Provinces of Libya

After Italy took the area from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, it was administered as a single administrative unit, called Italian North Africa.

[2] The Libyan Sahara Territory was divided into four military districts administered from the desert oases towns of Ghat, Brak, Murzuk and Hun.

The Senussi order Kufra oasis area in the southeastern Libyan Desert was not separately administered by the Italians, but in 1932, they built a fort at the holy place of El Tag above it.

[3] The French and British occupied Libya in 1943 after the Western Desert Campaign victories, when it was again split into three provinces: Tripolitania in the northwest, Cyrenaica in the east and Fezzan-Ghadames in the southwest.

[4] After independence in 1951, the three provinces continued as the subdivision system in the Kingdom of Libya, with boundaries slightly shifting, until 1963.