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Migrants in Libya Detention Center Detail Dire Conditions

Associated Press

   BENGHAZI, LIBYA - Migrants held at a small, dilapidated detention
   center in the southern Libyan city of Sabha say they are being
   neglected by international organizations and often go hungry due to
   lack of food.
   One of the detained is Ahmed Saleh Ibrahim, a 19-year-old Sudanese who
   made his way into Libya with the help of smugglers last year. He was
   arrested by an immigration patrol in the eastern city of Benghazi and
   moved from one detention center to another until he was brought to
   Sabha, 650 kilometers (400 miles) south of the capital, Tripoli, four
   months ago.
   "There's little food, and at night there are a lot of mosquitoes, and
   the place is dirty," Ibrahim recently told The Associated Press.

   Mohamed Jibril, the center's deputy manager, admits they lack "a lot of
   things, including a water supply," a generator and a clinic.

   The center consists of three buildings and can hold up to 45 migrants,
   but has less now after about 20 were deported back to their countries,
   according to Jibril.

   Ibrahim works daily at the center's kitchen a spacious room where wall
   and floor tiles are covered with dirt. Like other migrants, he sleeps
   on a sponge mattress or a blanket spread on the ground in a hall with
   grey-painted walls covered with graffiti mostly with religious
   messages, both Christian and Muslim the work of migrants who passed
   through.
   The migrants are given access to phones to call their families back
   home only when representatives of the International Organization for
   Migration visit, he said.

   Libya became a major conduit for African migrants and refugees fleeing
   to Europe after the 2011 uprising that ousted and killed longtime ruler
   Moammar Gadhafi. The EU has spent hundreds of millions of euros to
   equip and train Libya's coast guard and to improve the conditions of
   the detention centers.
   The migrants have also been caught in the ongoing war between Libya's
   U.N.-backed government based in Tripoli and the self-styled Libyan
   National Army led by commander Khalifa Hifter, who launched an
   offensive to capture the capital in April. The U.N. said in May it
   feared detention centers were being used to store weapons, effectively
   turning migrants into human shields.
   On July 3, more than 50 migrants were killed in an airstrike on the
   Tajoura detention center. The Tripoli government blamed Hifter's forces
   for the deaths.