In 1931 an Italian general crossed hundreds of miles of waterless desert with three thousand troops and roughly twenty bombers to take a group of oases in southeastern Libya. He later called it the greatest operation ever accomplished in the Sahara. For years afterwards, travellers continued to find the bodies of the people who had fled, mummified by the dryness.
In 1941 a Free French column under Leclerc covered something like a thousand miles from Lake Chad, with early assistance from the British Long Range Desert Group, and took the same place from the Italians. On 1 March the garrison surrendered. The following day Leclerc and his men swore an oath not to lay down arms until the French flag flew over Strasbourg cathedral, which it did on 23 November 1944.
In 2024 and 2025, satellite imagery showed the runway there being renovated and extended, heavy cargo aircraft appearing where none had been the year before, and flights operated by carriers previously named in United Nations reporting on weapons trafficking.
Kufra is the same oasis in all three paragraphs, and it is the node the modern corridor runs through. The holders change about once a generation. The reason nobody can leave it alone has not changed in a hundred and fifty years, and it is not strategic in any abstract sense.
It is water.
Why Kufra exists at all
Kufra sits in the Libyan Desert, a sub-region of the eastern Sahara, roughly a thousand kilometres from the Mediterranean and surrounded on several sides by sand seas that are effectively impassable to anything that cannot carry its own supply.
What makes it habitable is groundwater close enough to the surface to support date palms and cultivation. The Senussi who made it their capital tilled the soil, irrigated, and grew grain, vegetables, melons and dates in a place where nothing else grows for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.
That single fact generates everything that follows. In a desert, a route is not a line on a map. It is a sequence of places where water can be obtained, and the distance between them has to be shorter than the range of whatever is doing the travelling. Change the range and you change the map.
A camel caravan needs water every few days. A truck column needs water and fuel. An aircraft needs a runway, and a runway in a place like that requires people to maintain it, who require water. Each technology changed the spacing of the required stops and none of them removed the requirement.
That is worth holding against the intuition that modern transport makes geography irrelevant. It makes geography less binding, which is a different claim. A route that needed a stop every eighty kilometres now needs one every eight hundred, and the number of qualifying locations falls accordingly, which concentrates value on the survivors rather than dispersing it.
Kufra is where the stops are, which is why it has been fought over by the Senussi order, the Kingdom of Italy, Free France, Britain, Gaddafi’s Libya, two competing Libyan communities, and the Libyan National Army, in that order, across a century and a half.
The Senussi capital
The Senussi order, a Sufi religious and political movement, transferred its headquarters to Kufra in 1895, and the choice is the first demonstration of the principle.
A movement with influence across the central Sahara needed a base that its enemies could not easily reach. European powers were advancing from the coasts, the order had begun resisting French expansion from around 1906, and the Ottoman sultan was cultivating the Senussi leadership as a counterweight to the European scramble.
Kufra answered the problem geographically. A thousand kilometres of desert in every direction is a better defence than a fortress, provided you hold the water in the middle of it. The order could move across that desert because it knew where the wells were, and an invading army could not because it did not.
That advantage held for thirty-six years. It ended when somebody solved the logistics, which is the only way any of these positions has ever ended.
What Graziani actually did
The Italian campaign of 1931 is the hinge, and what makes it significant is not the fighting.
The engagement itself was short. What was remarkable, and what the Italians boasted about afterwards, was the navigational and organisational achievement of moving three thousand soldiers with artillery and air support across hundreds of miles of waterless terrain and arriving in a condition to fight. Graziani spent the autumn of 1930 reconnoitring the routes from the north and west, and the campaign was described afterwards as one of the largest desert operations yet attempted.
That is a logistics operation with a battle at the end of it, and it is the template for everything in this subject. The desert had protected Kufra because crossing it was harder than taking it. Once an industrial state applied motor transport, aerial reconnaissance, surveyed routes and pre-positioned supply to the problem, the protection evaporated.
The Italians then did what every subsequent holder has done. They built infrastructure: a fort with wireless masts, an aircraft hangar, a windmill and a reservoir. Graziani organised a compound and base of operations and used it to extend control across southern Libya.
Note what is on that list. A radio, an aircraft hangar, and a water reservoir, built in 1931. The oasis stopped being a destination and became a node. A place people travelled to had become a place things travelled through, and the distinction is the whole of what this subject is about.
The airfield, which is older than anybody assumes
The detail that makes Kufra belong in a course about air logistics rather than desert warfare is that it has been an aviation facility for ninety years.
Before the Second World War, the oasis served as an important refuelling point for Italian aircraft flying to Asmara in Eritrea. Buma Airfield was built there in the 1930s as a minor Italian facility, and it is the direct ancestor of the airport operating today.
