While every country on earth has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, the people of – and currently in – Libya have perhaps suffered more than any others.
In recent weeks, the civil war that has raged in the country for nearly a decade has intensified. Hospitals have been bombed. Locked-down residential districts have been shelled. Hundreds of thousands of migrants who seek to cross the Mediterranean through the country are stranded, with no legal status, awaiting the the virus.
The warring administrations of different regions have their own various lockdown restrictions and the roads are littered with fake checkpoints where travellers are hijacked or kidnapped for ransom, placing anyone going in search of supplies or medical care in danger. Conflicts can erupt at any point.
