Al-Khums or Khoms (Arabic: الخمس) is a city, port and the de jure capital of the Murqub District on the Mediterranean coast of Libya[2] with an estimated population of around 202,000.

This has been tentatively connected to the Semitic root (present in Arabic) LFG, meaning "to build" or "to piece together", presumably in reference to the construction of the city.

[citation needed] Leptis Magna remained as such until the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when the city and the surrounding area were formally incorporated into the empire as part of the province of Africa.

[citation needed] Leptis achieved its greatest prominence beginning in 193 CE, when the ethnically Punic Lucius Septimius Severus became emperor.

The natural harbour had a tendency to silt up, but the Severan changes made this worse, and the eastern wharves are extremely well preserved, since they were scarcely used.

Ammianus Marcellinus recounts that the crisis was worsened by a corrupt Roman governor named Romanus during a major tribal raid who demanded bribes to protect the city.

[citation needed] In 439 CE, Leptis Magna and the rest of the cities of Tripolitania fell under the control of the Vandals when their king, Gaiseric, captured Carthage from the Romans and made it his capital.

Unfortunately for the future of Leptis Magna, Gaiseric ordered the city's walls demolished so as to dissuade its people from rebelling against Vandal rule.

[citation needed] Belisarius recaptured Leptis Magna in the name of Rome ten years later, and in 534 CE, he destroyed the kingdom of the Vandals.

[10] During the decade 565-578 CE Christian missionaries from Leptis Magna even began to move once more among the Amazigh tribes as far south as the Fezzan in the Libyan desert and converted the Garamantes.

During World War II Khums was occupied by the Allies and from 1942 until 1951, when Libya gained independence, Tripolitania and the region of Cyrenaica were administered by the British Military Administration.

Khums remained under control of Gaddafi forces through most of the war until rebels from Misrata entered and captured the city on 23 August before moving on to Tripoli.

[19] In June 2018, the container ship Maersk Alexander rescued 113 refugees in the Mediterranean sea during her voyage en route from al-Khums to Malta.