These factors, along with Kufra's dominance of the southeastern Cyrenaica region of Libya, highlight the strategic importance of the oasis and why it was a point of conflict during World War II.

Al Idrisi writes that the place was once flourishing and peopled, but was by that point in ruin, its wells dry, its herds returned to the wild.

[12] 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.

The Frankfurter Zeitung reporter and author Muhammad Asad interviewed a man from Kufra after its seizure by the Italians in his book The Road to Mecca.

The Italians (and their Eritrean auxiliaries) then raped the women, tore up a Koran and cast it on the ground, cut down the palm trees, burnt Sayyid Ahmad's library, and took some of the elders and scholars and hurled them to their death from airplanes.

[citation needed] In the following years the Italians built an airfield (now Kufra Airport) in Buma oasis and a fort in El Tag, which dominated the area.

Kufra, due to its key role for the Italian Royal Army, soon became a target for the Allies, with Free France and British desert troops beginning a long battle for its conquest.

On 31 January 1941 Pat Clayton, an explorer recruited by British Intelligence, was captured by the Italian Auto-Saharan Company near Jebel Sherif, when leading "T" Patrol in reconnaissance of the planned attack on Kufra.

In May 1942 it was a location of the Tragedy at Kufra, where three South African Air Force Bristol Blenheim aircraft became lost and after landing safely the crews subsequently died due to lack of water.

After the Axis were expelled from North Africa, and when after the war it became part of independent Libya, the Buma airfield at Kufra was used little and fell into disrepair.

[16] In February 2012, fighting between the Tobu and Zuwayya tribes killed over a hundred people and the town became a focal point for mass human rights violations of refugees and migrants.

It is a little village of transit along the traditional route between Khartoum and the coastal Libyan towns, which has lately turned to be a spot gathering Libyan-Sudanese criminal organizations involved in the illegal transport of immigrants, police officers controlling the boundaries and the need of people working in local productive activities.

Such organizations promote the "journey of hope", with a flexible handling of the Migrants' African routes according to the restriction policies adopted by the various governments.

The minds of the criminal organizations act accordingly to what happens in each country: if Morocco stresses its restrain policies, the routes move towards the Canary Islands, if the controls in Libya increase, the streams are diverted towards Malta.

Once the migrants arrive, or are brought back, in Kufra, the only way to escape this situation is to pay people traders, which are often colluded with the police officers.

Hence the occurrence of continuous exploitation, enlistment in the work and prostitution black market, painful waiting for a money order urged by relatives and friends through mobile phone communications, which are allowed only for this aim.

There were also some baguettes, but you needed money to get them... (an ex-colonel of the Eritrean army, political refugee in Italy)When I saw Kufra I wanted to hitch up.

(Yakob, another boy from Eritrea)At the beginning of the 1970s, Libya launched a great cultivation project in Kufra aimed at developing agriculture in the desert.

[21] The Libyan government also has a project called the Great Manmade River to pump and transport these groundwater reserves to the coast to support Libya's growing population and industrial development.