Italian Cyrenaica - Italian Concentration Camps in Cyrenaica

Italian Concentration Camps in Cyrenaica

Fascist Italy maintained several concentration camps in Eastern Libya during the later phase of its occupation of that country. The colonial administration began in 1929, the wholesale deportation of the people of the Jebel Akhdar to deny the rebels the support of the local population. The forced migration of more than 100,000 people ended in concentration camps in Suluq, El Magrun, Abyar and El Agheila where tens of thousands died in squalid conditions.

Estimates of the Libyan people who died in these camps are as high as half of the total detained. The survivors were forced to build in semi-slave conditions the coastal road and new agricultural development projects. The Italian occupation also reduced the number of livestock by killing, confiscation or driving the animals from their pastoral land to inhospitable land near the concentration camps. Number of sheep fell from 810,000 in 1926 to 98,000 in 1933, goats from 70,000 to 25,000 and camels from 75,000 to 2,000.