Libya: The Salvador Pass – How a Nameless Desert Gap Became a Battleground for Libya’s Warlords

A failed prisoner exchange in Niger has revealed a complex network of Libyan, Nigerien, Chadian, and Russian interests converging on one of the Sahara’s most established smuggling corridors.

On the maps that colonial cartographers drew of the Sahara, most features carry the names of the people who ‘discovered’ them, or of the places they resembled. The origin of the name given to the gap in the escarpment where Libya, Niger and Algeria meet is murkier: old French military survey maps simply…