. Some of the Janjaweed leaders were among those said to have been trained in Libya, as many Darfuri followers of the Umma Party were forced in exile in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Legion was also to leave a strong impact on the Tuareg living in Mali and Niger. A series of severe droughts had brought many young Tuareg to migrate to Libya, where a number of them were recruited in the Legion, receiving an indoctrination that told them to reject the hereditary chiefs and to fight the governments that excluded the Tuareg from power. After the disbandment of the Legion, these men were to return to their countries and to play an important role in the Tuareg rebellions that erupted in the two countries in 1989–90.