The Rif War, 1921 to 1926: Abd el-Krim against Spain and France

A protectorate that did not hold

In 1912 France and Spain divided Morocco into protectorates. France took the center and south; Spain received a strip in the north that included the Rif, a wall of mountains whose Berber tribes Spain struggled to control from the start. Enrique Vázquez notes, reviewing María Rosa de Madariaga's biography of Abd el-Krim, that the sultan's court at Fez had never had real control there either.²

Muhammad ibn Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi was born at Ajdir, on the bay of Alhucemas, in 1882. He became the leader of the Beni Urriaguel, a tribe of the central Rif, and for years he was a proven friend of Spain. Madariaga traces his path from that early sympathy, through a first anticolonial manifesto at the start of the First World War, to open war against Spain by 1920 and 1921, when he and his younger brother rose to drive the Spanish out of the protectorate.³

The Rif was never only a local quarrel. During the First World War, in which Spain stayed neutral, German agents worked among the tribes of the Franco-Spanish zone, and Britain watched anxiously over anything that might change the balance around Gibraltar and Tangier. Madariaga's book, Vázquez writes, is at its best on this diplomatic background, which helps explain how a tribal leader from the Rif came to matter in London, Paris and Berlin.⁴

Annual, 1921

The Spanish answer was an advance from Melilla deep into the Rif under General Manuel Fernández Silvestre. In July 1921 it ended in catastrophe at Annual, where Abd el-Krim's men overran Silvestre's outposts and turned the retreat into a massacre. EBSCO's account says the Riffians destroyed a Spanish army of 20,000, reversing twenty years of Spanish advance in a fortnight, and puts the Spanish dead, soldiers and civilians, at 10,000 to 20,000. Osprey's 2024 study by Philip Jowett and Martin Windrow gives some 13,000 Spanish troops killed. Silvestre himself died there.⁵

After Annual the war spread west. EBSCO describes a Riffian force of 3,000 to 4,000 regulars, with tribal auxiliaries, harassing the Spanish posts. In 1924 the government of General Miguel Primo de Rivera ordered a withdrawal to fortified enclaves on the coast, and the retreat from Xauen alone cost the Spanish army about 17,000 casualties.⁶

The Republic of the Rif

At the height of his power, in 1924 and 1925, Abd el-Krim headed a Republic of the Rif. Vázquez calls it a state that existed in fact but was never accepted in Europe, nor in Fez, where the sultan and his court saw Abd el-Krim as a separatist. When the Turkish republic abolished the caliphate in 1924, he was even courted as a possible caliph, but he always insisted that his struggle was strictly national, not a pan-Islamic cause.⁷

France joins the war

For four years French Morocco stayed out of the fighting. In the spring of 1925 Abd el-Krim gambled and struck south, attacking French outposts and threatening the cities of the French zone. Jowett and Windrow call it his gamble of April 1925, followed by a summer of fighting along the central, western and eastern fronts.⁸

France now brought in its heaviest weapons. Marshal Lyautey, who had governed French Morocco since 1912, was replaced in command by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the defender of Verdun, who worked smoothly with Primo de Rivera's staff. Pétain poured in reinforcements in July and August 1925, and in September and October 1925 the two armies carried out coordinated operations.⁹

Alhucemas and the end

The centerpiece was a Spanish landing at Alhucemas Bay, in the heart of Abd el-Krim's own country, in September 1925, while the French pushed north. Vázquez describes it as the great Spanish and French landing that entered European military history. With his homeland now invaded, Abd el-Krim held on through the winter, but a final Franco-Spanish offensive in May 1926 broke the Rif, and he surrendered to the French.¹⁰

France sent him into exile on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, where he spent more than twenty years. In 1947 Paris agreed to move him to France, but when his ship passed through the Suez Canal he left it at Port Said, under pressure from Arab nationalists, and was granted asylum in Egypt. He died in Cairo on 6 February 1963.¹¹

Why the Rif War mattered

For Spain the Moroccan wars were a long political wound. Vázquez argues that they bred several of the old demons that led to the Civil War of 1936, in which the Army of Africa and its officers, among them a young general named Francisco Franco, weighed heavily, in campaigns such as the Aragon Offensive of 1938. For North Africa, Abd el-Krim became a symbol of resistance to European rule. Vázquez concludes that his leadership had international resonance and helped kindle the movements that led to independence after the Second World War.¹²