n 6 February 1860, General O’Donnell’s army enters Tetouan. Madrid is jubilant: the affair is christened the “guerra de África,” the press narrates it as a crusade regained, and Barcelona’s provincial council dispatches a young painter, Maria Fortuny, to immortalize the victory on a monumental canvas. A detail history will retain: Fortuny will never finish his painting.
Behind the romantic scenery, the figures tell another war. Of Spain’s roughly four thousand dead in the campaign, nearly three thousand were carried off by cholera, not by combat. And the peace, signed at Wad-Ras on 26 April 1860, will cost Morocco far more than an occupied city: an indemnity of four hundred million reales, that is, twenty million duros (one hundred million pesetas in the currency yet to come). The Cherifian treasury cannot pay. So it borrows in London in 1861, and pledges the most precious thing it has: its customs. European agents install themselves in Moroccan ports to count the receipts, half of which go to repay Spain. It is through this door, opened at Tetouan, that everything else will enter.
It should be said that Spain was not arriving in unknown territory. Melilla had been occupied since 1497, Ceuta (a Portuguese conquest turned Spanish by the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668) for two centuries, and the islets ran along the coast like promissory notes: the Penon de Velez, Alhucemas, then the Chafarinas, seized in January 1848 a few days ahead of a French column out of Oran. The Moroccan coast was already, let us note, a Franco-Spanish competition in which the Makhzen was the stake rather than the referee.
This article sets course for the least-known face of Morocco’s colonization: the Spanish one. One hundred sixteen years separate the fall of Tetouan from the departure of the last Spanish soldier from El Aaiun, in February 1976. In between: a partition negotiated in secret, a protectorate held in sublease, a republic in the mountains that will humble a kingdom, weapons the conventions already forbade, a decolonization in four unequal acts (1956, 1958, 1969, 1975), and a memory that, a century on, has still not been settled. We will also see what this adventure did to Spain herself: for the army that forged itself in the Rif is the very one that will devour the Spanish Republic in 1936.
The partition
Two documents, one same day
On 3 October 1904, France and Spain sign a solemn declaration in Paris: the two powers declare themselves “firmly attached to the integrity of the Moroccan Empire under the sovereignty of the Sultan.” The same day, in the same office, the same signatories initial a secret convention of sixteen articles that carves this empire into spheres of influence, from the mouth of the Moulouya to the Atlantic. Article III even scripts the scenario of the kill: should “the political condition of Morocco and the Cherifian government no longer be able to subsist,” Spain would be free to “exercise its action” in its sphere. Two texts, one same day, two contrary truths.
One article of that secret convention deserves a pause, for it carries the seed of a dispute that will not erupt until seventy-one years later:
“The Government of the French Republic recognizes henceforth to the Spanish Government full liberty of action over the region lying between degrees 26° and 27°40’ of north latitude and the meridian 11° west of Paris, which are outside the territory of Morocco.”
— Secret Franco-Spanish convention, article VI, 3 October 1904 (translated from the French)
“Outside the territory of Morocco”: the phrase, slipped into a text nobody was meant to read, founds the legal distinction between the protectorate (which Spain will have to return) and the Sahara “colony” (which she will claim to keep). The Moroccan Sahara file of 1975 was drafted there, in the secrecy of a Paris office, in 1904.
Algeciras, where the fiction becomes machinery
The affair still had to be dressed. That will be the work of the Algeciras conference, convened in January 1906 after the theatrics of Tangier (Wilhelm II had landed there in March 1905 to pose as protector of Moroccan independence, to the fury of Paris). The General Act, signed on 7 April 1906, proclaims in its preamble “the sovereignty and independence of His Majesty the Sultan” and “the integrity of his States.” Then the articles unroll the machinery: the police of the eight ports open to commerce is entrusted to French and Spanish instructors (Spanish at Tetouan and Larache, French at Rabat, mixed at Tangier and Casablanca: the map of the 1912 zones is already there, rehearsed six years in advance), and the State Bank of Morocco, granted the currency monopoly for forty years, is placed under the tutelage of Europe’s central banks. Twelve powers guaranteeing an independence they are already administering. Add to this the regime of consular proteges, locked in by the Madrid convention of 1880, which withdrew a growing clientele of Moroccans from the Sultan’s taxes and courts: a sovereignty that can no longer tax nor borrow is already no more than a word.
