The Battle for Aiun

SPANISH MOROCCO The Battle for Aiun

After two 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 is unable to establish its authority there. Last week, with Moroccans encircling Sidi Ifni's tightly held perimeter, Madrid merged all the rest of its West African colonies under one military governor, and set up the new administration at the fortified town of Aiun, 250 miles south of Ifni.

But Ben Hamou's nationalists and tribesmen were moving fast. Now calling themselves the new Saharan Army of Liberation, they appeared at Edchera, near Aiun, in the midst of a blinding sandstorm, launched a fierce attack on its garrison of Spanish soldiers and Legionnaires. It was the most murderous battle since the 1934 French "pacification" campaign. The Spanish claimed the Moroccans fled, leaving 241 corpses and 20 camels. The communique also listed 51 Legionnaires dead, but a knowing Madrid source indicated that total Legion casualties almost equaled the Moroccan dead. .

Aiun is a capital of unpaved streets and adobe buildings, lacking proper port facilities, adequate airstrip or water supply for 15,000 Spanish soldiers. In its bazaar, tribesmen selling their beads and hammered silver listen to Arab-language broadcasts from Rabat, just as Moroccans before independence tuned in Cairo. In the surrounding countryside, the Spanish have pulled their garrisons out of many tiny outposts into four desert fortresses.

Morocco's King Mohammed V declines to admit that the 12,000-man Liberation Army even exists. To repeated protests of the army's "aggressions," complained Spain's War Minister Antonio Barroso recently, all Spain has got back "are replies that Spain was responsible for them."

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