Cold War in the Desert

I’m scuttling along behind these young desert warriors because the Polisario Front—a guerrilla movement that has been fighting to end the Moroccan occupation of much of Western Sahara for almost four decades—is showing me how it would take out an enemy target. The target in question is the nearly 1,700 mile-long wall that separates the Moroccan-administered part of Western Sahara from the Polisario-run “liberated territories,” a mostly empty expanse of desert, where this exercise is taking place. Given that the area surrounding the Moroccan Wall is one of the most heavily mined terrains in the world, the exercise is plain tragicomic. The physical strength of the Polisario fighters is offset by their aging weapons, and their tactics feel like they might belong in the 20th century. Morocco, after all, is a modern military power, with an air force boasting 100 combat aircraft, including the latest F-16.