Kufra District
Kufra or Kofra (Arabic: الكفرة Al Kufra), also spelled Cufra, is the largest district of Libya. Its capital is Al Jawf, one of the oases in Kufra basin. There is a very large oil refinery near the capital. In the late 15th century, Leo Africanus reported an oasis in the land of the Berdoa, visited by a caravan coming from Awjila. It is possible that this oasis was identical with either the Al Jawf or the Taiserbo oasis, and on early modern maps, the Al Kufra region was often labelled as Berdoa based on this report.
The name Kufra itself is a derivation from kafir, the Arabic term for non-Muslims. Kufra did not fall under the dominion of either the Arabs or the Ottomans and was colonized by the Arab Bedouin tribe of the Zuwayya only in the mid 19th century, and eventually by the Italians by the 1930s. In 1931, during the campaign of Cyrenaica, General Rodolfo Graziani easily conquered Kufra, considered a strategic region, leading about 3,000 soldiers from infantry and artillery, supported by about twenty bombers.
Kufra
Kufra (/ˈkuːfrə/) is a basin and oasis group in the Kufra District of southeastern Cyrenaica in Libya. At the end of nineteenth century Kufra became the center and holy place of the Senussi order. It also played a minor role in the Western Desert Campaign of World War II.
It is located in a particularly isolated area, not only because it is in the middle of the Sahara Desert but also because it is surrounded on three sides by depressions which make it dominate the passage in east-west land traffic across the desert. For the colonial Italians, it was also important as a station on the north-south air traffic to Italian East Africa. These factors, along with Kufra's dominance of the southeastern Cyrenaica region of Libya, explains the oasis' strategic importance and why it was a point of conflict during World War II.
Etymology
The word Kufra comes from the Arabic word kafir, the Arabic term for non-Muslims (often translated as "infidels", literally "those who conceal [the truth]") with reference to the Toubou people native to the region.
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