Libya

Capital: Tripoli Population: 5,670,688 Official Languages: Arabic Time Zone: +1 Summer +2 Dialing Code: +218

Government: Provisional parliamentary republic Area: 1,759,541 km2 largest city: Tripoli Currency : Dinar (LYD) ISO 3166 code: /

Basic Info

Libya, officially the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west. With an area of almost 1.8 million square kilometres (700,000 sq mi), Libya is the 17th largest country in the world.

Geography

Libya extends over 1,759,540 square kilometres (679,362 sq mi), making it the 17th largest nation in the world by size. Libya is somewhat smaller than Indonesia in land area, and roughly the size of the US state of Alaska. It is bound to the north by the Mediterranean Sea, the west by Tunisia and Algeria, the southwest by Niger, the south by Chad and Sudan and to the east by Egypt. Libya lies between latitudes 19° and 34°N, and longitudes 9° and 26°E.

Climate

Within Libya as many as five different climatic zones have been recognized, but the dominant climatic influences are Mediterranean and Saharan. In most of the coastal lowland, the climate is Mediterranean, with warm summers and mild winters. Rainfall is scanty. The weather is cooler in the highlands, and frosts occur at maximum elevations. In the desert interior the climate has very hot summers and extreme diurnal temperature ranges. The highest official temperature ever recorded was on 13 September 1922 at 'Aziziya, Libya, but that reading is queried.

Religion

By far the predominant religion in Libya is islam with 97% of the population associating with the faith. The vast majority of Libyan muslims adhere to Sunni islam, which provides both a spiritual guide for individuals and a keystone for government policy, but a minority (between 5 and 10%) adhere to Ibadism (a branch of Kharijism), above all in the Jebel Nafusa and the town of Zuwara, west of Tripoli. A Libyan form of Sufism is also common in parts of the country

Administrative divisions

Historically the area of Libya was considered three provinces (or states), Tripolitania in the northwest, Barka (Cyrenaica) in the east, and Fezzan in the southwest. It was the conquest by Italy in the Italo-Turkish War that united them in a single political unit.

Since 2007, Libya has been divided into 22 districts (baladiyat):

1 Nuqat al Khams 2 Zawiya 3 Jafara 4 Tripoli 5 Murqub 6 Misrata 7 Sirte 8 Benghazi 9 Marj 10 Jabal al Akhdar 11 Derna

See Other Map

12 Butnan 13 Nalut 14 Jabal al Gharbi 15 Wadi al Shatii 16 Jufra 17 Al Wahat 18 Ghat 19 Wadi al Hayaa 20 Sabha 21 Murzuq 22 Kufra

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