After nearly three years of living in Europe I decided to go home for a visit. I spent six weeks between Tripoli, the capital, and Bani Walid, my hometown. The whole experience was like visiting a foreign country and, despite my well-traveled life, my home country seemed like a strange place to me.
The first thing that struck me was how desperate and disappointed Libyans are three years after the NATO-backed rebels toppled the Moammar Gadhafi regime in what is wrongly described as a “revolution” instead of a civil war, as my old schoolmate had described what happened in 2011. When the war ended, Libyans were full of hope and optimism. Today, they are hopeless and pessimistic as never before.