A protectorate in sublease
On 30 March 1912, in Fes, Sultan Moulay Abdelhafid signs the protectorate treaty with France. The text is brutally clear: a Resident-General, “depositary of all the powers of the Republic in Morocco,” will approve and promulgate every dahir; and His Cherifian Majesty “forbids himself to contract in the future, directly or indirectly, any public or private loan” without French authorization. A few months later, the Fes riots will drown the signature in blood (we have told those days elsewhere), and Abdelhafid will abdicate before summer’s end.
As for Spain, she does not even treat with the Sultan. Her zone is conceded to her by France, in the Franco-Spanish convention of 27 November 1912: a protectorate in sublease. The legal architecture is worth the detour. The northern regions remain in theory “under the civil and religious authority of the Sultan,” but they will be administered by a khalifa residing in Tetouan, chosen by the Sultan… from a list of two names presented by Spain, removable only with Madrid’s consent, and flanked by a Spanish High Commissioner who governs in earnest. The final paragraph of article one confesses the fiction: no responsibility may be imputed to the Cherifian government for what happens in the Spanish zone.
And the dowry matches. Articles 10 and 11 oblige the Spanish zone to finance itself from its own resources and forbid the Makhzen to contribute; article 12 fixes its share of Morocco’s loan charges at 7.95% of customs. Spain thus receives the Rif and the Jbala: 21,000 square kilometers of mountains, one-seventh arable, less than 8% of the country’s customs base. France has Casablanca, the plains, Fes, the ports and soon the phosphates; Spain has a vertical country, a legal fiction and an army. If the history of the Spanish zone will be written in military campaigns rather than in land registries, it is not a matter of national temperament: it is an article of treaty. Tangier, finally, is reserved: the city will receive its international statute in 1923.
The forbidden weapons
A procurement schedule
Annual falls on 22 July 1921. On 12 August, three weeks later, High Commissioner Damaso Berenguer telegraphs Madrid: he had always refused, he writes, to use asphyxiating gases against these populations, but after what has just happened, he will use them “with true relish.” On 20 August, Spain approaches Germany. In December, she buys 50,000 liters of chloropicrin. By the spring of 1922, a shell-filling workshop is running in Melilla. In October 1922, a commission under the King’s patronage proposes mounting the gases on aircraft. At the end of 1923, the contract for the great factory is signed. Read that chronology again: this is not a slide into atrocity, it is a procurement schedule.
The German connection
A supplier still had to be found, and its name was Weimar. Forbidden chemical weapons by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany sold Spain its surplus, its patents and its men, through the Stoltzenberg firm, the private facade of a state accord: Hugo Stoltzenberg, a gas chemist of the Great War, will even take Spanish nationality to run the factory he was building near Madrid. That factory bears a name that must be written out in full: Fabrica Nacional de Productos Quimicos Alfonso XIII. The mustard-gas works carried the King’s name, and the site, renamed La Maranosa, houses today a research institute of the Spanish Ministry of Defense. The name is the whole argument by itself.
Raining on the souks
The gases arrive by artillery from the autumn of 1921; mustard arrives by air in the summer of 1924. In between, Spain perfects her chemical war: shells refilled at Melilla, night bombardments (the day’s heat dispersed the clouds), and a targeting the German advisers recommended precisely because mustard gas contaminates whatever it touches: the fields, the springs, the souks at market hours. The mechanism is not tactical but agrarian: poison the harvest and the well, and the tribe surrenders because it starves. The German historians Rudibert Kunz and Rolf-Dieter Muller, the first to document the affair in the archives, count more than ten thousand chemical containers (shells and bombs) and more than 500 metric tons of agents dropped. France herself, in the war’s final months, will supply chemical munitions to her own front (their battlefield use is less documented; the supply is beyond doubt); the Spanish use, for its part, was systematic, aerial, and aimed at civilian habitat.
