Libya, 2014 — military coup attempt
Event Summary
On 18 May 2014 forces loyal to the rogue general Khalifa Haftar stormed the General National Congress, Libya's transitional parliament, in Tripoli, an armed assault that formed part of his broader campaign to seize power and that helped tip the country into full civil war. Libya had been sliding into chaos since the 2011 overthrow of Gaddafi, its feeble government powerless against warring militias, and by 2014 the Islamist dominated GNC had become deeply unpopular and its mandate contested. Days earlier, on 16 May, Haftar, a former Gaddafi era officer who had returned from exile, had launched Operation Dignity, an offensive in Benghazi against Islamist militias, which he cast as a war on terrorism; on 18 May his allied militias attacked and shot up the parliament in Tripoli, demanding its suspension and denouncing it as illegitimate.
The government condemned the assault as an attempted coup. Haftar did not seize national power outright, but the offensive shattered what remained of central authority and split Libya into rival camps, with competing governments and parliaments in Tripoli and the east, plunging the country into the protracted second civil war.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
Cross-Reference
Only one dataset carries it. One of the three reference datasets we check against carries this event; the others do not list it. That is not a contradiction — the datasets cover different periods and use different thresholds — but it means the record has had less outside corroboration.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
62005182014
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: Libya's transitional government condemned Haftar's May 2014 assault on parliament as a coup as the country split into civil war.
Baseline coding: Coup attempt failed to remove the incumbent. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
The Times
The Guardian
Palestinian Chronicle
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →