Kiffa

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Kiffa is a large town in the far south of Mauritania, and the name of an administrative area within the local Assaba Region. Kiffa is located at 16.63°N 11.4°WCoordinates: 16.63°N 11.4°W, some 600 kilometres (370 mi) from the coast and at the western end of the Aoukar sand sea of southern Mauritania. Kiffa was allowed to grow haphazardly and to sprawl during the later 20th century, and it has continued to do so. Near Kiffa is Kiffa Airport which has a tarmac runway of over 1,600 yards in length. But all practical travel to other parts of Mauritania is undertaken by taxi cars and trucks.
About two thirds of the population are settled Berber pastoralists, who as late as the 1950s operated as sheep, goat and camel herding nomads. Political and social life is largely dictated by hereditary family allegiances, now expressed amid a complex wider tangle of religious, regionalist and nationalist affiliations.