No document ever put in the airman’s mouth what the airman wrote himself. Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, future chief of the Spanish Republican air force, will recount the summer of 1924 in his memoirs; his words were read into the record of the Spanish Congress of Deputies in 2007:
“In those days it fell to me to carry out a truly vile piece of work, which earned me the shameful and sad privilege of being the first aviator to drop mustard gas from an airplane. It is curious how many years had to pass before I became aware of the monstrosity I was committing in gassing the Moorish villages.”
— Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, Cambio de rumbo; read into the record of the Congress of Deputies, 14 February 2007 (translated from the Spanish)
As for King Alfonso XIII, Spanish literature attributes to him words of extermination; those quotations circulate without an archival reference, and a book published in 2026 disputes their authenticity. We will not print them: Berenguer’s telegram, the royal commission of 1922 and the factory’s name are amply sufficient to establish where responsibility lay.
Counting what was never counted
There remains the question that haunts the Rif today: cancer. Let us first set down what is established. That Spain gassed civilians: proven, archives in hand, in four languages. That mustard gas causes cancer in humans: established (it sits in Group 1 of the IARC, and the Iranian veterans exposed in the 1980s develop nearly twice as many cancers as their peers). But between those two certainties and the common assertion (“the gas of 1925 causes the cancers of 2026”) stretches a void that no one has filled. There exists, to this day, no cancer registry covering the provinces of the Rif, no case-control study, no survey of soils and waters. The figures in circulation do not even share the same status: “half of Morocco’s cancers” traces back, when one follows it, to a hospital-corridor impression delivered at a colloquium in 2008, never to a study, and the “80% of Rabat’s patients” carries no attribution at all; the historian Maria Rosa de Madariaga, who documented the chemical war better than anyone, judges it rash to attribute today’s cancers to it. And the only regional dataset available places the province of Nador among the least affected of the Oriental: not because the Rif is well, but because the Rif is not counted.
That is perhaps the most durable scandal of all: a people that believes itself poisoned and is refused even the measurement. In 2019, the Rif Memory Association carried the file to The Hague, before the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons:
“We presented last year a petition to the Secretary General to send OPCW inspectors to the Rif… unfortunately we have received no response.”
— Abdelmajid Azzouzi, Rif Memory Association, 24th OPCW Conference of the States Parties, The Hague, November 2019
Recognition, the opening of the military archives, freedom of investigation, reparation, and a fifth demand that says everything (detecting the contaminated zones and at last studying the long-term effects): the association’s five demands fit in one sentence, and not one has received the beginning of an answer. Nobody wrote back. The silence, here, is a policy.
The long twilight
The Regulares and the confiscated letters
Irony willed that Spain’s next war should begin in Morocco. On 17 July 1936, it is in Melilla and Tetouan that the uprising against the Spanish Republic rises, and it is with tens of thousands of Moroccan soldiers (serious estimates run from seventy-five thousand to more than one hundred thousand men, including thousands of minors) that Franco will win his war. Many were recruited in a Rif that the famine of 1934-35 was finishing off, ten years after the gas. The regime would know, moreover, how to play its zone: from December 1936, Franco legalizes Abdelkhalek Torres’s nationalist party in Tetouan, not out of generosity, but because a tolerated Moroccan nationalism in the north was a needle planted in the flank of the French zone. One fact will remain of it: the north had legal parties and a press when the south had none.
Of this forced encounter between the Rif and Spain, the archives have kept a heartbreaking trace, unearthed recently by two researchers in the holdings at Alcala de Henares: hundreds of love letters between Moroccan soldiers and Spanish women, confiscated by the Francoist censorship, which saw in these unions a threat to the “prestige of the race.” “When will you come back to Spain?” writes Carmela, of Granada, in 1944; her letter will never be delivered. A 1937 directive ordered these marriages prevented “without openly banning them.” Spain was willing for Moroccans to die for her; she was not willing for them to be loved.
