Assahafa.com
On October 31, 2025, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted a landmark resolution recognizing Morocco’s Autonomy Plan as the sole and legitimate basis for a lasting resolution of the Sahara question. This moment, though awaited for five decades, was predictable given the contract that was signed six months ago.
That Friday marked the end of diplomatic ambiguity surrounding the Moroccan Sahara, and brought the international community’s final endorsement of Morocco’s vision for unity, stability, and regional integration. For Rabat, it was not merely a diplomatic success; it was the culmination of a historical continuum that began in 1975 with the Green March, and matured through years of strategic patience, reforms, and proactive diplomacy.
As King Mohammed VI declared in his speech following the vote: “there is a before and an after 31 October 2025.” This royal statement encapsulates more than a chronological shift — it expresses a doctrinal transformation in Morocco’s political identity. The Kingdom moves from an era of defensive legitimacy to one of affirmed sovereignty; from pleading recognition to leading regional consensus.
In this sense, the recognition of the Autonomy Plan constitutes both a closure and a rebirth: the closure of an inherited dispute and the rebirth of Morocco’s full territorial self-confidence on the international stage. Historically, the Sahara dispute had long embodied the tension between post-colonial borders and national continuity. For 50 years, Morocco’s diplomacy operated within the constraints of international indecision, which neither condemned nor fully endorsed.
The 2025 resolution, therefore, acts as a rectification of history, validating decades of steady statecraft and confirming that realism and compromise — rather than ideological rigidity — form the foundation of modern conflict resolution.
The Security Council’s endorsement reflects not only the triumph of Moroccan diplomacy but also the evolution of international norms, which now privilege autonomy and regional development over separatist fragmentation.
The King’s address underscored this transition with solemn clarity. He spoke of a “united Morocco, from Tangier to Lagouira,” and affirmed that no one would henceforth be allowed to question its historical borders or sovereign rights. His tone was not triumphalist but inclusive, extending a hand to the inhabitants of Tindouf camps, inviting them to “seize this historic opportunity” and to participate in the governance and development of their homeland.
Equally, the royal message to Algeria’s President called for “a fraternal and sincere dialogue,” and signaled that Morocco’s victory was not one of domination, but of maturity and reconciliation.
This policy paper aims to analyze how this diplomatic watershed redefines Morocco’s strategic environment. The recognition of the Autonomy Plan does not merely consolidate territorial integrity — it repositions Morocco as a regional pivot economically, politically, and ideologically within Africa and the Euro-Mediterranean space. Yet with this new status comes risks and responsibilities; to manage expectations in the southern provinces, recalibrate relations with neighboring states, and maintain the balance between national pride and pragmatic governance.
A military and historical context
Ultimately, October 31 will be remembered as the day Morocco’s territorial question ceased to be an issue and instead became an asset. The challenge now lies not in defending sovereignty, but in translating recognition into development and transforming symbolic victory into a model of regional stability. A Morocco that is confident, inclusive, and forward-looking, carries the legacy of the Green March beyond geopolitics and into the instability of the 21st century.
From the outset of the Green March in 1975 to today, the saga of the Sahara has been nothing short of a 50-year testament to Moroccan statecraft and militaryresolve. In the wake of Spain’s withdrawal from what was then the Spanish Sahara, the Kingdom of Morocco swiftly moved troops into the territory, determined to assert its claim.
The creation of the Polisario Front in 1973 and its declaration of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in 1976, only deepened the military dimension of the conflict. What followed was a war in earnest; the Moroccan Armed Forces (FAR) and supporting institutions undertook an extraordinary transformation moving them from a posture of symbolic legitimacy to one of institutional consolidation and hard military infrastructure.
The FAR, under royal command, built the now-legendary defensive berm, a 2,700-kilometer fortification of sand, sensors, and fortresses that stands as one of the longest continuous military structures on earth. Each segment of the berm was defended by garrisons that lived and fought in isolation, exposed to raids and artillery fire, but sustained by the conviction that they were the living border of the kingdom.
After the 1991 ceasefire, the battlefield was transformed into a buffer zone, officially neutral but strategically alive and very hostile. The ceasefire agreement, supervised by the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), created a 5-kilometer wide demilitarized area east of the berm. In theory, no armed forces are allowed inside it; in practice, the Polisario maintains armed patrols and observation posts, while Morocco monitors every movement through surveillance, drones, and rapid-reaction units.
For Rabat, this “zone tampon” is not a vacuum but it is an early-warning belt where deterrence begins. FAR observation points along the berm remain permanently manned; radar and unmanned systems track incursions, and when violations occur, Moroccan forces react with precision. Within this larger narrative a number of key battles stand as milestones in Morocco’s military journey. The Battle of Bir Anzarane (August 11, 1979) marked one of the starkest early tests of the Moroccan forces, as the Polisario Front launched a large-scale mechanised assault on the oasis garrison, aided by hundreds of vehicles and artillery, and Morocco claimed heavy losses.
