The UNSMIL met with the speaker of the General National Congress Tuesday in Tripoli

More people have been beheaded.

This time, no one is exactly sure who is responsible for the killings.

The bodies of three activists were found by residents in the Libyan city of Derna on Tuesday, the BBC reports. The abducted activists have been identified as Siraj Ghatish, Mohamed Battu and Mohamed al-Mesmari, aged between 19 and 21 years old.

The activists reportedly relayed information about the rebel-ridden city on social media. 

Understanding the air of unrest in the country is vital to understanding why the country is lawless, and how violence like this occurs with stunning regularity.   

Libya has been in an unstable state since Muammar Gaddafi was famously overthrown in 2011. The Huffington Post reports that more than 30,000 people died in the 2011 war, with more than 4,000 people missing after the dust settled. 

READ MORE: 3 Libyan Activists Beheaded By Suspected Islamist Militants Linked To ISIS

Three years after Gaddafi’s regime was overthrown, and NATO packed up its intervention specialists and plans, the country continues to exist in varying levels of lawless unrest. 

Experts in the topic at Harvard have published work heavily criticizing the NATO intervention, arguing that it actually exacerbated the problem and increased the death toll. Regardless, news like today’s beheadings show that the body count continues to rise and peace in Libya is nowhere to be found. 

An anonymous BBC correspondent told the organization on Tuesday that there appear to be three main militant groups currently present in Derna, where the activist’s bodies were found. These militant groups hold varying ideologies and levels of extremism, the correspondent said, though beheadings in the area are uncommon.

Derna has been out of the control of the government since 2012, and is expected to be the next stadium for battle after fighting in Benghazi, the second city, is finished. The publication Magharebia reported Tuesday that the Libyan army is “making victories” every day in Benghazi, and residents of Derna are waiting for the army “to liberate” their city – particularly in lieu of terrorists in the area “swearing allegiance to the ISIS leader.”

Though the major battles haven’t yet been brought to Derna, symptoms of violent unrest have already begun to fester.

READ MORE: Libya: Estimated 30,000 Died In War; 4,000 Still Missing

Last month, photographs were published from the area depicting public institutions renamed as ‘Islamic courts’ and ‘Islamic police.’ Furthermore, a video emerged in August showing a shooting in a football stadium. The victim was a man targeted by an unknown group. 

Derna has also been a hot-spot and breeding ground for Islamic activists to join militant groups fighting in Syria and Iraq. As of now, the people that have returned from the fighting have brought some of the harsh ideologies adopted during war time back to their own city.

The international community isn’t exactly sitting idly by, though the type of systematic intervention seen in 2011 is absent in the North African nation.

The head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) met with the speaker of the General National Congress (GNC) on Tuesday in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. According to the UNSMIL Twitter account, the meeting is being held in order to massage a dialogue aimed at “reaching a political agreement.”

It is important to note that major Western news outlets are surprisingly quiet about these beheadings, and the general unrest in Libya. Despite that every major cable news network covered previous beheadings of journalists and activists, they now remain silent.

Meanwhile, residents of Derna who oppose ISIS cannot express their distrust and distaste for the group publicly, as it threatens not only their safety, but the safety of their families.

This piece is a curation of reporting done by the BBC, The Huffington Post, Magharebia, Ansa Med, Harvard, the Independent, and Middle East Eye.

Reach Associate News Editor Diana Crandall here. Find her website here.