Morocco Fights a Desert War

Hassan brandishes an elite new force in the Sahara

"It is our war all 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 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.

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 report:

The 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 the burning noonday sun.

The 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 as the Polisarios.

Rabat obviously hopes that the Uhud Force may eventually turn the balance of the war by cutting off the guerrillas' movements to and from the main Polisario base at Tindouf in Algeria. Moroccan officers point to two recent pitched battles as evidence that the new task force may already be making a difference in the war.

In the first battle, at Smara on Oct. 6, three waves of Polisarios nearly overran the large Moroccan garrison, killing one local commander and 120 of his men; the intervention of a squadron of Moroccan Mirage jets, used for the first time in the war, drove off the attackers. In the second battle, at the phosphate-mining station of Bu Craa one month later, a 600-man Polisario force attempted a similar frontal attack; this time two battalions of Dlimi's mobile forces, which had rushed to Bu Craa's defense, counterattacked, killing some 130 guerrillas and capturing twelve of their vehicles. "The Polisarios exhausted themselves in the October attack on Smara--the biggest ever carried out in the Sahara since World War II," said Brigadier Abruk. "They also failed in their Bu Craa attack because we were beginning our own offensive."

These military initiatives, and the political boost provided by the U.S. decision to help Morocco with arms, have given observers increased confidence in King Hassan's staying power. Western capitals have long feared that the monarch, who has survived two coup attempts, might go the way of the Shah of Iran. Last summer a Central Intelligence Agency report predicted that the King could possibly lose his throne within a year, largely because of economic problems engendered by the cost of the war (estimated to be as high as $1.5 million a day).

"Those root problems are still there," a U.S. diplomat observed last week. "But the regime looks in better shape than it did some months ago."

In an interview with Correspondent Halevy in Rabat last week, King Hassan manifested considerable confidence of his own. The King said that the new Moroccan offensive in the Sahara is only the beginning of an aggressive new strategy. But he carefully drew the line against any possible hot pursuit into Algeria.

"The Polisario are escaping from the battle," he said. "In spite of that, we shall not penetrate Algeria's territory to chase them. There will be no need of that. We are now in the process of establishing another task force like the Uhud. Soon we will have a third Saharan task force in operation. With those three task forces, skillfully using tanks and helicopters, we shall gain control over the Sahara."

The King angrily charged that Algeria was not the only power behind the Polisario. He accused Libya of providing the guerrillas with Soviet arms. He claimed that Cuba's African expeditionary force was training the guerrillas and directing their attacks. And he fumed that the Soviet Union was behind it all, as part of an elaborate plan to gain control of the Mediterranean as well as North Africa.

"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."

He went on: "The Russian tactics in Africa are like the tactics of a parrot climbing a tree. First came Angola, then Congo Brazzaville, then Ethiopia, and afterward the Sahara. Step by step. If they get the Sahara, the Russians will have a window on the Atlantic, as they have always wanted, and the key to the Mediterranean. The American Sixth Fleet will have to sail back home and leave these seas to the Russian fleets."

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