Southern Military Territory

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
"Territorio militare del Sud libico" (Southern military territory of Libya) inside Italian Libya

The Southern Military Territory (Italian: Territorio Militare del Sud) was a jurisdictional territory within the Italian colonies of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania (1911-1934) and later Italian Libya (1934–1947), administered by the Italian military in the Libyan Sahara.

Data

This military territory was below Italian Libya's four coastline provinces of Tripoli, Misurata, Benghazi and Derna. Administratively it was the only part of Italian Libya managed by the Royal Italian Army, and was divided in four military sections

The population was mostly

Aozou Strip from Chad, then part of French Equatorial Africa, to Italian Libya.[1]

Italian fort in Ghat, built in the 1930s

In 1931, the towns of

First World War
–style fort in El Tag in the mid-1930s.

Administrative capital Hun

During the colonial Italian Libya period, Hun was the administrative capital of the Italian Fezzan region, called Territorio Militare del Sud. Hun was the Italian military center of southern Italian Libya, and was not part of the national Fourth Shore territory of the Kingdom of Italy as Italian Tripolitania and Italian Cyrenaica were.

A small

Libyan Italian community of 1,156 people lived in Hun, which was called Homs in the colonial years. In the 1939 census they were 3% of the total population of 35,316 in the city. They disappeared from Homs after Italy's loss of Libya in World War II
.

In the 1930s the Italian government made some important improvements to the small town, including a connection to the coast via the new Fezzan Road.

Small Italian communities, mostly related to the military servicemen, lived even in Gadames and Gat. Someone of them were related to the

Auto-Saharan Company
("Compagnie Auto-Avio-Sahariane"), Italian military units specialised in long range patrols of the Sahara Desert and headquartered in Homs.

World War II

The Military Territory of the South was occupied by the Allies during the Second World War. The French invaded from Chad and occupied

Fezzan-Ghadames, the western part of the Military Territory of the South, in 1943. The British occupied the rest of Libya, including the other half of the territory which became part of Cyrenaica
.

Demographics

According to the 1936 census, which allowed citizens to declare their ethnicity, Libyan Sahara's native population was made up of 55.7% Arabs, 21.8% black Africans, 14.1% Berbers, 6.9% Turks and 1.5% Others.[3]

See also

Notes

References

  1. ^ New York Times: Aozou Strip
  2. ISBN 1-55876-405-4
    , p. 111
  3. doi:10.1080/00324728.1949.10416359
    .

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