Cairo, Kingdom of Egypt

June 1947

—

When Bashir had heard word of the dealings between the British and King Idris of the Senussai, he could scarcely believe it. Believing he was being deceived, Bashir quickly departed Cairo and went to Tripoli to speak to his supporters directly. There was no way that the British Empire, of all places, had just agreed to the first stepping stones of Libyan independence without Bashir needing to do any work. After all, with Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, a modern Libya could be forged and the French could be pressured out of Fezzan in due time. Upon arriving in Tripoli however, Bashir was shocked to see the French tricolor up where the Union Jack had previously flown. Talking to one of his subordinates confirmed his worst fears, Libya was to be divided and split up between French control over the west with a British-backed regime in the east led by King Idris. It was all a sham.

As such, Bashir al-Sadawi quickly mobilized his followers in the Libyan Liberation Committee (LLC) and went after the United National Front, believing them to be the biggest obstacle to the LLC in the French-occupied zone. Supported by foreign backers, the LLC was quickly able to persuade the Tripolitanian branch of the UNF into a united front with both parties merging into the Libyan National Congress on June 15th. The Nationalist Party, another independent group striving a united Libya, joined the LNC a few days later. The main tenets of the LNC’s political platform is the immediate removal of foreign occupiers and a unitary system of government centered on Tripoli. The long-term effects of this alliance have been yet to be discerned but French officials in Tripolitania and Fezzan have already noticed that the local population has grown less cooperative as minor demonstrations occur daily in Tripoli.

A byproduct of the Tripolitanian situation been the splintering of the UNF in Cyrenaica into three different factions. The largest faction still supports King Idris and sees his future rule over Libya as a requirement to not only create a power-base to balance out Tripolitania, but as a way to generate desperately needed foreign investment into the Libyan economy. The second largest group has defected to the newly created LNC and is agitating for King Idris to denounce the French occupation of western Libya and take measures to rid Libya of the foreign imperialists. The third and smallest group, led by former members of the Omar Mukhtar Club, is calling for the immediate independence of Cyrenaica, but instead of unification with Tripolitania and Fezzan, is calling for King Idris to negotiate with King Farouk in order to unify Cyrenaica into the Kingdom of Egypt.