Word: morocco
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...recurrent charges of deaths in prison from torture, and crude political assassinations. In Argentina alone, Amnesty International documented the names of 2,500 among an estimated 15,000 political disappearances during a three-year period. Allegations of torture and ill-treatment in prison were reported in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia in the Middle East. The report also mentions the more than 100 executions known to have taken place in Iran, at the command of Ayatullah Khomeini's revolutionary tribunals...
...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...
...This Sahara matter is not just another conflict between the Maghreb countries of Algeria and Morocco," he said. "It is a Kremlin dossier. We are fighting a war that is part of a Russian plot against Europe itself. Let me remind you that the Moslem Conquest moved into Southern Europe using the same routes that the Russians are using now. We [Moroccans] were then, and we are now, the key to the Mediterranean Sea and to Southern Europe...