Omar Mukhtar
Omar Mukhtar led the resistance to Italy in Cyrenaica for twenty years, was captured at seventy-three when his horse was shot under him, and was hanged in front of twenty thousand people who had been brought to watch. He was a teacher of the Quran from the Senussi order, the Sufi brotherhood whose lodges organised the tribes of the Libyan interior, and he was already in his fifties when Italy took Tripoli and Benghazi from the Ottomans in 1911 and found that the coast was the easy part. He fought the Italians from the beginning, with Ottoman officers in the first war and without them after 1918. From 1923, when Mussolini's government repudiated the accords that had left the Senussi a share of the country, he commanded the whole Cyrenaican resistance: a few thousand horsemen who knew the Jebel Akhdar, striking columns and outposts and vanishing, against an army with aircraft, armoured cars and, from 1930, the full apparatus of Graziani and Badoglio. That apparatus was the answer to him. The Italians fenced the Egyptian frontier with three hundred kilometres of wire to cut off his supplies. They drove the population of the Jebel - perhaps a hundred thousand people - into concentration camps on the coast where tens of thousands died, and hanged or shot anyone found helping him. He went on with a few hundred men. On 11 September 1931 he was wounded and taken near Slonta, tried in Benghazi in a hearing that lasted an afternoon, and hanged at the Suluq camp on 16 September before an audience of prisoners. The photograph of him in chains after his capture, an old man looking level at the camera, is the image Libya kept, and Gaddafi wore it on his chest when he met Berlusconi in 2009 to receive Italy's apology. He is on the ten-dinar note. Anthony Quinn played him in 1981 in a film Italy banned for twenty-eight years.
- Lived: 1858 CE – 1931 CE
- Nationality: Libyan
- Roles: resistance_leader, military, teacher
