Paddling in the Aftermath of Libya’s French Embassy Bombing

When I arrived at the scene of the latest bombing in Tripoli, smoking bits of car were strewn all over the road and a crowd of men were paddling around in a big puddle outside the French Embassy. The water was pumping out of a hole in the middle of the road.

"The car doesn’t exist any more," one security official told us. "It was a very big bomb."

The blast has been blamed on "militants", but so far no one's come forward to claim responsibility for it. French President Francois Hollande said yesterday that it wasn't just aimed at his government – or at the two guards and several residents who were injured – but at "all countries in the international community engaged [in] fighting terrorism". It's the first attack to have taken place in the Libyan capital since the war that deposed former leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Some of the guys milling around were from local civilian militias and were sporting a dress code common in present-day Tripoli, a kind of military-casual. One was wearing a white T-shirt and board shorts and holding a Kalashnikov. Another was wearing jeans, a football shirt and waving an ancient-looking Soviet pistol about. They were running here and there, shooing away people who tried to cross a hastily erected tape barrier. Standing at the back were a more serious looking security force, dressed in smart dark-blue outfits and holding shiny black machine guns.

After a while, we went and stood in the middle of the big puddle to try to get a good view of the damage that had been done. The water emerging from the hole in the ground was surprisingly warm, and standing head-on to the embassy – its exterior wall having been toppled by the blast – it looked like the explosion had bored a dark cave straight into it.

At first, the crowd mainly consisted of curious Libyans. And they were getting everywhere, despite the militia guys doing their best to keep them back. Some neighbours seemed to be poking around inside the embassy itself and others were on the roof of the house opposite, which had also been hit hard.

A middle-aged French woman who was clearly upset told me that a Libyan family lived in the house opposite. She said a girl had been badly hurt by the explosion and sent to Tunisia for treatment. Some of the other neighbours said two French security guards had been hurt as well, one critically.

After a while, armoured cars with hatches and heavy machine guns attached arrived and blocked off the road. Then some guys with white gloves turned up and started picking up little pieces of metal and inspecting all the mashed up cars that were parked around the bombsite.

Neighbours said the explosion took place at around 7AM, about one hour before we arrived. One neighbour said she'd been literally knocked out of bed by it, another man said he was eating his breakfast when he heard the explosions: first a big one, then a smaller one some time afterwards. He came out and there was smoke and flames everywhere. A shopkeeper took us on a walk and pointed out how flying shrapnel had smashed the windows of a house some distance away.

A Tunisian journalist who was peering under the bonnet of one of the burnt out cars said some of the French people she knew were preparing to leave the country. They were shocked that they had become a target, she said. France took a leading role in Nato’s campaign to bomb Gaddafi out of power, sending in its jets to bomb regime tanks as they moved in on Benghazi on the 19th of March, 2011 – something most Libyans still seem grateful for.

The residents were also shocked that the blast had taken place in Tripoli. Until this attack, all the real terror had been directed at diplomats in the east of the country. Things like the RPG attack on the British ambassador last June, the raid on the US Embassy in Benghazi that took place three months later and the machine-gunning of the Italian Consul General in January of this year.

As the clean-up operation rolled on, many of those who lived in the area brought chairs out of their houses so they could sit down, chat and watch the investigation. A local Imam suggested that the attack wasn’t the work of a hardcore Islamist group because they would have set the bomb off at a later time, in order to cause more casualties. He told me the bomb was "a warning" and "a symbol". Others were quick to point out that the bomb came a day after the French parliament voted to extend its troop deployment in Mali – where it’s been driving militant Islamists out of the country’s northern cities.

Some were dismayed, and worried the attack could further destabilise the country, which is already struggling to control its well-armed civilian militias and rebuild its weak institutions. And others saw the bomb as an inevitability in a nation with so many weapons and so much anger. Before we left, a young man perched on a plastic chair beckoned me over and motioned for me to sit next to him. ‘"In my country, there are six million people," he said. "Two million are very angry at the West. And everyone has guns and bombs. Yesterday it was the US Embassy, today it was the French Embassy and in the future, there will be many tomorrows."

Follow Wil (@bilgribs) and Matthew (@MATTHEW_BARTON_) on Twitter.

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