Word: polisarios
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 guerrillas of the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, who are fighting to turn the desolate, phosphate-rich 103,000-sq.-mi. wedge of territory into an independent "Saharan Arab Democratic Republic...
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...
Like so many African crises before it, the Polisario dispute in the Sahara between Morocco and Algeria has caused the Carter Administration an inordinate amount of worry. As in such similarly intricate problems of the recent past that involved Zaire, Angola and the Ethiopian-Somali fighting in the Horn of Africa, the Administration has been sharply divided over how to protect its improving relations with the Third World while at the same time countering rising Soviet influence...
...present case, the question is in what way the U.S. can best use its influence toward bringing about a cease-fire in the Western Sahara between Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario guerrillas, who want to establish an independent state in the area formerly ruled by Spain. Morocco's King Hassan II is pressing the U.S. to sell him the Bronco planes and Cobra helicopter gunships he feels he needs to continue the fight against the guerrillas. The U.S. State Department opposes the sale and cites a CIA assessment that Morocco cannot win the war against the Polisarios...
...sense, Carter is gambling that Hassan is too beleaguered militarily and politically to resist a settlement of the dispute. Since last summer, the Polisario attacks have grown from small local skirmishes to pitched battles involving thousands of guerrillas. In an attack last month, the Moroccans were forced to abandon a key defense post at Mahbes, about 35 miles inside the Moroccan border. At the same time, Hassan's economy has been hobbled by 25% inflation, skyrocketing fuel bills and bad harvests. He is not particularly popular among his countrymen, but so far they have supported him on at least...