Word: moroccans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...right, but we are fighting for the West as well," said Moroccan Brigadier Muhamed Abruk, scanning the desert horizon from his headquarters at Laayoun, deep in the western Sahara. "We are the last fort protecting Western interests in this part of the world." For four years, Morocco has been waging a costly campaign to maintain its disputed claims over the former Spanish colony on North Africa's Atlantic coast. King Hassan II, 50, one of the West's most reliable allies in the Arab world, has found himself mired in a no-win war of attrition against leftist...
Committed to defending isolated population centers and their own garrisons, Morocco's 36,000 troops in the Sahara have been increasingly harassed by the hit-and-run attacks of Polisario bands armed with Soviet weapons. Last week the Polisario attacked a Moroccan village with Soviet-made Katyusha rockets, and claimed that it shot down a Moroccan air force Mirage fighter with a SA-7 missile. The Polisario command in Algiers also claimed that its forces had killed 329 Moroccan soldiers in a series of engagements near Laayoun, but Moroccan officials in Rabat flatly denied the claim...
Lately, however, two developments have given Morocco's 120,000-man military forces a new impetus and the Moroccan public a strong boost. One is the Carter Administration's decision to reverse a long-standing U.S. policy by providing Morocco with badly needed arms assistance, notably Bronco planes and helicopter gunships. The other is Rabat's deliberate attempt to modify the army's defensive garrison mentality and try to seize the military initiative with an elite new fighting force. After touring Moroccan positions in the western Sahara for five days, TIME Correspondent David Halevy cabled this...
...Moroccan brigade, moving fast across the southern desert near the Mauritanian border somewhere between Bir Anzaran and El Aargub, was an impressive sight. Armored cars and tanks, halftracks and armored personnel carriers, trucks and Jeep-type vehicles, churned across the sands as far as the eye could see. With light reconnaissance aircraft pointing the way, the battalions roared by in long columns. Supply trucks and gasoline tankers were tucked safely into the middle of the convoy, with a Jeep battalion covering flanks and rear. The cloud of dust raised by the vehicles was almost enough to lay a shadow across...
...brigade is part of the Moroccan army's elite new Saharan task force, commanded by King Hassan's intelligence chief, Brigadier Achmed Dlimi. This "Uhud Force," named after a battle famous in Arab history, has been given the best of Rabat's military machine: escorting helicopter gunships, air cover from U.S.-made F-5s and advanced French Mirages flying out of Saharan air bases at Laayoun and Dakhia. Young Moroccan officers compete for assignment to Dlimi's force, and more than 60% of the soldiers are native Saharans who know the desert terrain as well...