UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres flew to eastern Libya on Friday for talks with commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA) Khalifa Haftar, days after he launched a military offensive to capture the capital Tripoli. He will first head to Tobruk, another eastern city, to meet lawmakers of the House of Representatives that is allied to Haftar. The UN chief had arrived in Libya on Wednesday and spent the night in the in the heavily fortified UN compound in a Tripoli suburb. Guterres was in Tripoli to help organize a reconciliation national conference later this month. “My aim remains the same: avoid a military confrontation. I reiterate that there is no military solution for the Libyan crisis, only a political one,” Guterres wrote on Twitter. Late on Thursday, the assembly president, Aguila Saleh, issued a statement welcoming the offensive, a spokesman said. In New York, diplomats revealed that Britain had requested Thursday that the UN Security Council convene to address the Libyan crisis. LNA forces on Thursday took Gharyan, a city some 80 km (50 miles) south of Tripoli. The renewed confrontation is a setback for the United Nations and Western countries which have been trying to mediate between Haftar and Government of National Accord (GNA) head Fayez al-Sarraj , who met in Abu Dhabi last month to discuss a power-sharing deal. The conference the United Nations is helping to organize is aimed at forging agreement on a roadmap for elections to resolve the prolonged instability in Libya. The Kremlin meanwhile, said it was not involved in the current developments in Libya. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated Moscow supported a negotiated political settlement to Libya’s problems that ruled out any new bloodshed. “We are closely following the situation in Libya,” he told reporters. “Of course we consider that the most important thing is that (military) operations there do not lead to bloodshed. The situation should be resolved peacefully.” The General Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) expressed its concern about the military escalation in the Libya. It called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint and avoid any armed escalation that could lead to chaos. The OIC urged all parties to exert efforts to safeguard Libya’s security and stability and set as a priority the unity of its people and land. Dialogue is the only way to resolve disputes, it added, stressing its support for UN efforts to achieve comprehensive national reconciliation.