During the colonial Italian Libya period, the Italians built a World War I–style fort in El Tag in the mid-1930s. Although some guns were stationed at the fort, its battlements were out of date and of little use in the mobile warfare tactics of World War II. The fort, airfield, and town of Kufra were taken by Free French forces and the British-New Zealand Long Range Desert Group in the 1941 Capture of Kufra, in the Allies World War II Western Desert Campaign.