An ammunition depot exploded on the evening of Friday 21 August in the Al-Ghiran area south of Misrata, Libya, throwing rockets and artillery shells into surrounding homes and farmland. Sixteen people were injured. By Saturday, residents were demonstrating — not about the explosion itself, but about the fact that the depot was there at all.

What happened

Witnesses told the Anadolu news agency that a large blast shook Misrata, Libya’s second city in the west of the country, roughly 200 kilometres east of Tripoli. Thick smoke was seen rising from the headquarters of the Al-I’sar Battalion, opposite Al-Sakt prison, and projectiles were thrown in random directions as a fire took hold inside the site.

Local outlets including Al-Marsad, Libya Press and Alwasat published footage they said showed continuing detonations inside the store. Reports described rockets, artillery ammunition and tank rounds cooking off in sequence, with debris landing in nearby residential streets and farms.

The Security Media Department said the acting interior minister of the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity had issued instructions on the incident, and that teams were sent to survey the site and collect explosive remnants from the surrounding area. Roads near the depot were closed.

Early reports said no deaths or injuries had been recorded at local hospitals. That figure moved: the Libya Observer subsequently reported sixteen people injured, and quoted an official confirming that the explosions had stopped while National Safety Authority teams continued working to fully contain the fire. Casualty counts in the first hours of an incident like this are provisional by nature, and the injured figure may still change.

What caused it is not known

No authority has said what started the fire. The possibilities in a case like this are an accident during handling or storage, a technical failure, heat, or a deliberate attack — and nothing published so far distinguishes between them. Libyan authorities have not announced a finding, and no group has claimed responsibility.

That uncertainty matters, because the political reading of the event depends entirely on it. An accident is a safety story about how a country stores its munitions. An attack is a story about the balance of power between armed formations in western Libya. Until the cause is established, treating either version as settled is guesswork.

The part that was predictable

What was not unexpected is that a store of munitions inside a populated area caught fire and scattered live ordnance across the neighbourhood. Misrata has been here before: in late August 2025, a fire at an ammunition depot in the Al-Skeirat district of the same city set off hours of explosions, with rockets and shells landing in residential streets and a central park.

On Saturday, demonstrators in Misrata carried banners rejecting the presence of such depots inside residential zones, warning about the danger to civilians given the record of repeated accidents in the area and elsewhere. They called on the authorities to move the stores somewhere safer, saying the current arrangement puts lives at risk and leaves residents living with permanent anxiety.

Why the ordnance stays where it is

Libya has had no single national army since 2011. Weapons and ammunition are held by a patchwork of brigades and battalions, many of which grew out of the 2011 uprising, are nominally attached to one government or another, and are physically based where their members live — which in practice means inside towns and cities.

Analysts who follow Libyan security have argued for years that this is the underlying problem: a depot belongs to a unit rather than to a state, and a unit will not move its ammunition somewhere remote where it could be taken, monitored or destroyed by a rival. Weapons held close are weapons kept. The counter-argument made by the formations themselves is that they are performing a security function the state cannot yet perform, and that disarming or relocating before a political settlement simply hands advantage to whoever moves last.

The politics are not static. On 21 August, the day of the explosion, the UN Support Mission in Libya said representatives of the country’s eastern and western authorities had initialled a draft agreement in Tunis. Whether that process reaches the question of who holds which weapons, and where, is a different matter from whether it produces a signature.

What to watch next

Three things would tell you whether this incident changes anything. First, whether an investigation is announced and its findings published. Second, whether the injured figure holds — unexploded ordnance thrown into farmland and streets can injure people days later, which is why the collection of remnants matters. Third, whether any authority commits to relocating munitions out of residential districts, with a date attached.

Similar promises have been made after previous fires. The demonstrators on Saturday were, in effect, pointing out that nothing followed them.

Related from Plain Sight News: why munitions end up stored inside cities.

Sources: Anadolu Agency; Xinhua; The Libya Observer; TASS.