In place of an obvious indigenous militant group, and with scant evidence of organised al-Qa’ida activity, the regime has focused on Darnah. The city has a tradition of sending volunteers for jihad. In 2007, US forces in Iraq found a list of foreign fighters: of the 112 from Libya, Darnah, with its population of 48,000, supplied 52.

Abdul Hakim Al-Hasidi, who took over as ‘chief of security’ at Darnah at the start of the uprising on 17 February, spent five years in Afghanistan where he supposedly met bin Laden and frequented, according to US intelligence briefings at the time, a training camp used by both the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. Mr al-Hasidi claims he has 1,200 fighters, which would make his group one of the largest contingents among the revolutionaries, known as the Shabaab. He has personally led units into battles in Bin Jawad and Ras Lanuf where the action has been fierce.

It is, however, not easy to ascertain details of Mr Al-Hasidi’s links with Islamic militancy. During a recent meeting in Darnah, he was reticent to talk about his Afghan sojourn and his alleged meetings with bin Laden. He was not a member of al-Qa’ida, he stated, and did not follow its ethos. Mr Al-Hasidi refused to elaborate on a previous observation that bin Laden “had his good points” and described claims of his links with the head of al-Qa’ida as “just tales”.

He was keen to point out he was a member of the Benghazi regional council, which liaised with the administration now being recognised by a number of states as Libya’s de facto government and whose members are attending the summit in London.

The 45-year-old teacher insisted he did not want the Talibanisation of Libya. “Afghanistan is a different country,” he said. “We have got our own situation in Libya and I am a member of the council which has all kinds of people in it. If I wanted to have a state like the Taliban, would I belong to the council? We are already a Muslim country and we shall follow the path of Islam. We do not need to bring in foreign ideas on how to be Muslims. I am not even teaching religion in my job, I teach geography.”

While refusing to discuss who gave him lessons in arms in Afghanistan, Mr Al-Hasidi acknowledged: “Yes I was there. I did not like the attack by America (in 2001) because it was unjust. A lot of civilians, women and children, were killed by bombs dropped from the sky.” The Tripoli regime, he continued, was simply trying to demonise its opponents. “I was a political prisoner in Libya and all I want is justice for our community.”

From a counterterrorism point of view, a more serious danger is that the civil war will continue without end. Bin Laden has proved adept at exploiting civil wars and strife. In Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, among other countries, al-Qaida and like-minded groups initially worked with local fighters motivated primarily to throw out outsiders or redress other local grievances. Slowly but surely they made the struggle more global, casting it as a fight against the United States and making the jihadist component of the resistance larger. Given the strong Libyan representation in al-Qaida and the historic role jihadists played in the anti-Qaddafi struggle, al-Qaida might try to bend this conflict to its will. So Qaddafi’s swift end is all the more necessary.