The Last War: The Sahara Combat Zone

The Last War brought almost the entire world into battle. As the conflict spread from Europe, North Africa became a primary battleground. Her deserts and jungles became contaminated battlefields, her people overrun, her nations broken. What little survived was chaos and a handful of states clustered along the Gold and Indian coasts. By 2086, the rest was only the "Sahara Combat Zone," stretching between Mauritania and the Red Sea, and far south into the Kalahari itself.

Refugees choked the surviving states, overburdening their already collapsing economies. Each tribe or country preyed upon its neighbors, while within individual borders civil unrest seethed. Like jackals, all the African nations watched the battling empires. Every scrap left on the desert battlefields was in turn fought over, the scavenged hardware being the best equipment the African military forces could ever hope to aquire. And sometimes those forces looked for live prey – straggling units, a bit too far from their own support, were fair game to all sides in Africa.

Stubborn and tenacious, the Republic of South Africa was one of the few nations to survive the Last War. With both natural resources and industry, its own internal struggles settled decades before, South Africa remained neutral. Trading resources for technology, dealing with all countries, and maintaining a strong army, it outlasted all the other empires which fell around it.