Sirte

...

the desert outside Sirte in Libya when we were discussing with him Libya's disarmament.

You know, as head of an intelligence organization, you find yourself in some pretty strange situations.

And I think those two I can freely mention and talk about, maybe others-

Apparently, Eastern Libya, a group that calls themselves the LNA, the Libyan National Army, is led by former warlord Khalifa Haftar.

They operate everything from the city of Sirte, could you point to Sirte, which is there, left a little more, right there, to the west.

I'm sorry, to the east.

Everything from there to the Egyptian border.

And so anyway, Khalifa Haftar... killed his rival, Abu Bakr Yunus, who was the former minister interior and the person, well, I don't want to get into it.

Let's just say I knew Abu Bakr Yunus.

So he killed him and then took control of most of the rebel groups in Eastern Libya as Muammar Gaddafi went down and was killed in the city of Sirte.

next to Gurdabia Air Base there.

So it happened in the winter of 2014.

A group of Coptic Christian men from upper Egypt were working construction jobs in Sirte, Libya or Sirte.

Most of them came from single poor farming village, from a single poor farming village called Al-Ur in Minya province.

And there was no work back home.

So they were taken in two groups.

One group was seized in late December 2014 while traveling.

And the larger group was taken in early January 2015 when masked gunmen raided their housing compound in Sirte, like their work compound in the middle of the night.

The gunmen reportedly worked from a list of names and they checked identity cards, Egyptians IDs state, Egyptian IDs state your religion.

We convened senior officials from both regions in Malta in July to advance concrete unification efforts.

And after a US congressional delegation visited Libya earlier this summer, Libyan defense leaders committed to three historic and tangible steps towards military unification: establishing a joint operations center in Sirte, an Air Force training center of excellence in Misrata, and an integrated air command.

The United States continues to support full implementation of Libya's first unified national budget in thirteen years, and we have engaged directly with Libyan economic leaders to strengthen investment and the business climate.

These US efforts are fully complementary to UNSMIL's roadmap.