Libya

Three provinces that were never one country until Italy made them one, and have been coming apart again since 2011. Tripolitania faces the Mediterranean and Tunisia, Cyrenaica looks east to Egypt, and the Fezzan is Saharan and looks south - Greek, Roman, Arab and Ottoman rulers all treated them as distinct. Italy invaded in 1911 and spent twenty years subduing the interior, with Omar Mukhtar's resistance in Cyrenaica ending in his hanging in 1931 after a campaign of concentration camps in which a large fraction of the population died. Britain and France held the territory after 1943, and the United Nations created a federal kingdom under the Senussi leader Idris in 1951, the first state made independent by UN resolution. Oil found in 1959 transformed it. Muammar Gaddafi's coup in 1969 began forty-two years of rule through a system he called neither capitalist nor communist, with no formal head of state, funding movements abroad and eventually two decades of sanctions. His overthrow and killing in 2011 after a NATO-backed uprising left rival governments in Tripoli and the east. Leptis Magna is among the best preserved Roman cities anywhere. The Great Man-Made River pumps fossil groundwater to the coast. Tripoli is the capital and Benghazi the eastern centre. The country is the fourth largest in Africa and about ninety per cent desert. It holds the largest proven oil reserves on the continent. Five of its sites are World Heritage listed. The record for the hottest temperature ever measured was long attributed to Al Aziziyah before being withdrawn.

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