Egypt–Sudan border

Latitude 22° North

After an Anglo-Egyptian force ended a revolt in Sudan in 1898, Britain and Egypt agreed to run Sudan together, as a condominium. The agreement of 19 January 1899 defined Sudan as “all the territories south of the 22nd parallel of latitude”.^[1]

In 1962 the US Geographer measured the line at 792 miles. It follows the 22nd parallel all the way from the Libya tripoint to the Red Sea, except for 38 miles around Wadi Halfa, and had been defined on paper but never marked on the ground.^[1] Away from the Nile it crosses open desert, sandy in some stretches and rocky in others, with only a few wells.^[1]

“The word ‘Soudan’ in this Agreement means all the territories south of the 22nd parallel of latitude…”^[1]

The Wadi Halfa salient

On 26 March 1899 Egypt gave Sudan a small strip along the Nile north of the parallel, so that the railway south to Khartoum could start on Sudanese soil, at Faras. Ten Egyptian villages ended up inside Sudan.^[1] The salient is a finger of land less than eight miles wide, reaching about 22°12′ North.^[1]

The Nile Waters Agreement of 8 November 1959 covered payment and resettlement if a high dam at Aswan flooded the area.^[1] It did: part of Wadi Halfa went under Lake Nasser, the reservoir behind the Aswan High Dam, and its people were moved to New Halfa near Kassala.^[4]

The 1902 line and Hala’ib

By an order of 25 July 1902 and a decree of 4 November 1902, Egypt’s Minister of the Interior drew a separate administrative boundary in the east, so that nomadic groups and their wells stayed under one government.^[1] It put land north of the parallel by the Red Sea, the Hala’ib Triangle, under Sudan, and a smaller area south of it, Bir Tawil, under Egypt.^[1][2]

On 1 February 1958 Egypt asked Sudan to return all the territory north of the parallel, and offered the land it ran south of it in exchange. Sudan pointed out that two Sudanese elections had already been held there without Egyptian complaint, and the question was not pressed after Egypt and Syria merged later that month.^[1]

The two countries shared uneasy control of Hala’ib for decades. In 1995, after an attempt on President Hosni Mubarak’s life that Egypt partly blamed on Sudan, Egyptian troops took over the triangle, and Sudan has never accepted it.^[3] Because each country claims the line that gives it Hala’ib, neither claims Bir Tawil.^[2]

Crossings

When war broke out in Sudan in April 2023, Egypt became the largest host of those fleeing. By 19 May almost 110,000 Sudanese had entered Egypt, according to its government, through the main crossings at Qustul and Argeen. Most moved on north to Cairo.^[5]