Atar’s airfield entered military history as a waypoint. During the Second World War the US Army Air Forces’ Air Transport Command used it as a stopover for cargo, transiting aircraft and personnel, English Wikipedia says, on the corridor that ran north from Dakar to Agadir in Morocco. The encyclopedia’s source is the command’s own route map of 1 September 1945; it gives no dates for the first or last American movements, and no figures for the traffic.

In February 1958 the town was again on someone else’s map. Operation Écouvillon, the joint French and Spanish offensive of 10 to 24 February 1958 against the Moroccan Army of Liberation in Spanish Sahara, drew on French forces stationed at Fort-Trinquet, Fort-Gouraud and Port-Étienne, with about 50 French aircraft under French command. The French Minister for Overseas Territories, Gérard Jaquet, visited Atar to discuss the operation and called it a “police operation”, according to Wikipedia. Which French aircraft, if any, operated from Atar’s runway is not stated in the sources checked.

The base’s modern role began with the jihadist threat in the north. On 4 June 2005 militants attacked an army barracks at Lemgheity near the Malian and Algerian borders, and in 2008 much of the remote border region was declared a military zone, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies records. The air force that faced this threat was a transport service with no armed aircraft of its own beyond ageing light types.

In 2011 France supplied four ex-French Air Force EMB 312F Tucanos, overhauled and with two-thirds of their structural life left, together with pilot training. English Wikipedia, citing a Forecast International report of April 2011, says the type is based at Atar and used in attack missions against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and that in March 2012 Mauritanian Tucanos entered Malian airspace to attack AQIM targets. The Africa Center writes that in 2011 Mauritanian aircraft demonstrated the capability to strike suspected AQIM positions in the Wagadou Forest across the border in Mali; it does not say from which airfield they flew.

Embraer delivered the first of the more capable EMB 314 Super Tucanos on 19 October 2012. Where they are based has not been published, and this page does not assume that it is Atar.

For its first decade the air arm was flown by others. Wikipedia says all its personnel in 1960 were French and that Mauritanian pilots began training only in 1970, on six SOCATA Rallyes. Atar is where the service now does that work itself: English Wikipedia says an Air Force School was founded in the town in 2012 to train pilots and crew for the armed forces, and the air force article calls it recently created. Both statements rest on a page of the army’s website, retrieved by Wikipedia editors on 31 July 2014, that is no longer online.

The army’s current site describes what those crews are trained for. In peacetime the air force watches the fisheries and territorial waters, sprays against locusts and birds, sows seed against desertification, evacuates the sick and searches for the lost; in war it is to provide reconnaissance, air support, interception, transport, medical evacuation and airborne operations. The site names no school commander, publishes no intake figures and does not list the training aircraft.

On paper Atar is a civil aerodrome. The AIP published by ASECNA under amendment 01/26, effective 22 January 2026, names the Office National des Aéroports de Mauritanie as operator and gives a reference point on Taxiway C, labelled military, at 231 metres above sea level. Its one runway, 03/21, is 3,000 metres long and 30 metres wide, of bituminous concrete with a PCN of 37. English Wikipedia, drawing on older aeronautical data from 2006, gives the runway as 04/22 and 3,004 metres; this page follows the current AIP and does not try to explain the difference.

The town itself, with 35,170 people at the 2023 census, is better known abroad as a gateway to the old caravan towns of the Adrar and as a stage of the Paris–Dakar Rally. What the airfield holds for the air force — hangars, aircraft numbers, the school’s fleet — is not published, and this page does not guess.