On 21 August, two individuals were tried on terror charges in Tripoli after alleged involvement in a series of attacks in the capital, including the assault on the Corinthia Hotel in January 2015, in which nine people were killed. The defendants have not been named and it is unclear how they came to be detained. They are reportedly being held by the Special Deterrence Force (Rada). At the time of the Corinthia attack, a social media site linked to ISIS said that it had carried out the attack, identifying the two attackers as a Tunisian and a Sudanese. Their noms de guerres were Abu Ibraheem al-Tunisi and Abu Sulaiman al-Sudani respectively. They were supposedly members of “Abu Anas al-Libi Assault.”
On 19 August, Government of National Accord (GNA) deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Metig visited Sirte. However, pro-ISIS media accounts released images of the armed convoy escorting Metig captioned, “today, under the lens of our sniper”. The GNA-aligned al-Bunyan al-Marsus (BM) forces also published a video showing the backdrop used in a couple of ISIS videos recorded in Sirte. On 17 August, the Misratan counter-terror branch of BM released two promotional trailers of upcoming ‘confessions’ by Libyan ISIS fighters captured during fighting between BM and ISIS, though it is not clear how recently they were captured. One of the alleged ISIS fighters is Islam Ahmed Beleid al-Mahdawi, another is Muftah Attia Bushnaf al-Khafifi.