Fezzan-Ghadames (French Administration) country to achieve independence through the United Nations and one of the first former European possessions in Africa to gain independence. Fezzan-Ghadames (French Administration) The Military Territory of Fezzan-Ghadames was a territory in the southern part of the former Italian colony of Libya controlled by the French from 1943 until Libyan independence in 1951. It was part of the Allied administration of Libya. Free French forces from French Chad occupied the area that was the former Italian Southern Military Territory and made several requests to annex administratively their Fezzan to the French colonial Empire. The administrative personnel remained the former
Italian East Africa a threat to Egypt and those in the Italian East Africa a danger to the British and French territories in the Horn of Africa. Italian belligerence also closed the Mediterranean to Allied merchant ships and endangered British supply routes along the coast of East Africa, the Gulf of Aden, Red Sea and the Suez Canal. (The Kingdom of Egypt remained neutral during World War II, but the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 allowed the British to occupy Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.) Egypt, the Suez Canal, French Somaliland and British Somaliland were also vulnerable to invasion, but the "Comando Supremo" (Italian General