The zone that did not follow
On 20 August 1953, France deposes Mohammed V and exiles him (to Corsica, then Madagascar). That day, the legal fiction of 1912 turns against its authors: the Spanish zone refuses to follow. The khalifa Moulay El Hassan ben El Mehdi does not recognize Ben Arafa, the replacement sultan installed by Paris, and Tetouan becomes one of the lungs of Moroccan nationalism. In the mosques of the zone, the Friday prayer will continue to be said in the name of Mohammed V: the detail is recorded by Spanish historiography itself. Francoist Spain, only too happy to embarrass France, lets it happen, without obtaining from the khalifa the open dissidence she hoped for. The kingdom was cut into two zones; in those years it had only one legitimate king, and the north knew it.
Two independences and a remainder
France yields first: the declaration of 2 March 1956 ends the French protectorate. Spain follows on 7 April, in Madrid, recognizing Morocco’s independence and territorial unity (a phrase Rabat will quote back to her for seventy years), not without congratulating herself, in her press, for having driven from the text the word “interdependence” that France had imposed on hers. On 29 October, the Fedala conference returns Tangier to Morocco. But Spain does not return everything, and it is here that the legal geometry drawn in 1904 unfolds its effects. Madrid keeps four things, in the name of four different theories: the southern zone of the protectorate (Tarfaya), which she will logically have to restore; Ifni, which she holds from a cession in the 1860 treaty; the Sahara, which she holds as a colony (“outside the territory of Morocco,” said the secret article of 1904); and the presidios of Ceuta and Melilla, which she proclaims Spanish cities. Four statuses, four calendars: the decolonization of the north will not be an act, but a countdown in four movements.
The war nobody tells
For the Moroccan Army of Liberation was not waiting on the jurists. In the autumn of 1957, its southern branch attacks the Spanish positions in the Sahara and lays siege to Sidi Ifni; in January 1958, at Edchera, the Spanish Legion counts eighty-seven men out of action in a single day. The reply comes in February, and it comes as a pair: nine thousand Spanish soldiers and five thousand French, under one hundred fifty aircraft, jointly conduct Operation Ecouvillon-Teide against the Moroccan fighters of the Sahara. Two years after recognizing Morocco’s independence, the two former protecting powers campaign together against Moroccans: the fact is stubborn, and we report it as it stands. Diplomacy closes the parenthesis in April: by the accords known as Angra de Cintra (1 April 1958), Spain restores the Tarfaya zone, handed to Morocco at Villa Bens on 10 April, in the presence of Crown Prince Moulay Hassan. First movement of the countdown.
The United Nations clock
The second movement plays out in New York. On 16 December 1965, the General Assembly “urgently requests” Spain to take immediately all necessary measures “for the liberation of the Territories of Ifni and Spanish Sahara from colonial domination.” Spain complies on one file and digs in on the other: Ifni is retroceded by the Treaty of Fez of 4 January 1969 (the Spanish flag comes down there on 30 June), but the Sahara, made a “province” in 1958, industrializes instead: the Bou Craa phosphates enter production in 1973. In August 1974, Madrid at last announces a self-determination referendum; Morocco answers by taking the question to the International Court of Justice.
16 October 1975
The Court’s opinion falls on 16 October 1975, and each side will forever quote only the half that suits it. The text deserves better:
“The materials and information presented to the Court show the existence, at the time of Spanish colonization, of legal ties of allegiance between the Sultan of Morocco and some of the tribes living in the territory of Western Sahara. […] On the other hand, the Court’s conclusion is that the materials and information presented to it do not establish any tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco or the Mauritanian entity.”
— International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion of 16 October 1975
Ties of allegiance recognized (by fourteen votes to two), no terra nullius (unanimously), no territorial sovereignty established, and a referral to self-determination: the opinion handed each side its half-sentence. Hassan II, for his part, had prepared his own. That very evening, he announces to the Moroccan people a peaceful march toward the Sahara. Three weeks later, on 6 November 1975, three hundred fifty thousand volunteers (the official figure, selected by provincial quota from more than half a million registrations) cross the border at Tah, Quran and flag in hand, without a single weapon. We have told this Green March elsewhere; let us keep here to its diplomatic mechanics, which were of a watchmaker’s precision. On 9 November, the King recalls the marchers. On the 14th, in Madrid, the Spain of a dying Franco signs with Morocco and Mauritania a declaration of principles transferring the responsibilities and powers Spain possesses over the territory “as administering Power”: administration, not sovereignty, and the text registered with the United Nations says not one word more. Franco dies six days later. On 26 February 1976, Ambassador Jaime de Pinies writes to the Secretary-General that Spain “as of today, definitively terminates its presence in the Territory.” One hundred sixteen years after Tetouan, the last Spanish soldier leaves Saharan soil; Morocco reintegrates its southern provinces, and another history begins (that of the conflict sustained from Algiers), which is not the subject of this dossier.
