Nofaliya or Nawfaliya ( ar, النوفلية ''Nawfalīyah'') is a town in the desert in the Sirte District of

Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Suda ...

. It is west of Libya's major oil ports. It is located in the former Bin Jawad District, around 20 km west of Bin Jawad and 15 km south east of ‘Uwayja.

History

During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

Nofaliya was the site of a brief skirmish in late 1942 when some of

Erwin Rommel Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel () (15 November 1891 – 14 October 1944) was a German field marshal during World War II. Popularly known as the Desert Fox (, ), he served in the ''Wehrmacht'' (armed forces) of Nazi Germany, as well as servi ...

's retreating forces ran out of fuel., reprinted in 2005 by Kessinger Publishing, At the time it was home to a small fort with a few Italian buildings in addition to a mosque, some shops and a school. During the

Second Libyan Civil War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Second Libyan Civil War , partof = the Arab Winter, Libyan Crisis, Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict, War on terror, and Qatar–Saudi Arabia diplomatic conflict , image ...

, Nofaliya was fought over by the

New General National Congress The General National Congress or General National Council (GNC; ar, المؤتمر الوطني العام, Berber: Agraw Amuran Amatay) was the legislative authority of Libya for two years following the end of the First Libyan Civil War. It ...

forces (NGNC), the

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant An Islamic state is a state that has a form of government based on Islamic law (sharia). As a term, it has been used to describe various historical polities and theories of governance in the Islamic world. As a translation of the Arabic ter ...

(ISIL); the

Libyan National Army The Libyan National Army (LNA; ar, الجيش الوطني الليبي, ''al-jaysh al-waṭaniyy al-Lībii'') is a component of Libya's military forces which were nominally a unified national force under the command of Field Marshal Khalifa H ...

(LNA) and various militias. In February 2015, the town was taken over by the ISIL. A convoy of forty heavily armed vehicles arrived from Sirte and ordered Nofaliya's residents to "repent" and pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The fighters appointed Ali Al-Qarqaa as "emir" of the town. Nofaliya was briefly retaken by

forces on 19 March 2015, but they withdrew the next day. The LNA took the town, but ISIL regained the town from the LNA the following week. It was not until the Bunyan Marsous offensive in Spring of 2016 that pro-government forces retook the city on 31 May 2016. However, in December 2016 militia forces, believed to be units of the Benghazi Defence Brigades, attempted to take over Nofaliya, driving off the NGNC forces, but were in turn driven out the same day by the

(LNA).

References

Populated places in Sirte District Tripolitania {{Libya-geo-stub