Exiting Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya 49 and Britain, on student scholarships. The English city of Manchester, due in part to its clustering of prestigious universities and the process of chain migration, became home to the largest concentration of Libyans outside Libya.6 By 2011, national statistics reported 15,046 Libyan nationals residing in Britain, with two-thirds of them living in Manchester (El-Abani et al. 2020). Libyans also came abroad to the United States as refugees and students after 1965. Students were expected to return in order to bring their skills back to the homeland, though many remained abroad to escape repression and conscription into the Libyan military. In the face of such extreme brutality, survivors had little choice but to go underground or flee the country. In 1981, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), founded by an ambassador-turned-defector named Dr. Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, plotted from Sudan to overthrow Gaddafi by force.7 After the NFSL’s CIA-backed assault on Gaddafi’s compound was exposed by informants in 1984, key leaders were captured and executed, and the group never recovered. Survivors fled into neighboring states, traveling with their families from one country to the next using forged passports. Due in large part to Western governments’ growing animus toward Gaddafi and his links with international terrorist attacks, some NFSL fighters and their families were granted asylum in Britain and the United States. As Libyan dissidents escaped Gaddafi’s dystopia, their aspirations for a freer Libya traveled with them. By the 1970s, approximately one hundred thousand Libyans had left their homeland, and those who gained asylum in the United States and Britain used this opportunity to continue their activism and to recruit new members. Ahmed, who grew up in exile with other NFSL families in Lexington, Kentucky, recalled, My father came to the United States on a scholarship from the Libyan government to study engineering. He became politically active, was opposed to some of the activities of the regime, and was pretty vocal about it. Eventually that led to participation and involvement with the National Front for the Salvation of Libya – the Jebha, as we affectionately call it. That became a major part of the community that grew up in exile. Many of our social functions [and] formative experiences were really brought about by this network of individuals who made the principled decision to stand up against the regime and were paying the consequences for those decisions abroad. Others formed smaller groups congruent to the NFSL, such as Mahmud, an activist-turned-businessman. “Some of the students who had been harassed – I was one of them – had to leave to go to UK,” he explained. 6 7 See Othman (2011) for more information about Libyan education in the Manchester community before the 2011 revolution. Sudanese president Gaafar Nimeiry, irked by Gaddafi’s adventurism in Africa, provided refuge to NFSL insurgents until he was overthrown in 1985. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press