Libya

Libya, officially the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Algeria and Tunisia, the fourth-largest country in Africa at almost 1.8 million square kilometers, with Tripoli, home to over a million of its roughly seven million people, as its capital and largest city. Inhabited by Berbers since the late Bronze Age, the territory saw Phoenician and Greek settlement and Carthaginian, Numidian, Persian, Greek and Roman rule before Arab migration following the seventh century Islamic conquest reshaped its demographics; Ottoman rule from 1551 gave way to Italian occupation after the 1911 Italo-Turkish War, and Libya became an independent kingdom in 1951 after Italian rule ended during the Second World War. A 1969 bloodless coup led by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overthrew King Idris I and created a republic; Gaddafi ruled for 42 years until he was overthrown and killed in the 2011 civil war, part of the wider Arab Spring. Since 2011 Libya has faced ongoing political and humanitarian crisis, splitting by 2014 into rival governments based in Tripoli and Tobruk amid a second civil war and continued factional conflict, with two governments, the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity and the Government of National Stability proclaimed by the House of Representatives in 2022, still functioning simultaneously; Libya is a developing country with the tenth-largest proven oil reserves in the world and a Sunni Muslim, Arab majority population speaking Arabic.