In October of the same year, the Battle of Al Mahbes saw the Polisario overwhelm a Moroccan battalion, seize weaponry, and deal a blow to the army’s public image. These episodes were not mere footnotes; they forced the FAR to redesign tactics, rethink logistics, and integrate desert warfare into the national defence doctrine. Throughout the 1980s the conflict evolved, but so too did the Moroccan state’s military professionalism. The Battle of Guelta Zemmur (October 13-23, 1981) pitted a major Polisario armored assault and anti‐aircraft capability against the Moroccan garrison, illustrating that the war on the Sahara frontier was far from a peripheral skirmish — it was a serious conventional challenge. Later, the Battle of Amgala (November 8, 1989) represented perhaps the pinnacle of the field-engagement before the ceasefire; the Polisario breached the berm by some 20 kilometers in one maneuver and inflicted casualties on the Moroccan side, signaling that the frontier remained active.
Over decades, the DGED complemented this kinetic dimension, maintaining intelligence presence, counter‐infiltration operations, and strategic planning that fed into both military posture and diplomacy. Therefore, the result was a Moroccan state whose military-strategic architecture evolved from reactive defense into proactive sovereignty. The royal institution stood at the center of this continuity.
Morocco’s initiatives and leadership
From King Hassan II’s leadership of the Green March to King Mohammed VI’s modernization agenda, the Crown converted battlefield and berm into national narrative. The fallen soldiers, the remote garrisons, the dunes and walls, they all became part of an identity. The monarchy framed sacrifice as national service as battalions lost, frontier posts abandoned then retaken, mines laid and removed, thousands of lives spent on behalf of territorial integrity. This institutional continuity anchored the Kingdom’s narrative that the Sahara was not a contested fringe but a core of Moroccan statehood. Yet the narrative shifted. The Sahara ceased to be only a frontier to defend, it became a platform for modernization and integration. Provinces like Dakhla and Laâyoune now host logistics hubs, renewable-energy projects and gateways to Africa.
But despite this forward-looking vision, the military and defense posture remain central, the sands do not rest. The ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario froze open warfare but hostilities resumed in 2020 when the Polisario announced the end of the ceasefire following Moroccan operations in the buffer zone of Guerguerat. Technically and in reality, it was way before 2020, many attacks were launched by the Polisario against Morocco, for instance the massacre of hundreds of militaries in 2016.
In 2021 and 2022, Moroccan garrisons at Mahbes and Aousserd came under rocket and mortar fire, and a UN report recorded hundreds of firing incidents initiated from the Polisario side. Moroccan units responded with surveillance drones and precision artillery, effectively neutralizing most threats. The FAR remain on alert, intelligence services remain vigilant, and the monarchy maintains that the region will not be relinquished. Over these five decades the story of the Sahara has thus become a tale of transformation from irregular war to border-state consolidation, from desert defense to territorial development. The interplay of military strength, intelligence adaptability, and royal legitimacy has underpinned this transformation. The missiles and tanks of the 1970s and 1980s gave way to drones and infrastructure projects in the 2020s, but the logic still remains that sovereignty must be defended, identity must be preserved, and once ambiguous territory must become an integrated homeland.
In this sense, the Sahara stands both as the memory of sacrifice and the engine of Morocco’s future. The desert’s silence is deceptive, behind it stands half a century of readiness, sacrifice, and strategic foresight. The recognition of Morocco’s Autonomy Plan as the sole and legitimate framework for resolving the Sahara question, did not merely close a diplomatic chapter but it rewrote the regional and global equation. It balanced firmness with restraint and evolved into a strategic assertion, backed by credibility on the ground and alliances abroad.
Algeria, whose regional narrative had long revolved around the Sahara conflict, suddenly lost its diplomatic gravity. The Polisario Front, deprived of both symbolic momentum and international sympathy, was and is still increasingly now isolated politically, militarily, and rhetorically. Its discourse of liberation has lost resonance in a world that prizes stability and development over fragmentation. The King’s speech directly acknowledged this shift by thanking Morocco’s “brotherly and friendly nations”: the United States, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the European Union for their “constructive and determined efforts to support the sovereignty and stability of the Kingdom.” The convergence of Western powers around Morocco’s autonomy plan has produced a genuine diplomatic axis that redefines power balances in North Africa. Once a regional mediator, Morocco has become a pole where the pivot around which dialogue, security cooperation, and investment now revolve. It illustrates how Morocco safeguards its Saharan territory with unwavering vigilance, minute by minute, while projecting an image of prudence and composure on the global stage. For over a decade, Rabat has been translating its Saharan strategy into an African one, using the southern provinces as a logistical and developmental bridge to the Sahel and West Africa. The royal discourse explicitly situates the Sahara and the Sahel as a “hub of development and stability,” linking the Kingdom’s economic and security policies to the broader African landscape.
