The city of Zawiya, fifty kilometres west of Tripoli, holds an unusual concentration of Libya’s economic lifelines: the country’s largest operating oil refinery, an export terminal, a desalination plant and a power station. Over five days in August, drones hit almost all of them.

The sequence began over the weekend of 8 and 9 August with strikes on fuel storage tanks at the Zawiya refinery. A strike on a tank holding fuel ignited a blaze that firefighters fought for more than fifteen hours. Further strikes followed on an oil-blending and lubricant plant, and on a desalination facility. On 12 August, a one-way explosive drone destroyed an electricity substation linking power plants to homes and businesses, cutting supply across areas south of the city. The state-run General Electricity Company said the substation burned down completely.

By that point it was the sixth drone strike in five days.

The cumulative damage

No fatalities have been reported, and the National Oil Corporation says the fires have been extinguished. But the pattern of damage is doing something worse than any single strike: it is driving the technical staff away.

The electricity company has now withdrawn its engineers twice, pending security guarantees, and warned that continued attacks could trigger a partial or general blackout of the grid. More than 700 megawatts of the Zawiya power plant’s 1,300 megawatt capacity has already been offline since June, when technical teams were pulled out during an earlier round of fighting. Infrastructure that nobody will service degrades on its own.

The National Oil Corporation has warned it may declare force majeure — the contractual clause releasing a supplier from delivery obligations — if attacks continue. For a country whose budget depends almost entirely on hydrocarbon revenue, that is not a technical formality.

Who is behind it

Nobody has claimed the strikes, and no official explanation has been given for who is conducting them or why. The context is the fragmentation that has defined Libya since 2011: two rival administrations, the UN-recognised government in Tripoli under Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and an eastern authority backed by Khalifa Haftar, with armed groups holding real power on the ground in the west.

Armed clashes broke out between groups in Zawiya and neighbouring Surman on 4 August, before the drone strikes began. The Libyan Red Crescent raised its alert level to the highest in Surman and advised residents to stay indoors. Separately, the intelligence chief of Haftar’s Libyan National Army was killed by a car bomb in Benghazi — an assassination nobody has claimed either.

The Brega Oil Company appealed to all parties to stay away from oil facilities, describing them as infrastructure owned by all Libyans. A parliamentary panel condemned the attacks and called for stronger protection of oil installations. Neither appeal has stopped anything.

Why it matters beyond Libya

Libya produces oil that Europe buys, and the Zawiya complex sits on the Mediterranean coast opposite it. Sustained disruption there feeds into a market already unsettled by attacks on refining capacity elsewhere, including the strikes that have cut Russian refinery output this summer.

But the domestic consequence is more immediate. A country with a damaged grid in August, in North African heat, with the engineers who maintain it withdrawn for their own safety, is looking at blackouts that have nothing to do with oil prices — and at a population that will feel the effects long before any of the political actors involved do.

Sources

Associated Press, Al Jazeera and The National, together with statements from Libya’s National Oil Corporation, the General Electricity Company and the Brega Oil Company.