To end the Senussi resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, Italian commanders removed the population that sustained it. Between 1929 and 1931 the semi-nomadic communities of the Jebel Akhdar were driven south to the coastal plain of the Sirtica and held behind wire in about twenty camps, their livestock confiscated or destroyed, while a barbed-wire barrier some 270 kilometres long was built along the Egyptian frontier to cut off supply. Historians estimate that 100,000 to 120,000 people were interned and that 40,000 to 48,000 died of hunger, disease and executions in the camps. Omar al-Mukhtar was captured and hanged before an assembly of internees at Soluch in September 1931, and the campaign was declared over in January 1932. The camps were dissolved in 1934, and survivors returned to a devastated region. Libyan and Italian scholars, notably Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, characterise the episode as genocide; the Italian state has not accepted that characterisation, though the treaty of friendship signed at Benghazi in 2008 included an Italian expression of regret for the colonial period and a substantial compensation package.
Italian forces under Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani cleared the population of the Jebel Akhdar and interned them in camps on the Sirtica coast
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, working from Italian administrative figures, put Cyrenaica's population at about 225,000 before the campaign, most of it the semi-nomadic Bedouin of the Jebel Akhdar. Italian forces deported roughly 100,000-110,000 of them to camps on the Sirtica coast between 1929 and 1934; Italian and Libyan estimates of deaths in the camps and the clearances range from about 40,000 to 70,000, and Cyrenaica's livestock herds, the population's livelihood, were reduced by well over half.
The range of 40,000 to 48,000 deaths among internees, from starvation, disease, exposure and execution, is the figure given in the scholarly literature summarised in the International Review of Social History. Italian colonial records did not systematically register deaths in the camps, so the figures derive from population comparisons before and after the clearance as well as from camp reports.
The forced removal of the Jebel population, the confiscation and slaughter of herds, the conditions in the Sirtica camps and the public execution of captured resistance leaders are documented in Italian colonial military records and the historical literature reviewed in the International Review of Social History.
Libya