General Khalifa Haftar has been appointed as head of the Libyan army by the country's internationally-recognised government in Tobruk.
Haftar, a controversial anti-Islamist, launched Operation Dignity last year, a self-declared war on Islamists in the city of Benghazi.
BBC News reports that, as a young military officer, he helped Colonel Muammar Gaddafi come to power, before fleeing the country in 1987 to live in the United States.
He returned to Libya to fight against Gaddafi in the 2011 revolution, but it was only in 2014 that he rose to prominence with a vow to rid Libya of violent Islamists.
(Source: BBC News, Reuters)
