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Pro-Polisario activists in Spain have been urging the Spanish government to reverse his decision to endorse the Autonomy Plan as a serious and credible solution to end the Sahara dispute.Rabat - Spanish security services expelled on Wednesday a man from a Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) event after he displayed the separatist flag of the Algerian-backed and self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The event, which took place in Burgos, a city in Castile-Leon, was part of the Spanish ruling party’s pre-campaign meetings ahead of local and regional elections that are set to take place in Spain next month. During...

President Biden travels to Israel and Saudi Arabia next week — his first trip to the Middle East since entering the White House. And while the president has been eager to criticize a range of his predecessor's policies, he is fully embracing one key pillar of Donald Trump's Middle East policy — the Abraham Accords. Those deals were brokered by the Trump White House in 2020 to normalize relations between Israel and a number of Arab countries, including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco. It was a huge rupture from recent history in which Arab nations had made it...

Arab World Shocked by Israel-Morocco Defense Pact - EDY Cohen Dr. Edy Cohen 02:00 8 hours ago “This is beyond normalization! Even Egypt didn’t go this far at Camp David!!” Defense Minister Benny Gantz recently returned from Morocco where he met with his counterparts and signed an agreement for strengthening security ties between Israel and the North African country. The agreement allows Morocco to purchase Israeli air defense systems, military drones and other hi-tech equipment. Morocco also purchased machine guns, reconnaissance vehicles and observation systems from Israel. The backdrop to these purchases is the increasing tension between Algeria and Morocco...

I cannot help but think these Irish do-gooders are taking us straight back to the racist laws of the 1930s in Germany. Kauft nicht bei Juden! (Don’t buy Jewish!) The bill now making its way through the Irish parliament that aims to criminalize the trading of goods from Israeli settlements could not be more scandalous! As a native German and citizen of the European Union, I find this proposed law totally misguided, extremely unfair, wholly counterproductive to peace, and – most of all – morally outrageous. On its face, the bill would impose a fine of up to €250,000 or...

Hillary Clinton did two huge favors for Morocco during her tenure as secretary of state while the Clinton Foundation accepted up to $28 million in donations from the country’s ruler, King Mohammed VI, according to new information obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group. Clinton and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lisa Jackson tried to shut down the Florida-based Mosaic Company in 2011, operator of America’s largest phosphate mining facility. Jackson’s close ties and loyalty to the Clintons were revealed when she joined the Clinton Foundation’s board of directors in 2013, just months after she left the EPA....

Prehistoric Desert Town Found in Western Sahara Thu Aug 19, 2004 01:52 PM ET RABAT (Reuters) - The remains of a prehistoric town believed to date back 15,000 years and belong to an ancient Berber civilization have been discovered in Western Sahara, Moroccan state media said on Thursday. A team of Moroccan scientists stumbled across the sand-covered ruins of the town Arghilas deep in the desert of the Morocco-administered territory. The remains of a place of worship, houses and a necropolis, as well as columns and rock engravings depicting animals, were found at the site near the town of Aousserd...

It feels strange visiting a country like Morocco and listening to people extol the virtues of a political system my country waged a revolution against. Morocco has a king, and he’s a real one too, not some kind of a figurehead. But I went there, I listened, and after almost ten years of visiting Middle Eastern countries wracked by tyranny, terrorism, botched revolutions, and wars, I was perhaps a bit more willing to hear what they had to say than I might have been a decade ago. A monarchy is a tough sell for Americans. The founders of our country...

Last Updated: Fri Oct 05, 2012 07:26 am (KSA) 04:26 am (GMT) Film ‘Stolen’ exposes modern-day slavery in Polisario camps Friday, 05 October 2012 The film, Stolen, the story of a Sahrawi girl called Fatim Sellami, herself a slave, who was reunited with her mother after 35 years of separation with the help of the United Nations. (Image grab from film Stolen By KHADIJA FATHI AGADIR / MOROCCO A controversial documentary film that exposes slavery in the Western Sahara camps controlled by the Polisario front has been screened in Morocco’s coastal resort city of Agadir. The film, directed by Violeta...

Bamako will "no longer accept the violation of its territorial integrity by the Polisario Front", a Malian Minister said on condition of anonymity. Our country is not the Wild West where they can come to kill, and kidnap people and we have already made it clear. Next time, we will take up our responsibilities," the Minister said. For him, the "reasons for this intrusion do not hold water. The person who was killed and those who were taken hostage have nothing to do with the kidnappers of European hostages taken in Tindouf", West of Algeria. Armed men from the Polisario...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Three European aid workers continue to be held by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) after being kidnapped from refugee camps controlled by the Polisario Front near Tindouf, Algeria last week. According to reports, Polisario members in the camps helped the kidnappers by supplying weapons and directions to the victims' location. The two Spanish and one Italian hostages are being held at an undisclosed location. They remain alive, though no demands or conditions for their release have been made, despite considerable efforts by the international community. Agence France Press (AFP) reports that "less than...

Algeria has awarded four German companies the largest contract ($10 billion) for arms and military equipment ever signed by Algeria with a Western country. Algeria has been buying armaments and military equipment almost exclusively from Russia or former Soviet bloc countries. Authorities in Algeria are willing to pay up to get either a recognition or a simple statement of support for their Western Sahara Separatist group, Polisario. During a visit to Berlin last December, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has managed to convince German Chancellor Angela Merkel to make a small gesture to the Polisario, when she said, in a joint...

A mainly desert territory in north-west Africa, Western Sahara is the subject of a decades-long dispute between Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front. The territory is phosphate-rich and believed to have offshore oil deposits. Most of it has been under Moroccan control since 1976. Western Sahara fell under Spanish rule in 1884, becoming a Spanish province in 1934. Nationalism emerged in the 1960s, as nomadic Saharans, or Saharawis, settled in the region. Polisario was set up on 10 May 1973 and established itself as the sole representative of the Saharan people. Some 100,000 refugees still live in Polisario's camps in...

In an excellent documentary called Stolen, which sets out to document a family reunion in the sole region in Africa where Spanish is spoken, filmmakers Ayala and Fallshaw uncover a bigger story than they had originally planned. What they find is a pocket of slavery still practiced in Western Sahara, Morocco, Mauritania, and elsewhere in Arab-African societies. The initial impetus for the film is the re-union of a generational family under UN auspices, a service the UN provides if the correct paperwork is filled out; family members long separated are brought together for a joyous 5-day reunion. What the documentarians...

MAURITANIAN PASSENGER PLANE HIJACKED TO WESTERN SAHARA - MAURITANIAN POLICE

STUTTGART, Germany — The American campaign against terrorism is opening a new front in a region that military officials fear could become the next base for Al Qaeda — the largely ungoverned swath of territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Western Sahara's Atlantic coast. Generals here at the United States European Command, which oversees the area, say the vast, arid region is a new Afghanistan, with well-financed bands of Islamic militants recruiting, training and arming themselves. Terrorist attacks like the one on March 11 in Madrid that killed 191 people seem to have a North African link,...

ONE of Africa’s longest-running conflicts is set to explode into renewed warfare with a United Nations’ brokered ceasefire on the brink of collapse. Fighting between Morocco and independence fighters in Western Sahara ended in 1991 after 16 years of a bitter war, but both sides have retained a massive military presence dug into the desert. The rebels, known as the Polisario Front, still have some of the world’s longest-held prisoners of war, some of whom have been incarcerated for nearly a quarter of a century. The UN had hoped to hold a referendum on independence for Western Sahara, but Morocco,...