Ayesha Gaddafi; The “Anonymous Letters” of the Controversial Daughter of the Libyan Colonel!

On April 21, 2021, the European Court removed the name of Aisha Gaddafi, the daughter of the former leader Muammarة who lives in the Sultanate of Oman, from the list of those subject to sanctions in 2011. 

The court (based in Luxembourg) justified the decision by proving that Aisha Gaddafi is no longer a threat to international peace and security in the region, and that she no longer participates in political life in Libya and has not resided in the country for years. 

The decision to include or remove a person or company from the European sanctions list is taken unanimously by the member states of the European Council, and the sanctions include the prohibition of entering or crossing the European Union territory. 

Aisha al-Gaddafi was placed on the European Union blacklist in February 2011, and her name was kept during the list reviews that were carried out in 2017 and 2020. The name of Muammar Gaddafi, who was overthrown and killed on October 20, 2011, is still on this list, according to the French News Agency, also his sons Khamis, Mutasim and Saif al-Arab who were killed during the revolution.

 

Asylum for Her Silence

The most famous woman in the Gaddafi family, a forty-four-year-old lawyer, resides in the Sultanate of Oman. The Authorities have allowed her to reside in, on condition that she will never be engaged in any political activity. Aisha inherited from her father his controversial attitudes, and perhaps the most prominent position in her career was her joining the defense team of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. 

Aisha is the only daughter of Gaddafi from his second wife, Safiya Fargash, the mother of seven children. The couple adopted a son and a daughter, Milad and Hana. Safiya fled with her daughter Aisha from the capital, Tripoli, in 2011 to Algeria, which granted them asylum for “humanitarian reasons” before they moved to the Sultanate of Oman. Gaddafi's daughter married one of his cousins ​​in 2006, a Libyan officer named Ahmed Gaddafi, who belongs to the Qadhadfa tribe from which her father came, and the wedding ceremony was held in the capital, Tripoli, in the presence of a large number of wives of Arab presidents and kings. 

Three days after her arrival in Algeria, Aisha had given birth to a baby girl named Safia like her mother's name. Aisha Gaddafi obtained a master's degree in law from Al-Fateh University, and began preparing for a doctorate in international law in 2003 from the Sorbonne University in France, before deciding to leave it, considering that "it is absurd to waste time studying something that does not exist," referring to The US-British war on Iraq at that time.

Faithful to Her Father

Wahida Gaddafi vigorously defended her father's regime during the 2011 uprising, and in April of the same year, she said in a speech she gave at the Bab al-Aziziya camp in Tripoli on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the American raid in 1986, that the Western calls for her father's departure are considered an insult for all the Libyan people. 

She added in her speech: "In 1911 the Italians killed my grandfather in an air raid, and now they are trying to kill my father." During her presence in Algeria, she called on, through the Syrian TV channel, the Libyans to "revolt" against the new government. Aisha al-Gaddafi hired an Israeli lawyer to petition the International Criminal Court to investigate the death of her father, according to what was reported by the British BBC.

In 2012, she petitioned the same court to provide documents proving that her brother, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, was not involved in crimes against humanity, and requested that the court guarantee him a fair trial in Libya. Libyan media reported that Aisha, while in Algeria, supported the Algerian national team against its Libyan football counterpart, saying that the Libyan side "does not represent her." 

Aisha Gaddafi called for the liberation of Palestine through jihad, then was interested in the African situation, saying that "Palestine will not be liberated while the Arabs are asleep." The lawyer joined the defense team of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, in 2000, and headed the Libyan delegation on the first flight to Baghdad, where she met Saddam, with the aim of "breaking the air embargo imposed on Iraq since 1990 by the United Nations." 

She told the media at the time: "We did this trip without anyone's permission, because this visit represents moving from one room to another inside one house, so there is no need to take any permission to do so." 

 The British newspaper "Sunday Times" reported that in 2000, the colonel's daughter gave a speech in the "Speakers Corner" in "Hyde Park" in London to support the Provisional IRA, and her intervention constituted a violation of diplomatic protocol and led to a state of security alert. When asked about her support for the IRA in 2010, she stated, "I have always been supportive of the liberation of all movements," as well as the Iraqi resistance, saying, "When you have an occupying army coming from abroad, raping your women and killing your people, it is legitimate to fight them." In 2011, she strongly denounced the policies of the Secretary of State in that time Hillary Clinton and former US President Barack Obama, calling for mediation in the Libyan civil war through an international organization to exclude them. 

She established an association called “Aisha Charity,” before changing its name to “Wa'tasimou Charity,” to become a way for her to participate and struggle in political issues that she would like to intervene in, such as the Palestinian case.

Aisha's Letters

In December 2020, the media exposed a letter of Aisha Gaddafi, in which she said: “When NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) bombed my country and demolished Bab al-Aziziya, we fled to Sirte because it was my father’s hometown, but the traitors followed us. We fled to Bani Walid, which it resisted a lot, and the tribal members ,there ,promised us that they would die for us (...). '' 

We told my father that it is up to him to decide where to go and that we agree with him without hesitation. He said: I go to Algeria, I have not seen any harm  for fifty years! In Algeria you will live free. And he continued: "Algeria will not hand you over to NATO and NATO will not dare to enter it, I am sure !! Algeria has possessed a comprehensive deterrent weapon since 1973, which it was available for Arab countries during the October War against Israel." 

"But the Arab traitors informed America and Israel about this, which made Algeria deny it!. ‘’ A source close to the Gaddafi family denied to "Sputnik" the Russian news agency that Aisha was the one who wrote the letter. The source said: "This text is full of lies. Anyone who knows the events of Libya in 2011 knows that this message is wrong." The message to Algeria was not the only one that sparked controversy, as a large number of social media users were subjected to fraud through a fake account that had the name and pictures of the president's daughter. 

The account asks users for a sum of money in exchange for transferring so much money to their bank account, claiming that Aisha Gaddafi’s name was banned and that she was unable to transfer her wealth. Most of the victims of the fraud network were from Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt.