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They are an enormous amount of destruction on.

I mean, I really never expected the Kanye family would rise. So far, those brothers, those seven brothers were really very poor, ignorant to rough people without any manners. A social status. It was zero about 30 years ago.

Seven brothers grew up in a small Libyan town.

You have to imagine basically a family that was poor. They were not very educated.

Only Mohammed, who later emerged as the brains behind the operation, was educated. The eldest, Abdul Haq, was just taking care of sheep.

He was just a shepherd, effectively seven brothers who no one took seriously. But when chaos engulfed their country, they waded through blood to lord it over their community. I'm Tim Whewell and for assignment here on the BBC World Service, this is the horrific story of the Carney brothers with some material you may find distressing.

Update number one from Cuttle Abdirahim was the number one killer after Hamas and then Mohammed delivered this, a whole family got killed just because of one person might be their brother or their son who does something that upsets this militia. They just go and assassinate the whole family and they get married.

You know, just sort of casual conversation with people in Tarhuna would lead to a story where you'd find out that five of their relatives were missing.

Yeah, there are hundreds of children in Tarhuna who now have no fathers, seven brothers who were so feared.

It's sometimes hard to distinguish myth from reality. They actually did keep lions and feed the victims to the lions. You believe that? Yeah, because the important thing when you kill someone is not the fact that we made them disappear. You what you need is striking the imagination of everybody around.

The carny brothers held Tarhuna in their ruthless grip until just seven months ago. Now the evidence of their crimes is being uncovered. But will they ever face justice? And what does their story tell us about the largely forgotten fate of a country that 10 years ago dominated headlines around the world that the West wanted to help achieve freedom and good governance?

I joined the revolution thinking that Libya will be a better place and we got formed, which is going to be similar to.

Well, you could see it before you arrive because you're driving inland from Libya's coastal plain, these low hills begin to sort of rise from the horizon. Daniel Hilton, the Middle East II is one of the very few foreign reporters to have visited Tarhuna, just outside the capital, Tripoli, since the Carney brothers fled. The area seems to sort of get more fertile as you approach the soil becomes kind of rich Arabs, the beautiful rusticana. Tarhuna is a sprawling community of low white concrete buildings home to about 40000 people.

It's famous for its barley, its almonds and above all, its olives, an outpost of greenery before the Sahara sets in. The Italians who occupied to Libya before the Second World War, like Tarhuna, maybe because it reminded them of home and later, the country's dictator. For 42 years, Colonel Gaddafi favored it, too, perhaps because it was such a small, unthreatening town. Many of its sons got plum jobs in his security apparatus, but not the Carni brothers Abdul Harlock, Mohammed, Muammar Abdulrahim, Mackeson, Ali and Abdul Azim.

They were peripheral even to this peripheral place. Abdul Harlech, the oldest, the shepherd, quiet and polite, enjoyed some respect in the community.

But the main thing that everyone remembers about the others from those early days is that they spelt trouble whom they used to be like Venus', which fights with one another. Swear they could even hit one another with sticks.

This is Hamza dealable, a demonstrative young man in a black leather jacket, a trained lawyer and community activist, a cigarette between his fingers. He's one of the survivors of the Carneys reign of terror that I've talked to for hours on crackly social media calls, battling the power cuts and bomb blasted infrastructure of Libya today. Now, in his late 30s, Hamza grew up with some of the brothers bumping into them at weddings and funerals. He says they were drifters from job to job only.

Mohammed, the second oldest, had a kind of career.

Mohammed Khatami. Mohammed was a driver of two weeks on, two weeks off with one of the oil and gas companies. He had a pale skin, green eyes, and he seemed very calm. But he was one of those people who hides his poison in honey, as we say, really have grudges against people. I remember in about 2004 or 2005, he started to grow his beard like a Salafist and started preaching about what is right and what is wrong in Islam.

Muhammad was stockier and more softly spoken than his younger brothers. He cultivated an air of authority, but he would never have enjoyed real authority if it wasn't for what came next.

In 2011, much of Libyan role was against Colonel Gadhafi, not Tarhuna, though many people in the town, remember, had prospered under the brutal, flamboyant dictator.

But those underdogs, the Kani brothers, saw their chance at some of US sobriety, and the money sabotaged Chabrier after the revolution broke out.

They were among the very first revolutionaries, not for the sake of the revolution. They had another reason. It was to undermine their cousins. They had a dispute with their cousins going back 30 years. Those cousins were Gadhafi supporters. So the Carneys joined the revolution and slowly, discreetly, they managed to get those cousins assassinated one by one.

