One of the country's largest and most influential tribes, Al-Warfelli, seem to have turned against Gaddafi. Akram Al-Warfelli, leading figure of Al-Warfella and in control of Libya's security forces personnel, called on Gaddafi to stand down.
A complicating factor is that Libya's tribes are subdivided into clans and leading families with conflicting interests.
The Saadi confederation is led by the numerous and influential Baraasa tribe of Al-Bayda. Gaddafi's second wife Safeya Farkash Al-Baraasa and Seif Al-Islam, in his famous apologetic televised address to prop up his father's regime referred to his "uncles of Al-Bayda" in a vain attempt to woo his maternal familial connections.
Another powerful tribal grouping is the Maghara many of whom are loyal to Gaddafi because he secured the release of Abdel-Baset Al-Megrahi from a Scottish jail in 2009 for his role in the downing of the American Pan-Am airliner over the village of Lockerbie, Scotland. Al-Megrahi, a prominent member of the Maghara, was head of Libyan intelligence, and members of the Maghara tribe predominate in the Libyan state security apparatus.
The southern tribes of Libya are not as numerically predominant as the northern tribes, but tribal loyalties are generally stronger among southerners. Being mainly black, they might suffer in a post-Gaddafi regime because of the backlash of lighter skinned Libyans against local and foreign blacks seen as favoured by Gaddafi. The Tebu inhabit Kufra oasis in the southeast of the country and the adjacent highlands of eastern Fezzan and the deserts near the Sudanese and Chadian frontiers. The Tebu people are a distinct Black African ethnic group and speak a Nilo- Saharan language similar to the Nubian languages of southern Egypt and Sudan.
The Tuareg are Amazigh, the indigenous non- Arab peoples of North Africa pejoratively referred to as Berbers, and inhabit a vast swathe of territory stretching from the oasis of Ghadames located on the Libyan side of the southern tip of the Tunisian border to Ghat in the far south near the borders of Algeria and Niger. Both the Tuareg and the Tebu are inclined to sympathise with the Gaddafi regime. The Amazigh of the Jebal Nefusa and the western city of Zwara as well as those of the eastern Jalo and Aujilia oases are less tolerant of the Gaddafi regime and so are mixed Arab and Amazigh tribe of the Zuwaya who control the oil- rich southern and central desert zone. The leader of the Zuwaya, Sheikh Faraj Al-Zuwai, threatened to cut off Libyan oil exports if Gaddafi did not end his clampdown against the protesters.
The tragedy of Libya today is the curse of oil, which stains both Gaddafi's supporters and the popular uprising against his 42-year dictatorship, effacing the subtle and vital tribal elements of Libya's culture, fuelled by a Facebook coup d'état. The flip side of pious Western plans to subvert the remnants of Gaddafi's regime is that such precious remnants of ancient Africa are held hostage to the steamroller of capitalist monoculture, sure to leave a trail of oil wells spouting their poison into the clear desert air.
