An Italian concentration camp in the Cyrenaican desert, and the centre of gravity of Ali Ahmida's research (EP 116).
Al-Agila (العقيلة) was one of more than a dozen concentration camps built by the Italian colonial administration in 1929 in eastern Libya to break the Cyrenaican resistance led by Omar Al-Mukhtar. The civilian populations of the Jebel Akhdar — entire tribes, with their livestock, water systems, and oral archives — were forcibly displaced into the desert plain.
The camps were not internment centres in the standard meaning. They were calibrated for slow killing. Food rations were below subsistence. Water was rationed below the climate's requirements. Exposure was deliberate. Public hangings were used as deterrent. The forced marches that fed the camps killed thousands before the camp gates were reached.
Ahmida's research, cross-referenced across oral poetry, the partial Italian colonial archive, and the small body of Libyan testimony that had reached print before his work, places the death toll at approximately 60,000 against a Cyrenaican population of roughly 225,000. In proportional terms — somewhere near 25 per cent of the regional population — it sits among the most extreme demographic events of the colonial twentieth century.
For most of the century that followed, the camp system was absent from European and global historiography. The Italian state did not undergo a post-war denazification. The colonial archives were not opened and litigated in the way the Nazi archives were. The survivors were Bedouin, illiterate by Western criteria, and their testimony lived inside oral poetry rather than written record. The combination produced an erasure that lasted decades.
Ahmida's Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, 2021) is the first English-language scholarly book to document the system as genocide. The recovery rested on more than ten years of summer fieldwork in eastern and southern Libya, in which he treated Libyan oral poetry as a primary historical source. The poetry, sustained across the generations, had carried the names, the dates, and the camp routines the colonial archive had recorded in sanitised administrative language.
Al-Agila is the working name, in Ahmida's lectures, for the architecture itself — the Italian-Libyan model that, as documentary evidence now shows, Nazi planners studied when designing their own camp system in the 1930s. The flow of administrative knowledge ran from Rome to Berlin, not the other way around.
See: Ali Ahmida, The Nazis Studied Libya, Italian Colonial Genocide