Word: sidi
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...market day, and the streets of Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef, a Tunisian village only 700 yards from the Algerian border, were thronged. Shortly before noon, a flight of 25 French military aircraft-mostly U.S.-made fighters and light bombers-swept over the border. In precise military formation, they bombed the town, strafed the streets with machine-gun fire. When the planes turned back to their Algerian bases an hour later, the scabrous little village was a shambles. Nearly 80 dead and 79 wounded were recovered from the rubble. A school was bombed out and 34 children buried in the ruins...
Confined to Barracks. The bombing of Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef seemed this week to have shattered Bourguiba's last hope of friendship with France. Within hours, he had recalled his ambassador from Paris, ordered the French to evacuate the Bizerte naval base, directed that the 18,000 French troops still garrisoned in Tunisia be confined to their barracks, and requested their removal from the country as soon as possible. Said Bourguiba grimly: "We are not at war with France, but we can consider that today's aggression marks the opening of hostilities...
...months of fighting, irregulars of the Moroccan Liberation Army, under the leadership of a squat ex-Marrakech street vendor named Ben Hamou, have driven the Spanish out of most of their Atlantic Coast enclave of Ifni. Ifni is not much but rocky rubble and scrub, but its single city, Sidi Ifni (pop. 10,000), has been used by the Spanish as the seat of the governor of all its desert provinces-Ifni, Rio de Oro, Spanish Sahara, as well as the part of southern Morocco that they have continued to rule on the ground that King Mohammed's government...
...that the Spanish garrison at Ifni had taken a beating. The first official casualty list enumerated 62 dead, more than 100 wounded. The government admitted that the Spanish defenders had abandoned the frontier outposts to the invading Moroccan irregulars, and had drawn back to regroup around the town of Sidi Ifni itself. Farther south in the Spanish Sahara, the Moroccan Liberation Army announced an offensive on Al Auin, declared that five desert outposts had been "liberated," with Spanish losses of 120 dead...
...week's end the fighting between Moroccan nationalists and Spanish colonial forces had spread south to the Spanish Sahara. Moroccan newspapers reported nationalist attacks on a village at the mouth of the Saguia el Hamra (Red River) and Spanish bombing raids on the inland villages of Smara and Sidi Ahmed el Aroussi; more than 200 Moroccans were reported killed...