Since December 2015, Sabratha city in western Libya has been hit by a wave of terror attacks, many orchestrated by the Islamic State (IS). The city made headlines when in February, the United States bombed what it claimed to be a training camp run by IS, killing over 40 people. In late 2015, Sabratha was mentioned many times in the Libyan local media as being an IS stronghold, while in 2014 residents told Al-Monitor that the city harbored many IS fighters in the woods scattered around the area.

The Phoenicians built Sabratha around 500 B.C. as a port for commerce and trading in African hinterland products that included ivory and animal skins. It was one of the three cities of Roman Tripoli, which included Tripoli and Leptis Magna, or modern-day Lebda 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of where Tripoli is situated today. In the second century, Romans took over Sabratha and extended their reach to Leptis Magna but kept Sabratha as the trading center connecting Africa in the south and the centers of Roman civilization including ancient Rome across the Mediterranean Sea. However, in the third century Sabratha as a trading port lost its role to other cities such as Tripoli, and Leptis Magna reduced in size and became a village.

Much of Sabratha’s ruins that are located right on the shoreline were damaged mainly due to the soft soil that continuously eroded because of the seawaters.

In the second wave of major violence that hit the country in 2014 — sometimes referred to as the second civil war — Mizran Mosque, which is over 100 years old and Tripoli's oldest mosque, was damaged. In March 2016, a bomb exploded inside the mosque destroying a large section of its fragile structure.