he Polisario Front declared a “general mobilisation” against Morocco on Tuesday. The announcement came ten days after the UN mission in Western Sahara lost its mandate and began emptying the observation posts that had stood between the two armies since 1991.
The decision was taken by Polisario’s National Secretariat at an emergency meeting chaired by leader Brahim Ghali, according to the communiqué published by the Sahrawi agency SPS. It cited “dangerous Moroccan military movements” and said Moroccan troops, weapons and equipment were being massed at various points along the wall. It named no locations, units or dates. The statement also called on “all peoples of the region” to resist what it described as Moroccan aggression, and urged the UN and the African Union to intervene.
Morocco had not officially responded by the time of publication. Several Moroccan outlets dismissed the claims as unfounded, and no independent source has confirmed the movements.
Ghali told Sahrawis to “prepare fully for all the enemy’s plots and manoeuvres.”
Beneath the rhetoric, the question is narrow and physical: who ends up at five small UN compounds in the desert east of the berm?
MINURSO ran nine team sites staffed by unarmed military observers. Four lie west of the sand wall: Smara, Mahbes, Oum Dreyga and Awsard. Five lie east of it: Bir Lahlou, Tifariti, Mehaires, Mijek and Agwanit. Polisario calls that strip the “liberated territories”. Morocco regards it as part of its southern provinces, beyond its defensive line.
Those five sites are being emptied. A source told the Moroccan outlet Yabiladi that observers based at Bir Lahlou, Tifariti and Mehaires were flown to Laayoune on a special UN flight in the first week of November, with staff from Mijek and Agwanit due on 6 November. UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix confirmed on 4 November that the withdrawal covers every MINURSO position, including those east of the berm. He estimated it would take about two months. El País reported that UN staff had been told to end their housing leases by 30 November. Médias24 asked Lacroix whether the eastern facilities would be dismantled or handed to someone else. He did not say.
A think tank in Rabat says it knows. The Institut Géopolitique Horizons (IGH) reported on 5 November, citing unnamed “very reliable” sources, that the evacuation of Bir Lahlou had begun that morning. It said all former MINURSO sites in the old buffer zone are to be handed to the Royal Armed Forces (FAR). Its headline says the army is “taking position”, but the note itself is more careful: it lists the final handover and any lasting Moroccan presence as still to be confirmed. Neither the UN nor the Moroccan government has announced a handover, and IBN could not verify one.
That uncertainty matters because of Bir Lahlou’s history. The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic was proclaimed there in February 1976, and Polisario treats it as its provisional capital.
Eight years ago, Morocco set the rule for this area itself. In an April 2018 letter to the Security Council, UN ambassador Omar Hilale wrote that Rabat had agreed with the UN that the only presence east of the wall “was and would remain that of the Mission.” Any move of Polisario civilian, military or administrative structures towards Bir Lahlou or Tifariti, he wrote, would be a “cause for war”.
That arrangement assumed MINURSO would stay. With the mission gone, the area has no agreed occupant. Either side can accuse the other of moving in, and no one is in place to check.
Lacroix was asked what mechanism would verify incidents from now on. His answer, in French: “pas de mécanisme de vérification, rien du tout”. No verification mechanism, nothing at all.
The scale of what is ending can be measured. Between October 2025 and August 2026, according to an analysis on the international law blog EJIL:Talk, MINURSO carried out about 8,000 visits to Moroccan army sites. It also ran ground patrols covering roughly 300,000 kilometres and flew 150 reconnaissance flights. When three projectiles landed outside Smara in May, a MINURSO team inspected the impact sites. Next time, all that will exist are the two sides’ statements.
Those statements already disagree. SPS reported on 9 November that Polisario’s army had “targeted Moroccan occupation forces” at Al-Aydiyat, the latest in a long run of communiqués claiming bombardments along the wall. Moroccan outlets in turn report drone strikes on Polisario fighters approaching the berm. Pro-Polisario sources often describe the people killed in those strikes as civilians. No outside party on the ground can check either version now.
The mobilisation call is the first test of that. Polisario says Morocco is massing troops along the wall, and Moroccan outlets say nothing of the sort is happening. Until last month, UN observers could have gone to look.
Rabat and Polisario are not even arguing about the same ceasefire. Polisario declared the 1991 truce void in November 2020, after Moroccan troops moved into the Guerguerat buffer zone. Morocco says the truce still holds.
On 4 November, King Mohammed VI chaired a meeting on the post-MINURSO period. The communiqué from the Royal Cabinet, the king’s office, reaffirmed the kingdom’s “firm attachment to the ceasefire”. It also faulted the departing mission for repeatedly failing to monitor whether the truce was respected. Among those present was General Mohammed Berrid, inspector general of the armed forces and commander of the Southern Zone. The king put the Interior Ministry’s coordination office for MINURSO in charge of the withdrawal.
So Polisario now accuses Morocco of breaching a ceasefire that Polisario says ended six years ago. Morocco, for its part, pledges to keep a ceasefire after the only body able to verify it has left.
Some voices inside Morocco want more. On 3 November, the National Observatory for Strategic Studies, a Moroccan think tank, urged parliament to list Polisario as a terrorist organisation. It also called for restoring full Moroccan control over the buffer zone east of the wall. That is not government policy.
The same five names have been on a military map before. A ceasefire had been agreed to take effect on 6 September 1991. That August, Moroccan forces launched operations against Tifariti, Bir Lahlou, Mehaires, Mijek and Agwanit. A chronology archived by UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, records that the fighting destroyed Bir Lahlou and Tifariti, which had a combined population of 2,365. Polisario said at the time that Moroccan troops had reached Bir Lahlou on 25 August. By 29 August, its representative to MINURSO said they were pulling back behind the wall. The UN team sites were then built in those same places.
In 1991, the arrival of UN monitors gave both armies a deadline to race against. In 2026 the monitors are leaving, and nothing has replaced the deadline.
The first government to act was not a party to the conflict. On 4 November, the prefects of Chami and Tmeimichatt in northern Mauritania told herders and nomads to return home. The independent agency Al-Akhbar reported that they were told to stay away from “areas where its location may be unclear”, meaning the border line itself. According to IGH, the instructions went out as WhatsApp voice messages. The next day, government spokesperson Mohamed Mohamed Abdallah Babana said Mauritania’s position remained “total positive neutrality”.
The concern is a specific one. Mohamed Mahmoud Ould El Hacen heads the General Union of Mauritanian Gold Prospectors. He told EFE that Sahrawi fighters use vehicles similar to the prospectors’, which could get prospectors mistaken for combatants. In September, a Moroccan drone struck two vehicles near Garzerz in the buffer zone, wounding two Sahrawis from the Tindouf camps who were believed to be looking for gold, a union source told Hespress. Nouakchott has also asked for the border near Lagouira, opposite the port city of Nouadhibou, to be formally marked out. The government says this is not a territorial claim.
Algeria’s Foreign Ministry expressed “profound regret” at the non-renewal. It said the US draft had made that outcome inevitable through what it called “excessive partiality”. The draft would have made Morocco’s autonomy plan the basis of talks and dropped the “R”, for referendum, from the mission’s name. Spain, the former colonial power, had said nothing for six days, the journalist Ignacio Cembrero noted on 8 November.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said MINURSO’s departure does not end the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination. The UN General Assembly’s decolonisation committee is next due to vote on Western Sahara in October 2027.
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