The Battle for the Last Unclaimed Land on Earth
Bir Tawil belongs to no country; or rather, it belongs to two and neither of them wants it. It is the last unclaimed, habitable land on earth.
Wedged in at the border of Egypt and Sudan, a unique geopolitical oddity is carved out of the sand. A diplomatic void without parallel, it has captured the imagination of thrill-seekers, filmmakers and wannabe statesmen alike.
The region – a triangle of rough terrain not too much larger than Greater London – experiences temperatures topping 45 degrees celsius nine months of the year. It has no permanent population, only the entrepreneurial mining folk that periodically migrate north from Sudan to scour the earth for gold, before taking their finds down to sell in the capital Khartoum.
The Red Sea lies 300 miles to the east, while the Nile, the main artery in this part of North Africa, is not much nearer. The border along which Bir Tawil sits is a knife-edge. Egypt and Sudan have not always been the cosiest friends. Cairo accused the government in Khartoum of complicity in a 1995 plot to assassinate Egypt’s president, a flavour of how dramatically temperatures can flare here. Local diplomacy, with almost a dozen states fighting over access to the Nile’s water, is high-stakes and rarely straightforward. What would ever attract outsiders to come here?
