The Arab Spring

Trump bigly strikes: Nothing but a slap on the wrist.

But the single volley of Tomahawk missiles was of such limited scope that it will reinforce the view held by Damascus and its allies that the United States is no more eager than before to take the sort of strong action needed to defeat him.

"Assad now knows there is a red line with regard to the use of chemical weapons. But I think he also probably just sees it as a slap on the wrist," said David Lesch, professor of Middle East history at Trinity University and an author on Syria.

"Assad has to recalibrate but not fundamentally change his military approach that they've been engaging in since the Russian intervention," Lesch said. "I really believe they are not feeling too bad today, if this is the extent of what the U.S. is going to do."

Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr has called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power in the wake of a chemical attack that killed more than 80 people in Idlib province April 4.

Sadr is the first Shiite political leader to urge Assad to give up power, Reuters reported. The religious leader has a huge following particularly among Baghdad’s majority Shiite community, but holds no official political office.

The cleric also commands the allegiance of a number of militias in Iraq—co-opted into the Iraqi Army as ‘Popular Mobilization Units’—some of which have fought alongside Assad’s forces in Syria.

Sadr called on the Syrian president in Damascus to "take an historic, heroic decision" to step down, a move he said would spare the country further bloodshed. "I think it would be fair for President Bashar al-Assad to offer his resignation and step down in love for Syria, to spare it the woes of war and terrorism… and take a historic, heroic decision before it is too late," he said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

However, Sadr did not openly condemn Assad for his use of the nerve agent sarin, dropped April 4 on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. The Syrian government has denied any involvement in the attack, as it has consistently denied the use of chemical weapons throughout the six-year-long civil war, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Rather, the cleric warned Assad that further U.S. strikes would "drag the region to war" and could lead to the "the expansion of Daesh,” the Arabic name for the Islamic State militant group (ISIS).

Sadr has been a fierce opponent of the United States since America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. The firebrand preacher rose to prominence, denouncing the occupation and created the Mahdi Army, an Iraqi militia, which launched attacks on the U.S. military.

The most recent and principal version of the Shiite Mahdi Army, the Saraya al-Salam, was remobilized to fight ISIS in 2014 as the militant Sunni group threatened the security of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. A number of the so-called Popular Mobilization Units, co-opted into the Iraqi Army in 2016, have links to the Mahdi Army.

In 2014, the Guardian reported that the Iran-backed militia, the Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq formerly part of Sadr’s Mahdi Army, was fighting alongside Assad in Syria.

The Iraqi government, backed by Iran and allied with the U.S., has itself had to tread a careful line over the chemical weapons attack. The government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi condemned the chemical attack—without naming Assad—and called for an international investigation into the deaths.

The statement from Baghdad also criticized "the hasty interventions" that followed the chemical attack, a reference to U.S. air strikes launched late Thursday.

A senior White House foreign policy official has pushed a plan to partition Libya, and once drew a picture of how the country could be divided into three areas on a napkin in a meeting with a senior European diplomat, the Guardian has learned.

Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to Donald Trump under pressure over his past ties with Hungarian far-right groups, suggested the idea of partition in the weeks leading up to the US president’s inauguration, according to an official with knowledge of the matter. The European diplomat responded that this would be “the worst solution” for Libya.

Gorka is vying for the job of presidential special envoy to Libya in a White House that has so far spent little time thinking about the country and has yet to decide whether to create such a post.

Libya has been mired in a conflict between two competing governments since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 after a Nato-led intervention. As rival jostle for influence and position in Washington on the hitherto neglected issue, sharp differences have emerged over how much say Russia should have in Libya’s fate.

There are fears among some European allies that the White House will reverse the Obama administration’s strong support for the UN-backed Libyan government of national accord, which is based in Tripoli and led by Fayez al-Sarraj.

While the GNA has been seen by some as the best option for achieving stability in the country, it has struggled against a rival government based in Tobruk, eastern Libya, backed by Khalifa Haftar, an anti-Islamist military strongman. Haftar, who would not back partition, has support in some parts of the Egyptian and Russian governments.

In January, he was welcomed onboard the Admiral Kuznetsov, the Russian flagship, as the aircraft carrier sailed along the north African coast. Haftar, a 73-year-old field marshal and former Gaddafi general who later became his bitter opponent, presents himself as a bulwark against Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood, which makes him appealing to elements of the Trump foreign policy team.

