The US military has moved a team of marines from Spain to southern Italy as a precautionary step in case the US embassy in Libya comes under threat, officials said Wednesday [14 May 2014].<\/p>\n
The contingent of nearly 200 marines is part of a newly-created “crisis response” force set up in the wake of a deadly attack on a US diplomatic outpost in the Libyan city of Benghazi in 2012.<\/p>\n
The State Department has requested the move amid growing concerns over violence in Libya, but there was no imminent plan to evacuate the embassy in Tripoli, an administration official said.<\/p>\n
“We’re seeing a deterioration of the security situation there,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.<\/p>\n
The team, equipped with four tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft as well as two KC-130 refueling tankers, arrived at the US naval air station in Sigonella in Italy on Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters.<\/p>\n
The deployment was ordered as a “prudent measure” due to “the general unrest in Northern Africa,” Warren said.<\/p>\n
He declined to say if the move was focused on a particular country.<\/p>\n
The US troops were drawn from a force in Moron, Spain, the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response unit. The force helped evacuate staff from the US embassy in South Sudan last year.<\/p>\n
Libya’s central government has struggled to assert its authority over the vast, mostly desert country, which is effectively ruled by a patchwork of local militias and awash with weapons.<\/p>\n
In March, the authorities acknowledged for the first time the existence of “terrorist groups” in Libya, particularly in Benghazi and in Derna, an eastern city with a history of Islamist militancy.<\/p>\n