That's not the kind of story that the world heard about the Libyan revolution. Your city, your city was an inspiration to the world as you throw off a dictator and chose freedom. In September 2011, Britain's David Cameron and France's Nicolas Sarkozy were acclaimed as heroes in Libya's second city, Benghazi, after they'd sent warplanes to defend it against Gadhafi's attempt to crush the uprising there. But the revolt wasn't entirely about grand ideals in countless towns like Tarhuna. There was also another unreported reality.

The Libyan revolution, like revolutions everywhere, provided cover for the settling of a myriad of local scores between individuals, between families, between tribes score settling that could upend the old social order. In Tarhuna, the colonies were the winners.

The 2011 revolution in Libya gave a lot of sway and importance to actors that nobody would have heard of if the old regime had remained in place. That's the direct impact of sheer anarchy.

Jallal Hushabye, Libya expert at the Klinkenborg Institute in the Netherlands. He's pieced together the story of the rise and fall of the colonies of the cycle of revenge that continued after they'd had their cousins murdered in the revolution.

In 2012, the brothers discovered their brother Ali, mutilated and dead. He was killed in a very gruesome manner.

That tit for tat killing triggered the tragedy of Tarhuna. Ali, the second youngest brother, was perhaps the handsomest bright eyed squatch, and he'd been the most prominent in the uprising. The remaining six brothers proclaimed him a martyr and set out to avenge his death.

The brothers decided to respond to the murder of their brother by not just finding the people responsible and killing them. What they did actually was kill their entire families. If he had the three year old kid, you would make sure that the three year old kid was buried alive to really send a message.

This is a song of praise to the brothers private militia, it was gradually built up by the third youngest brother, Mok's, and their minister of defense, a man with a gaunt face, scraggly beard and strange staring yellow brown eyes who was reportedly addicted to drugs. Eventually, he had several thousand men under his command who were used to gain and maintain control of Tarhuna through sheer terror.

I think to get their policy was to terrorize people for no other reason than to create fear, to kill for that reason alone. Anyone in Tarhuna who stood against them would die. So, Hohnen, this is Tim in London, thank you very much for talking to us. I know it's painful to remember, but I want to ask you what happened to your family.

I'm talking to Hanan Abuelaish. She's in her early 50s. She has four sisters and she used to have seven brothers until the day in 2017. The gunmen burst into the family home in Tarhuna. They were commanded, she says, by Mohammed al-Qahtani himself, the softly spoken Salafist one little bit before they came into the house.

And we've heard a lot of gunshots. And so there was my mom, my sisters and my sister in law. We were all in the house and then one of the militiamen, he put a gun to my head. He asked me who was in the house, and I said no. But then he dragged me to my father's bedroom and they said to my father, You've got seven sons, but we're going to kill you first. And they really did it.

So I did everything I could to stop it. But they just pumped bullets into his chest.

Then they killed three of Hannan's brothers and two of her nephews, aged 14 and 16. She says she doesn't know the motive for the attack, but the family were well-off and respected in Tarhuna as such. Perhaps they were a threat to the nightmarish mini state that the colonies had established by then with Muhammad, the unassuming Coppo at its head.

What I do always keep in my head is this image of a very modest looking Mohammed with the beard, without the mustache. It's usually in the Mafia. The very top boss is never particularly frightening or even charismatic. At the top, you usually find the person who's able to understand all the complicated schemes necessary to maintain the whole pyramid. And this is the case here with Mohammed.

And by 2017, the colony pyramid included a whole business empire. They extorted money from local entrepreneurs, took over a cement factory, built a shopping mall, run in probably a laundry and private health clinics. But their main revenue came from control of trafficking routes north from the Sahara.

There were in a geographic area that was quite vital. If you if the migrants wanted to cross the area that the cannibals controlled, you had to pay to feed. People don't care what you do, whether you're carry sugar or weapons or drugs or human beings, as long as you pay.

There's no doubt the government in Tripoli knew how the colonies were running. Tarhuna, the lab was one of many people from the town who'd fled to the capital and warned the authorities. But he says they didn't react. From 2014, Libya was in a renewed civil war between the west of the country, including Tripoli and Tarhuna and the East, controlled by a renegade general called Hugi for Haftar. And for years, the colonies were on the government's side of vital fighting force on the capital southern fringe Hadramawt.

Will I kicked up in 2017. The brothers staged a military parade in Tarhuna.

It was the apogee of their power to sell were armored cars.

There were militias dressed in official police uniforms that were heavy weapons, light weapons and lions riding in a truck.

Those are the lines I've seen two of them in a photo that some say were fed human flesh. But that pride came before the Carneys fall, greedy for yet more power and wealth.

They changed sides joining up in 2019 with the Tripoli government's greatest enemy, General Haftar, a master of eastern Libya and attacked the capital number of mosques and declared his eagerness for the fight for power.

But a battle they thought would take days before they used for months and tiny peripheral Tarhuna became the cockpit of an international power struggle. The country's new ally, Khalifa Haftar, was backed by a surreal combination of France, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Russia, which sent mercenaries to camp out in Torino against them. The government's main backer, Turkey, poured in weapons to defend the capital. It was probably a Turkish drone that killed Gougne to Mercilus Mackeson al-Qahtani in September 2019, along with the youngest brother, Abdul-Karim, age 22.

So then the brothers were just four.

That's the enforcer, Abdul Rahim, clipped goatee and glistening pate, vowing revenge.

Prepare the sweets for our victory feast, he says. But the remaining brothers needed hardware for the fight.

One day in December, Tarhuna housewife Rubio Jaballah saw her cousin Tareq shot 14 times on his doorstep by the carnies militiamen. They took away his four by four pickup next day as he was being buried. Police under the county's control invaded the cemetery, snatching 10 men from the family, including her husband, Suleiman.

And we more sure you can watch way. It was an unbelievable scene. They were shooting randomly among people, among children.

Suddenly, through the horror, she understood the motive for the attack.

The art of the chase, how I saw taught at school and they had a grenade launcher mounted on it. Basically, there's a family. We make our living from running car businesses mainly for by force. And that's the reason why they attacked us, drove us to use the cars for their war. The battle between Tripoli and Tailgunner saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the whole year on off Libyan conflict, but eventually last June, the anti-government forces were pushed back.

The colonies fled east with their brigades. Tripoli militiamen entering Tarhuna were greeted by some with tears of joy.

This is an old man in gray felt skullcap leaning through the window of a military pickup, begging the fighters to look for his son.

Kidnapped by the colonies, Rabia Chapala saw her husband and all the other abducted men in her family would be found a lot.

We had so much hope we didn't sleep that night. The kids were happy.

Next day, she made her way through the rubble of battle into the country's notorious detention centers for the.

But then we found that the prisons were empty.

You know, notebook. And let's say you should see the state they were in.

It was absolutely terrifying. I completely broke down when I saw it. It was a terrifying sight. They completely destroyed our hope.

The benefits of being a citizen.

Marcoola, the cells were 70 by 70 centimeters. You could hardly stand or sit in them. You can hardly move the tissue. And I was imagining my husband and then them and then the walls were covered in blood. I couldn't handle it anymore. I had a complete breakdown.

What the carnies prisoners had endured was described later by a rare survivor to British reporter Daniel Hilton.

I met somebody who had been captain, one of these cells crouched down for 45 days, and he said that it was completely silent because everybody was so afraid of being killed or being tortured that they just didn't didn't dare utter a word to people on their left and right who were in cells just centimetres away through a divide and above the cells was still these sort of mounds of ash where the people who were keeping these prisoners would occasionally light fires and turn the tiny cells into ovens as a sort of form of torture.

But even that wasn't the worst in one cell.

I found a lot of children's shoes, really small children's shoes and bright colours on the floor. And, you know, the bodies of children have been found in the mass graves and also in a morgue since June.

In the days after the recapture of Tarhuna, Libyan TV and social media showed almost unwatchable pictures of those uncovered mass graves. Human remains emerging from the rich red earth on the windy, baking hot farmland outside the town, the earth that once produced olive trees and barley. Yes, there were people who found their whole families buried. And more than half a year on slow, painstaking stomach churning excavation work is still continuing. The fields outside Tarhuna are divided into neat rectangles with red and white tape, each part dug forensically shovel by shovel full by a team of workers enveloped head to foot and shiny white chemical protection suits.

One is a quiet, thoughtful young man called Awada Qaeda.

Every time I text with the new dead body, I have this fear of not being gentle. If you will break his bone, his soul will feel it.

Sadly, working for the Red Crescent, Waddah has had a lot of experience of handling corpses in the last few years, but mainly it's been the bodies of drowned migrants on these beaches. Tarhuna, who shocked him even more profoundly.

These migrants, they have drowned following their dream. These people have made a decision. I reached the other side when I die. These people made their choice. The sea killed them. But the people who I see right now, these are all crimes committed by Libyans against Libyans. I mean, these people committed nothing. They have done nothing yet. They got killed and buried this way. 120 bodies have already been excavated, men and women, children as young as five, but only a very small number have been identified so far, and it's believed that there are many more burials to be found.

According to official figures, more than 350 people from Tarhuna are missing.

But some say the real number is much higher, perhaps a thousand.

Will the only and their militia to pay for their crimes. Grief is turning to anger in Tarhuna. Weekly protests. People demand to know when the missing will be found, when justice will be done.

There are no clear answers. Mohammed al-Qahtani, mild mannered godfather who hid his poisoning honey, is now on a U.S. government wanted list. But along with his three surviving brothers, he's sheltering under general halftimes protection in eastern Libya. The International Criminal Court is investigating, but it said little about the exact scope of its inquiries. As for the Tripoli government, known as the Government of National Accord, all my efforts to get an interview about its investigation have failed.

Jalil harshly isn't surprised.

You don't have a bunch of good guys vs. a bunch of bad guys. Everybody has something on their conscience, including foreign actors. You have also foreign states taking advantage of how safe it was to be able to hide and taroona and conduct attacks into Tripoli. I'm referring to the Russian mercenaries, but even European states like France, you know, you would never catch France, referring to the alliance that existed between their champion Haftar and the gangsters that were the culebras.

They might have to have the Holy Father, is there any hope at the end of this story today, Humza, who witnessed the rise and fall of the colonies?

And like everyone else in Tarhuna, as he lost friends and relatives, is visiting his neighbors, the Jaballah family, who use the word Rabea, still waiting for any news about her abducted husband or the other men in her family.

The children, not surprisingly, haven't even begun to recover from what they've been through and that we are all in a complete mental state and the kids run away whenever they see police cars. They don't want to leave the house at all.

Humza describes the victims of Tarhuna as ugly. Out to Dume, the guardians of blood. It's a term for those seeking revenge. But Humza insists that revenge can only come through the law, however hard that may be, not through violence.

Duty Sloshy Whitewall is to bring about reconciliation, to mend relations between people.

The security force I belong to. We're trying to protect the HUNA from outbreaks of violence and revenge attacks. We're trying to prevent people pursuing vendettas. But Tarhuna still living in fear.

Many even now are afraid to speak out. They say they get threats from afar, from the Carneys supporters, and they don't trust the outside militias that now occupy the town either.

These protesters even want the Carneys back. At least they were local boys, however monstrous, unlikely unknown forces who control residents lives now. They have been released from one militia to another by the hawkish the young grave excavator who spent a lot of time in Tarhuna recently.

The government just justifies the militias who control the ground. What is the new militia doing? Little bit of terrifying. They just are doing their thing, you know, which is terrifying people. That's how it goes to Libya and all of the towns, not just in Tirana. It's throughout the life of your loan for ordinary people to take a stand against the militias is almost impossible. And yet, at the reburial of one of the Carneys victims, Saeed Maspero, sloshy, where flesh and bones that Whydah and his teammates had raised so gently were finally laid to rest.

What I heard a speech was very different. What he'd expected that made him think that history needn't always repeat itself.

The murder of the victim came out to speak and he was tormented. He said basically what's going on in Libya with the militias? Whenever a militia controls one area, they claim that they have gave soldiers to this cause to reach this place. But he said none of his family and none of the victims that has been killed in that hona was killed because of cause they all died because of old vendettas. They were just murdered. He said, my brother only wanted to live, only wanted life for himself and his family and children like this.

So if anybody comes claiming that we will die for a cause, throw them out, don't listen to them, just kick them out. We don't want to take revenge into our hands. We want to stop the circle of blood. An hour ago, I was about to cry. Actually, it was kind of wonderful in a way. I was very moved by his speech. Wonderful. It's not a word I've heard before in this program. One speech by one man.

It doesn't give much hope, a lot of to battle.

And yet those brave words cheered by other mourners uttered on the central square of Tarhuna, which has seen many killings, were perhaps a start. And breaking the cycle of fear and revenge that brought Tarhuna brothers from hell to power is perhaps Libya's only chance for a better future in LA.

Thanks for listening. That assignment podcast from the BBC World Service was produced and presented by me, Tim Whewell, with Sound Mixing by Neil Churchill. The production coordinator was Jim Trashman and the editor Bridget Hanae.