The Atlantic–Sahel corridor, unveiled in royal initiatives and supported by African partners, exemplifies more this evolution. It integrates ports in Dakhla and Laâyoune with routes extending toward Mauritania, Mali, and Niger, an architecture designed to merge trade with security. Trade cannot flourish where security is uncertain. Economic corridors begin with secure frontiers. By anchoring the Sahel within its strategic perimeter, Morocco assumes a dual role as the economic locomotive and stabilizing power. It’s a mutual security matter.
The multilateral and modern aspect
At the multilateral level, Morocco’s posture after October 2025 embodies a new model of responsible stabilizer. The Kingdom’s consistent alignment with UN principles and its pragmatic diplomacy have earned it a reputation for reliability. King Mohammed VI emphasized that Morocco seeks “a solution with no winner and no loser”, and this shows a language of collective security and cooperative governance. This doctrine elevates Morocco from claimant to contributor, positioning it as a state capable of translating domestic stability into regional balance while balancing internal and external parameters. For decades, Modern Moroccan diplomacy has been defined by patience while maintaining legitimacy, gathering recognition, and weathering regional hostility. That patience is now transformed into influence. Rabat now projects a strategic leadership that draws credibility from results rather than just rhetoric. In this new paradigm, the Autonomy Plan transcends its original purpose; it becomes a normative model for African governance and sovereignty. It demonstrates that self-determination need not mean secession, and that stability can coexist with pluralism. In the King’s words, Morocco’s proposal is “a realistic and implementable solution, offering autonomy within sovereignty, a path toward unity, not division.” This vision resonates across Africa, where the balance between identity and cohesion remains tremendously delicate.
The royal doctrine has evolved into an art of strategic omnibalancing that ensures Morocco’s unity strengthens in the stability of an entire continent.
Yet, every strategic victory reshapes not only the balance of power but also the landscape of extremely high risk. The United Nations’ recognition of Morocco’s Autonomy Plan has redefined legitimacy, but it has not neutralized hostility or ended the conflict. The Kingdom now enters a post-recognition phase where diplomacy has succeeded, yet security remains very contested. The very success of Morocco’s statecraft, its restored influence, regional leadership, and military confidence inevitably generates counter-reactions from actors who have lost ground. These actors will not vanish; they will mutate. As Morocco consolidates its sovereignty and projects stability across the Atlantic and the Sahel, the environment surrounding it becomes more complex, fluid, and very unpredictable. The threats ahead will not resemble those of the past; they will blend ideology with technology, disinformation with infiltration, and diplomacy with deception.
Polisario’s self-inflicted fragmentation and marginalization
Fragmentation of the Polisario Front and of the RASD presents a primary strategic risk. Diplomatic marginalization can produce radicalization among sidelined cadres, creating splinter groups that reject negotiation and adopt violence; many historical chapters illustrate it, especially within the African continent.
Marginal factions may seek alliances with jihadist and criminal organizations very active in the Sahel since they also expanded their activities, groups such as JNIM, ISGS, and ISWAP which would supply battlefield experience, safe havens and smuggling networks. All terrorist groups would attempt to exploit the crisis, seeking to insert itself into demonstrations and local unrest, amplify divisions through online influence, and present the theatre as an opportunity to export its project of an extremist polity. The convergence of separatist splinters, jihadist cells and criminal entrepreneurs would create a lethal cocktail of opportunism and ideology that increases the tempo and unpredictability of attacks against Moroccan forces and infrastructure.
External interference and regional destabilization form a second major vector. Algeria’s historical political support for Polisario, when combined with permissive territorial practices, risks evolving into tolerance for covert logistic flows. Arms, materiel or personnel transits might be facilitated via private channels, including foreign-linked intermediaries or mercenary networks that offer deniability. The use of such illicit brokers transforms a local insurgency into a proxy hybrid theater, as external sponsors supply sustainment, training, and technical capabilities while avoiding overt state responsibility. This dynamic raises the probability of escalatory blowback, widens the geography of conflict and complicates attribution, making diplomatic resolution harder to achieve.
