On the night of October 28-29, 2023, 23-year-old Hamza Jeafri received a phone call and went to the rooftop of his aunt’s house in Smara to take it. A resident of France, he was in Morocco on vacation, taking the opportunity to visit the woman he called his second mother, who had long lived in the spiritual capital of Western Sahara. At that moment, Hamza had no idea he was living the last moments of his life. While still on the call, a projectile killed him.
“This young man had come to see his aunt to ask for his cousin’s hand in marriage, but those who committed these vile and cowardly explosions decided otherwise,” Morocco’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Omar Hilale lamented. He confirmed that in addition to Hamza’s death, projectiles injured three people in Smara at the same time, two of them seriously. Although he refrained from explicitly naming those responsible for the terrorist attacks, he implied that “the body of evidence” pointed to the Polisario Front.
Created in March 1973 in Mauritania and promoted by Eastern Bloc lobbying, the UN General Assembly subsequently designated this separatist movement to be the “representative of the Sahrawi people.” For nearly 50 years, the Polisario has waged a proxy war on behalf of Algeria to secure the independence of Western Sahara. The Polisario did not even wait for the organization of a referendum on self-determination—which the UN Security Council advocated as the solution to the conflict until June 2001. On the very day Spain transferred sovereignty over the territory to Morocco and Mauritania in February 1976, the Polisario proclaimed a so-called “Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic” (SADR), which at one point 84 countries recognized. Today, only staunchly anti-Western regimes like Algeria, South Africa and its various southern African satellites, and Cold War communist remnants like Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam recognize it as such.
From the moment of its March 1956 independence, Morocco aligned with the free world. In the early years of the armed conflict with the Polisario, Morocco received support from France, and later from the United States, except during a brief interlude when the Carter administration suspended arms deliveries.
After years of struggle, Morocco gained the upper hand, especially after its August 1987 completion of a defensive wall inspired by the Bar-Lev Line Israel built in the Sinai after the 1967 Six-Day War. This forced the Polisario to accept a ceasefire agreement with Morocco, which came into effect in September 1991.
Twenty-nine years later, after several failed United Nations peace plans—including two proposed in the early 2000s by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker—and with growing international support for Morocco’s 2007 autonomy initiative, the Polisario broke the ceasefire, and launched a new phase in the Western Sahara war. It had prepared for some time. In July 2014, while receiving an Egyptian press delegation, for example, Polisario Secretary-General Mohamed Abdelaziz began threatening to resume “armed struggle.” In November 2014, his militias conducted exercises involving ten infantry units, three BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle units, and two units equipped with Katyusha rocket launchers.
The group’s justification to formally resume warfare was a Moroccan military intervention in the buffer zone near Guerguerat, a village along the Moroccan-Mauritanian border, to remove Polisario militias that had regularly blocked the movement of goods and people since August 2016. So serious was this obstruction that the UN Security Council was prepared to condemn the Polisario in April 2017, but only dropped the move after the Polisario saw the writing on the wall and withdrew.
By targeting civilians... the Polisario can no longer claim to be waging a national liberation war. Instead, it is part of a broader Iranian proxy strategy to target U.S. allies.
What was unknown at the time, and only recently discovered, is that the Polisario had already gained combat experience in Syria. Leaked documents from the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate following the fall of the Assad regime show the Polisario, alongside Algeria, signed an agreement with Damascus in January 2012 under which they deployed 120 fighters in Syria. Later reports, including a Washington Post article on April 12, 2025, citing a regional official and a European source, suggest that hundreds of Polisario members are imprisoned in Syria following their arrests by the new ruling authorities.
Syrian intelligence also indicates that the Polisario began forging close ties with Hezbollah. As early as December 2011, Polisario leaders reportedly traveled to Lebanon to coordinate with Hezbollah leaders on “training, preparation, and participation in special operations against terrorism [sic] on Syrian soil.”
The Hezbollah-Polisario partnership extended beyond Syria to the Western Sahara. In November 2016, Moroccan security services grew discovered a “Support Committee for the Sahrawi People” in Beirut, apparently established with Hezbollah’s involvement. Rabat reacted cautiously as they had only re-established diplomatic relations with Iran just a year earlier.
The turning point came in March 2017, when the Moroccan security services apprehended Kassem Tajeddine, a Hezbollah financier, at the Casablanca International Airport. Wanted by the United States, Morocco extradited him, provoking Hezbollah’s ire and prompting it to deepen its involvement with the Polisario. The French weekly Jeune Afrique reported Hezbollah operatives subsequently visited the Polisario’s Algerian rear base in Tindouf in July and August 2017. Then, in early April 2018, the group reportedly delivered SAM-7, SAM-9, and SAM-11 missiles as well as rocket launchers. For Morocco, this was the last straw. On April 30, 2018, it dispatched Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita to inform his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif of Morocco’s decision to sever diplomatic ties for the second time in under a decade. One of these missiles is what killed Jeafri in Smara.
By targeting civilians—in Smara and, later, Mahbes in northeastern Western Sahara on November 9, 2024—the Polisario can no longer claim to be waging a national liberation war. Instead, it is part of a broader Iranian proxy strategy to target U.S. allies. Morocco, notably, is America’s longest-standing ally, based on the bilateral Treaty of Peace and Friendship signed on June 28, 1786, and ratified by Congress the following year—the very first of its kind in American history.
Nor is this Polisario’s first dalliance with terror. From the late 1970s through the late 1980s, then group targeted Spanish fishermen who off the Western Saharan coast, killing nearly 300. This led Spain’s Audiencia Nacional to open legal proceedings in November 2016 against current Polisario Secretary-General Brahim Ghali, who headed the movement’s “Defense Department” at the time.
In November 2021, Mohamed Wali Akeik, a Polisario militia commander, declared that attacks were “much more than a possibility” and listed “companies, consulates, airlines, and other sectors”—all civilian—as potential targets.
The worst may yet be to come. In September 2022, a few months after Akeik’s remarks, Omar Mansour, self-proclaimed “Interior Minister” of the Polisario, announced the arrival of Iranian Arash-2 kamikaze drones in Nouakchott. The onward delivery was canceled after Hilale warned that Morocco would retake the entire UN-supervised buffer zone if it proceeded.
As a political resolution to the Western Sahara conflict seems within reach bolstered by the Trump administration’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty, the terrorist threat risks undermining it all. After decades of passivity, it is time for the international community to recognize the Polisario for what it is—a terrorist group—and to support the only regional power capable of restoring order and stability: the Kingdom of Morocco.
Wissam El Bouzdaini is a journalist and analyst specializing in North African geopolitics.
