Word: sahara
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...additional aid, if approved by Congress, would enable the King to buy armaments he needs to pursue a six-year-old desert war that neither the Moroccans nor their enemies appear to be capable of winning. The war, centered in the former Spanish Sahara to the south of Morocco, pits Hassan's armed forces against the guerrillas of the Polisario Front. The rebels, who are supported by Algeria and Libya, hope to create an independent state in the barren, 103,000-sq.-mi. territory...
...Moroccans have claimed the disputed region since precolonial times. In 1975, when Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco lay on his deathbed, Hassan led 300,000 of his unarmed subjects on a March across the border into the Spanish Sahara. The ploy worked. Spain withdrew from the colony immediately, I leaving the northern two-thirds to Morocco and the southern third to Mauritania. Nobody asked the inhabitants, believed to number about 100,000, what they wanted for their country. As it turned out, many of them wanted independence and, toward that end, banded together in a guerrilla fighting force...
...bind: he could not defeat the Polisario, even though he was spending about $ 1 million a day in trying; and he could not withdraw because his countrymen of every political persuasion, whatever they might think of his other policies, were wildly enthusiastic about the war in the Sahara...
...Western Sahara. Following Spain's withdrawal from its former North African colony in 1975, King Hassan II of Morocco dispatched 350,000 of his unarmed subjects into the region to claim it. They were later backed up by Moroccan troops. Opposing the Moroccans is the Algerian-backed Polisario Front, a guerrilla force that claims sovereignty over the area...
...early as the 6th century, in the sub-Sahara, Moorish merchants routinely traded salt ounce for ounce for gold. In Abyssinia, slabs of rock salt, called 'amôlés, became coin of the realm. Each one was about ten inches long and two inches thick. Cakes of salt were also used as money in other areas of central Africa...