Cyber and cognitive warfare comprise a third, and are tools for all the risk vectors that rapidly intensify the threat. Coordinated campaigns of disinformation, fabricated imagery, deepfakes and targeted digital infiltration aim to delegitimize Morocco’s Autonomy Plan and to undermine domestic cohesion. Actors hostile to the Kingdom can manufacture and diffuse incriminating content of videos purporting to show soldiers committing abuses, edited footage presented as proof of repression, or falsified testimony exploited by networks of influence to inflame populations in the camps, mobilize diasporas, and create national pressure. The objective is not merely reputational damage but functional destabilization, to erode confidence in institutions, provoke overreaction, and create openings for violent actors to exploit. Without rapid verification and credible counter-narratives, such campaigns can alter the political calculus faster than military responses can contain.
A hybrid escalation scenario integrates these trends into a deliberately calibrated campaign. In such a scenario, fragmented Polisario elements, potentially allied with jihadist units and sustained by clandestine external support, conduct terror attacks and raids against Moroccan outposts east of the berm while cyber actors orchestrate parallel information assaults. The combined effect is to saturate Morocco’s security responses, impose political costs domestically and regionally, and force resource dispersion across multiple domains. Information operations would accompany kinetic strikes by videos alleging atrocities, falsified evidence of civilian casualties, and orchestrated protests intended to distract and delegitimize state responses. The hybrid approach is designed to remain below the threshold of interstate war while producing maximum strategic disruption.
A further, immediate operational challenge stems from the sheer geography and social complexity of the southern theater. Securing stretches of desert that can extend hundreds of kilometers is not simply a matter of deploying military units; it is a question of knowledge, presence, and legitimacy. Expecting the FAR to cover a 300-kilometer expanse that many units do not know intimately raises real risks including gaps in human intelligence, vulnerability to ambush and improvised attacks, and an imperfect appreciation of local dynamics. Human geography matters as much as the physical one. Local populations whose loyalties and grievances are shaped by cross-border kinship, pastoral routes, and resource access will not automatically and from the first attempt accept an expanded footprint.
If those communities feel excluded or marginalized during all this process, the security situation could fracture into new localized conflicts that rival the old political cleavages. Practically, filling that capability gap requires more than temporary rotations or technological fixes. It demands sustained increases in manpower, targeted recruitment from the south, specialized training in desert and cultural intelligence, and robust civil-military engagement to build local trust. The alternative is costly; it either leaves vacuums that hostile actors exploit or risk repeated cycles of confrontation that drain national resources. In short, consolidating control over an expanded southern perimeter will necessitate a conscious policy of force generation, local inclusion, and community-centered governance, otherwise Morocco may win recognition on paper while struggling to secure the ground in practice.
Looking forward
One anticipated pathway is that talks convened under UN auspice between Morocco, Polisario, Algeria, and Mauritania begin but ultimately fail, each party reverting to entrenched positions. Morocco will implement his Autonomy Plan without Polisario participation, provoking renewed fighting east of the berm and sustained low-intensity conflict. MINURSO might be scaled down, transformed to MANSAO by the end of 2026. Algeria is expected to continue providing political, logistical, and military support to the Polisario, ensuring the group’s operational survival despite growing diplomatic isolation. As a result, hostilities on the ground are likely to intensify following the collapse of the peace process. The United States might seek to designate Polisario elements as terrorist groups, constraining their networks but also driving them toward clandestine violence; conversely, renewed diplomatic incentives could encourage reintegration and de-escalation. In a severe contingency, Morocco could decide to launch a comprehensive military operation aimed at neutralizing Polisario capacity beyond the wall, a decision likely to redesign legal and diplomatic constraints and to test regional balances. Under any of these circumstances, Morocco would be compelled to declare a state of war, formalizing a transition from contained confrontation to open military engagement. The level of terrorist threat has, in literal terms, increased twofold.
Across all, the decisive factor will be managing public perception especially among youth. Preventing their exposure to false narratives and extremist messaging is critical as they are particularly quick to be influenced by false narratives or extremist rhetoric.
What’s coming next will not be without hostility and fighting, it underlines urgent, integrated policy imperatives. To prevent fragmentation from becoming radicalization, it is necessary to couple reconciliation and reintegration measures with security presence in vulnerable communities. Additionally, it is necessary to disrupt external supply lines through diplomatic pressure, law enforcement cooperation, and targeted action against mercenary brokers and illicit logistics networks. Strengthening cyber and cognitive resilience by deploying rapid verification mechanisms, robust counter-messaging and legal tools to challenge fabricated content on platforms and to protect information integrity, is also crucial. It is crucial to maintain layered defense and selective deterrence by upgrading surveillance, protecting critical infrastructure, and calibrating proportional response. Finally, contingency planning must include proportional military options constrained by legal and diplomatic considerations, clear escalation thresholds, and multinational engagement to avoid unilateral spillover into interstate conflict. Across these contingencies, combat fatalities are to be expected. Planners should prepare for losses potentially approaching the scale of a battalion and the cascading operational consequences that would follow.
Source: Morocco word news
