Italy in Libya: Colonial Massacre and the Hanging of Umar al-Mukhtar

The Invasion

Italy invaded Libya in 1911, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman forces withdrew, but the Libyan population (led by the Sanussi Islamic order) continued to resist for over two decades.

The Italian military response escalated progressively: aerial bombardment (the first use of military aircraft in history was against Libyan civilians), the use of poison gas, and the internment of the entire population of Cyrenaica in concentration camps.

The Concentration Camps

Between 1929 and 1933, the Italian military forcibly relocated the population of Cyrenaica (approximately 100,000 people) into concentration camps along the coast. An estimated 50,000 to 70,000 died in the camps from disease, starvation, and abuse, roughly half the interned population.

The camps were established specifically to cut the resistance fighters off from the civilian population that supported them. The strategy was effective, and genocidal in its consequences.

Umar al-Mukhtar

Omar Mukhtar was a Sanussi scholar and Islamic teacher who became the leader of the Libyan resistance. He conducted a guerrilla campaign against Italian forces for twenty years, operating from the Jebel Akhdar mountains with a fraction of the resources available to his opponents.

He was captured in September 1931 at the age of approximately 73. He was tried by an Italian military tribunal, convicted of rebellion, and publicly hanged on September 16, 1931, before an assembled crowd of Libyan prisoners brought specifically to witness the execution.

His reported words before execution: "We will not surrender. We will either win or we will die."

He is remembered across the Muslim world as one of the great figures of Islamic resistance to colonialism. His image appeared on Libyan currency. He is the subject of the 1981 film Lion of the Desert.

Italy did not formally acknowledge its colonial crimes in Libya until 2008, when Silvio Berlusconi signed a friendship treaty with Muammar Gaddafi that included an apology and $5 billion in reparations, the first formal colonial apology and reparation in history. No criminal accountability followed.