IS has Europe in its sights

On Saturday, IS loyalists said they had seized control of municipal institutions in Sirte, the eastern port city from which the group's Egyptian Christian hostages were kidnapped

Islamic State's beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians on Libya's Mediterranean coast is intended as a clear message to Europe: the terrorist group is expanding and it has the West in its sights.

The slow creep of Islamic State through Libya has gone largely unnoticed, but it is here, in a divided nation spiralling even further into chaos, that the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's fanatics are finding fertile ground.

The jihadist group - one of several operating in Libya - gained a foothold in the port city of Derna in October after a senior IS official travelled to eastern Libya to unite a panoply of militant factions under a single banner.

The Islamic State leader has since recognised the Libyan "provinces" of Barqa in the east, Tripolitania in the west, and Fezzan in the desert south as belonging to his "caliphate".

Details of the group's strength remain murky. But, online, IS supporters have been making an aggressive case for continued expansion in Libya, and Western intelligence officials now fear that the power vacuum that has enfeebled the oil-rich nation will provide IS militants with fertile ground in which to grow in strength.

Three years after the fall of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is split between an internationally recognised government in Tobruk, in the far east, and Islamists who control Tripoli in the west. 

Although each side is nominally allied with a patchwork of overlapping militias, control over the armed groups is often in practice limited.

In the early days of its expansion into Libya, IS left the clearest footprints in the cities of Benghazi, Sirte and the capital, Tripoli, where they recently mounted an armed assault on a luxury hotel, killing at least eight people.

On Saturday, IS loyalists said they had seized control of municipal institutions in Sirte, the eastern port city from which the group's Egyptian Christian hostages were kidnapped.

A key question in the months to come will be the extent to which Libya's IS-affiliated groups are able to link up with militants in IS branches outside the country.

The Daily Telegraph