Think about what that means. Italy’s problem in the 1930s was connecting Libya to its East African colonies across a continent it did not control. The aircraft of the period could not make the distance without stopping, and the only usable stop was the oasis.
That is the same problem, with the same solution, that produced everything downstream. An aircraft with insufficient range to overfly a region must land in it, and where it lands is determined by where a runway can be maintained, which is determined by water. The modern Ilyushins crossing the same airspace have considerably better range and land at Kufra for a different reason, which is that the cargo is going to a place a thousand kilometres further on with no runway worth using. Range solved the refuelling problem and did not solve the destination problem, and the destination problem is the one that matters.
Leclerc, and the axis that keeps reappearing
The 1941 capture deserves attention for a reason that has nothing to do with the oath.
Leclerc came from Lake Chad. The Free French column crossed roughly a thousand miles of desert from French Equatorial Africa to take a Libyan oasis, with reconnaissance and early support from the Long Range Desert Group, besieging the position from 31 January to 1 March.
The Chad-to-Kufra axis is the same axis that the Libyan expeditionary force used in reverse in the 1980s, staging south through these oases into northern Chad. It is the same axis that carries cargo today.
Three different wars, three different sets of belligerents, three different technologies, one route. The route is not a tradition or a preference. It is the only line across that terrain where the gaps between water are short enough to cross.
After the capture, Kufra became an Allied base, garrisoned by a company of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, about two companies of the Sudan Defence Force, and a company of the Long Range Desert Group. The LRDG used it as a forward operating base for the deep patrols that are the direct ancestor of every long-range desert vehicle operation since.
The hazard of the place is recorded too. In April 1942 a South African Air Force detachment of three Blenheims was ordered to Kufra, became lost, and landed about a hundred and fifty kilometres northeast of it. Navigation error in that terrain is not an inconvenience. The glazed navigator’s station on a Soviet freighter exists because of exactly this, four decades later, over the same kind of ground.
The water problem, inverted
The Gaddafi era produced the strangest development in the oasis’s history, and it is a resource story rather than a military one.
Kufra sits above the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, one of the largest bodies of fresh groundwater on earth and overwhelmingly fossil water, accumulated during wetter periods and not meaningfully recharging under current conditions.
Libya built an enormous engineering project to pump that water north through pipelines to the coastal cities and agricultural schemes, and the Kufra basin became a wellfield. Circular pivot irrigation schemes appeared around the oasis, visible from orbit as green discs in an otherwise featureless desert.
The inversion is worth stating plainly. For a century and a half, Kufra mattered because it was the only place in the region with water. The modern Libyan state’s response was to extract that water and send it somewhere with more people.
Which is a reasonable thing for a government to do with a national resource, and it means the asset that gives the place its entire strategic significance is a stock being drawn down rather than a flow being used. Fossil water does not come back on any timescale relevant to policy. The resource-extraction logic that governs so much of this subject applies to the thing that made the crossroads possible in the first place. A gold seam and an aquifer are the same kind of asset: a stock, finite, being drawn down by whoever holds the ground above it, with the proceeds leaving by air.
Who holds Kufra now, and how that happened
Libya after 2011 produced a contest over Kufra that was explicitly about control of transit revenue.
The oasis sits on routes carrying migrants north from Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and the Horn toward the Mediterranean, alongside smuggled goods, fuel, and latterly artisanal gold. Control of the town is control of the taxation of all of it, which makes Kufra a revenue asset rather than merely a military one, and revenue assets are fought over more persistently than positions.
That produced armed conflict between the Toubou, whose communities straddle the Libya-Chad-Niger frontiers and who historically controlled desert routes, and the Zuwayya, the dominant Arab community in the town. There had been a confrontation with the Toubou under Gaddafi in 2008, and open clashes between the two in 2012.
The town today sits within territory controlled by the Libyan National Army under Khalifa Haftar, which dominates eastern and southern Libya, with an allied local militia involved in the transit business. An LNA officer in Kufra has told reporters that cargo flights there transport civilians, soldiers and police between Libyan airports, and that no Sudanese paramilitary fighters are present. The LNA has repeatedly denied backing the Rapid Support Forces or taking sides in Sudan’s war.
Haftar, as it happens, was a Libyan officer taken prisoner in Chad during the 1987 campaign that staged through these oases. He is now the man who controls them, which is a continuity worth noting without over-reading.
The runway, 2024 to 2026
The current chapter is documented by satellite imagery and flight data rather than by anybody’s testimony, which is a change in how this story gets told.
Reuters reporting drawing on satellite imagery, flight tracking and United Nations documents described a transformation of the airport during 2024. By June, local airlines had begun scheduled flights between Kufra and Benghazi. The more significant change was in heavy cargo: no large cargo aircraft appeared in Copernicus satellite images from 2023, and by April 2024 at least one appeared in six of seven images. Flight tracking indicated several of those flights were operated by carriers previously cited in United Nations reporting on weapons trafficking linked to the Emirates.
