Al Kufra

Kufra is a basin and oasis group in the Kufra District of southeastern Cyrenaica in Libya.
At the end of nineteenth century Kufra became the center and holy place of the Senussi order. 
It also played a minor role in the Western Desert Campaign of World War II.

It is located in a particularly isolated area, not only because it is in the middle of the Sahara Desert but also because it is surrounded on three sides by depressions which makes it dominate the passage in east-west land traffic across the desert. For the colonial Italians, it was also important as a station on the north-south air traffic to Italian East Africa. These factors, along with Kufra's dominance of the southeastern Cyrenaica region of Libya, explains the oasis' strategic importance and why it was a point of conflict during World War II.

Kufra increased its importance when the Second World War started and, after the Suez Canal was closed to Italian shipping, connections with Italian East Africa became mainly aerial, using Kufra and its strategic location.
Kufra, thanks to its key role for the Italian Royal Army, soon became a target for  
the Allies, with Free France and British desert troops beginning a long battle for its conquest. 
The Free French from Chad, with General Leclerc's leading a combined force of Free French and Chad native troops, acted together with the British Long Range Desert Group, attacked and took Kufra in the Battle of Kufra.
In later stages of the Western Desert Campaign, Kufra was used as a staging post for Allied units such as the Long Range Desert Group and the Special Air Service.

After the Axis were expelled from North Africa, and when after the war it became part of independent Libya, the Buma airfield at Kufra has fallen into disrepair and is little-used. The town surrounding the Oasis is still dominated by the old fort of El Tag, built by the Italians in the mid-1930s.
On 26 August 2008, a hijacked Sudanese Boeing 737 landed at Kufra Airport after having departed from Nyala Airport, Darfur, with destination Khartoum. Earlier, Egyptian authorities had refused to allow the plane to land in their national capital, Cairo.
In recent decades, Kufra has become a major point on the route of African migrants who try to reach Europe by various routes, and some of whom get incarcerated in Kufra's notorious prison.

Following the Libyan civil war, the area was reported to be under control of anti-Gaddafi forces and not the government of Muammar Gaddafi on 2 April 2011.
On 28 April 2011, loyalist forces reportedly re-captured Kufra. There were no reports of casualties in the fighting for the town after the rebels put up only light resistance.
By 6 May 2011 the town had been retaken by the Libyan rebels.
In February 2012, fighting between the Tobu and Zuwayya tribes killed over a hundred people.

The Kufra Basin is a large, underexplored, Palaeozoic intracratonic sag basin in SE Libya and NE Chad with extensions into NW Sudan and SW Egypt.