Jufra District
Oasis cluster at Libya's geographic center hosting a strategic air base—now the ceasefire line between rival governments, gateway to nothing but desert depth.
Jufra exists because oases need administrative centers. Roughly halfway between Tripoli and Sabha, this cluster of palm-fringed settlements—Hun, Waddan, Sokna—has served as the northern gateway to the Fezzan since antiquity. Control the oases; control the passage between coast and interior.
The Romans built a frontier fort at Ghirza, 200 kilometers north, but the oases themselves marked where Mediterranean influence yielded to Saharan. Caravan routes passed through, never lingered. Italian colonizers established airfields here in the 1930s—strategic position for controlling Libya's center, remote enough that resistance movements could organize without surveillance.
Gaddafi understood Jufra's military geography. The district hosts al-Jufra Air Base, one of Libya's largest military installations, from which the regime projected power across the country's ungovernable south. After 2011, control of this base became a prize. Haftar's forces seized it in 2017; Turkish-backed Tripoli forces threatened it in 2020 before the ceasefire froze positions.
Today, Jufra marks Libya's internal ceasefire line. Eastern and western forces face each other across territory that neither can hold without overstretching supply lines. The oases themselves—population roughly 50,000—continue their ancient function: date palms, groundwater, a stopping point in the desert's expanse.
By 2026, whoever controls Jufra controls Libya's center of gravity. The air base offers power projection across the country; the oases offer nothing but strategic depth. Jufra has always been a waystation, not a destination—and Libya's partition may calcify it as permanent frontier.