Separate imagery from July 2025 showed at least two Russian-built transport aircraft on the ground, which observers assessed as indicating movement of military equipment or specialised personnel with reasonable certainty.
The airfield lies roughly three hundred kilometres from the Sudanese border. Shipments of arms from Kufra toward Darfur were reported from May 2025, notwithstanding the United Nations arms embargo, and geolocated video has been used to establish a Sudanese paramilitary presence in the town. Traffic had shifted north to Kufra as scrutiny of the Chadian route increased, which is a corridor rerouting rather than closing.
Abu Dhabi denies supporting any side in Sudan’s war. The LNA denies backing the paramilitary. Sudan’s army has repeatedly accused the group of moving military cargo through Libya.
Then the fighting reached the border itself. In June 2025 there was an engagement at the Jabal al-Uwaynat massif, the three-way junction of Libya, Egypt and Sudan, with Sudan’s army accusing Haftar’s forces of participating alongside the paramilitary, and Haftar’s government describing it as an attack on a Libyan patrol.
The corridor now has a contested entrance.
What this geography actually dictates
Strip out the politics and the physical constraints produce the behaviour, which is the useful part.
The desert has few regulated entry points, which is a consequence of there being few places anybody can physically be. A frontier running through sand seas is not a line anyone patrols. It is a formality crossed at the small number of points where crossing is possible, and those points are known to everybody who uses the desert and to nobody else. That asymmetry of local knowledge is older than any of the states involved and has survived all of them.
An air bridge terminating at Kufra solves a specific problem. Cargo from the Gulf can reach eastern Libya through ordinary civil aviation with ordinary paperwork. Moving it onward to Darfur by air requires a destination runway and invites interdiction, as the destruction of a cargo aircraft at Nyala in May 2025 demonstrated. Moving it the last leg overland through unpoliced desert is slow and reaches a place nothing else reaches.
So the pattern that emerged is not a design. It is the only configuration the geography permits: long-haul air to a node with a runway, then surface transport across terrain nobody can monitor.
That is identical in structure to what the Senussi were doing with camels, to what Graziani did with motor columns, and to what Leclerc did coming the other way. The vehicles improved. The nodes did not move, because the water did not move. Flags, registries and corporate structures can be relocated in an afternoon. An aquifer cannot.
The claims that do not hold up
An audit, since remote places attract confident assertion in inverse proportion to the evidence available.
Kufra became strategically important recently is contradicted by a hundred and fifty years of people fighting over it.
The desert is a barrier is only true relative to a technology. It was a barrier to armies before motor transport, briefly not a barrier after it, and is now a barrier to surveillance rather than to movement.
Nobody knows what goes on there is less true than it has ever been. Satellite imagery and flight tracking have made the airfield one of the better-documented pieces of infrastructure in the Sahara.
The LNA controls Kufra overstates a situation involving allied militias, local communities with their own interests in the transit economy, and a town where control has changed repeatedly.
The air bridge is the whole supply route ignores the overland leg, which is where most of the distance and all of the unobservability sit.
The Great Man-Made River made the desert bloom is a partial description of a project pumping fossil water that does not replenish.
Haftar’s capture in 1987 explains his current conduct is a tidy narrative that outruns the evidence. He was captured, he left, he returned, and the connecting reasoning is contested.
This is a Libyan problem or a Sudanese problem misdescribes a corridor that has always been international and that currently involves at least five states.
What Kufra is actually telling us
The lesson is about the durability of physical constraints relative to everything built on top of them.
Over a century and a half, the oasis has been held by a Sufi order, a fascist empire, a Free French column, a British long-range reconnaissance unit, a revolutionary republic, two competing communities, and a general’s private army. Every one of those holders had different objectives, different allies, different technology and different enemies.
Every one of them wanted the same thing for the same reason, and the reason is that there is nowhere else to stop.
That is worth generalising because it cuts against how this subject is usually narrated. The story is normally told through people: an operator, a general, a trafficker, a sanctioned brother. Those people are real and they are substitutable. What is not substitutable is a place where water is obtainable in a thousand kilometres of desert, with ground flat and firm enough for a runway, within reach of a border nobody can police.
There are very few such places. The map of them has barely changed since the camel. And the consequence is that the corridor this investigation follows was not chosen by anybody. It was the only one available, and every party that has ever needed to move something across that desert has independently arrived at the same set of coordinates.
An Italian general called taking it the greatest operation ever accomplished in the Sahara. A French colonel swore an oath there about a cathedral two thousand miles away. A Libyan militia now taxes what passes through. None of them picked the location. The water did.
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