Gorka advocates hardline policies aimed at defeating “radical Islam” and sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group bent on infiltrating the US. As a former Breitbart editor, he is close to Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, who believes the struggle against radical Islam should be the central theme of US foreign policy. But Bannon’s star is on the wane in the White House and he lost his seat on the national security council last week.

Gorka has alarmed foreign diplomats with his views on Libya’s future. The map he drew on a napkin during the transition period cut Libya into three sections, apparently based on the old Ottoman provinces of Cyrenaica in the east, Tripolitania in the north-west and Fezzan in the south-west.

Mattia Toaldo, a Libya expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, said: “This is like a litmus test of how much you know about Libya. If you the only thing you know is that it was cut into three, then it shows you are clueless about the situation in Libya.”

Gorka’s rivals for the envoy job include Pete Hoekstra, a former congressman and lobbyist, and Phillip Escaravage, a former US intelligence official who worked on Libya for more than a decade.

Escaravage is generally considered to be the clear favourite to take on the unpaid role. He is believed to have put forward a peace proposal heavily dependent on tens of billions of dollars in western financial support.

At least one European ally has privately expressed frustration at the US state department’s lack of a position on Libya, voicing concerns over Russia’s growing influence.

While separatists who support partition claim that a viable state could be built in eastern Libya, most experts agree that the move would stoke another civil war because the boundaries would be hotly disputed.

Representatives of the Tobruk government, including Haftar, have sought to influence the Trump administration, calling for the US to radically change its position and withdraw support for the Sarraj government.

In a phone interview with the Guardian, Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli security consultant based in Canada, whose company has a $6m (£4.9m) contract to lobby on behalf of Haftar and Aguila Saleh Issa, the head of the Libyan house of representatives in Tobruk, said the White House had been “briefed” on Libya and was “willing to play on our terms”.

“There is not going to be a partition,” Ben-Menashe said. “None of them [Trump administration officials] really knew anything about what was going on. They were briefed pretty extensively by us and ... they understand that Sarraj will never work.”

Ben-Menashe said it was understood by the Trump administration that a central Libyan government acceptable to the west and east of the country could be created “in three days” if Russia were more involved. The Trump administration, he added, was “interested in getting the help of Russians and interested in getting them to resolve it”.

Support for the eastern government was growing in parts of Europe, including the UK, Ben-Menashe said. “We have talked to the Brits, the Norwegians, the Swiss. We did a lot of work on this,” he added.

When Islamic State (IS) militants occupied Mosul University in June 2014, they set about destroying its precious collection of manuscripts in a show of contempt for culture and higher education.

Now though, in an attempt to rebuild Mosul's cultural heritage, a campaign is under way to restore the university library and others in the city.

The project is being led by an anonymous blogger, who found fame writing about life under IS on the site Mosul Eye for the past three years.

The blogger, who describes himself as an independent historian, is calling for donations of books and other printed material in all languages and from all disciplines under the slogan: "Let it be a book, rising from the ashes."

The university, lauded as one of the Middle East's pillars of higher learning, housed one of the most extensive collections of literature in the region.

The library was once home to some of the "most precious and valuable manuscripts and rare prints in the region", according to the man behind the Mosul Eye website.

It is believed the militants destroyed or looted well over 100,000 manuscripts during the occupation.

Some 400 books have been received since the campaign was launched in February, with thousands more waiting in collections centres in the US and Europe. A French institute in Marseille has pledged to donate about 20 tonnes of books to the campaign.

"We hope the campaign will serve as a link between Mosul University and the rest of the world on academic, cultural, and social levels," the blogger says.

The aim is to collect at least 200,000 books.

The blogger told the BBC by email that some Iraqis responded to the drive by volunteering to collect books in major Iraqi cities, but the response from other Arab countries has been "negligible with a capital N".

"So far, we received only one single donation from an Iraqi lady living in Jordan, and frankly, her donation was the first donation we received since we launched the campaign."

Earlier this month, Mosul Eye issued a plea via social media to Basra port authorities to facilitate the transfer of a 200-tonne shipment of books from a collection centre in Irbil.

...new collection centres are now being established in the US and Europe.

Campaigners will then work on collecting and categorising the books to prepare them for the shelves of Mosul's libraries once the city is fully recaptured from IS.