What remains
A memory in three voices
What does Spain do with this past? The answer fits in one committee session. On 14 February 2007, the Congress of Deputies examines a motion asking for recognition of the chemical war on the Rif and a gesture of reparation. The deputy defending it recalls that “for the Rif, this was its Guernica”; a member of the Partido Popular jokes about the possible confusion between “the Rif and the Ritz”; and the motion is rejected by thirty-three votes to three, government and opposition combined. The session will even have its ritual counter-argument: the reminder of the bombardments of the Rif by independent Morocco itself in 1958-1959, brandished as in every Spanish debate, and as every time without a primary source. Nothing has moved since: not in 2018, not in 2022. It would nonetheless be unjust to reduce Spain to that refusal. The Spanish conscript of Annual, that peasant from Extremadura sent to die because he did not have the two thousand pesetas that bought exemption from Africa, was himself a victim of the system (the Spanish left says so willingly; it is on the rest that it falls silent). And civil society sometimes moves faster than the state: in the spring of 2026, one hundred years almost to the day after the surrender at Targuist, an Andalusian human-rights association launched a campaign for recognition, the opening of the archives and a solemn apology. The same week, the Congress hosted the screening of a documentary celebrating the centenary of the Alhucemas landing. Spain commemorates the operation it refuses to examine.
The archives ajar
Two clocks were nonetheless ticking in memory’s favor. The first was legislative: in July 2025 the Spanish government approved a bill on classified information that would replace the Francoist official-secrets law of 1968 and automatically declassify documents older than forty-five years; the Madrid press immediately listed what those boxes contain, beginning with the file on the precipitous withdrawal from the Sahara in 1975. The text would never reach a vote: bogged down for more than a year in committee, it lapsed on 6 October 2026, the day the dissolution of the Cortes sent Spaniards back to the polls for 29 November. The archives had come ajar; they have closed again, and the next Parliament will have to start over. The second clock is diplomatic, and it has already struck: on 14 March 2022, the head of the Spanish government wrote to Mohammed VI that the Moroccan autonomy plan constituted “the most serious, realistic and credible basis” for the territory Spain had left in 1976. The loop opened by the secret article of 1904 closed with a letter. There remain Ceuta, Melilla and the islets, last legacy of five centuries of presidios; we have devoted an entire article to Sebta, and that file has not finished living.
We must finally come back to the Rif, for it is there that this past best refuses to pass. A century after the bombardments, the region still awaits its cancer registry, its soil surveys, its epidemiological study: it awaits being counted. Fortuny never finished the Battle of Tetouan; Spain never finished the inventory of what she did to Morocco. Between the unfinished canvas of the 1860s and the sealed archives of 1975, it is the same suspended gesture. Morocco, for its part, stitched its territory back together piece by piece, from Tetouan to Tarfaya, from Ifni to El Aaiun. It can wait for the rest: it has already proven, four times over, that patience too is a policy.
- Franco-Spanish Declaration and secret convention of 3 October 1904; General Act of Algeciras (7 April 1906); Treaty of Fes (30 March 1912); Franco-Spanish Convention of 27 November 1912 — full texts, Digithèque MJP, Université de Perpignan.
- Tratado de paz y amistad (Wad-Ras, 26 April 1860) — Colección de los Tratados, official Spanish edition.
- Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- C.R. Pennell, A Country with a Government and a Flag: The Rif War in Morocco, 1921-1926, MENAS Press, 1986.
- David S. Woolman, Rebels in the Rif: Abd el Krim and the Rif Rebellion, Stanford University Press, 1968.
- María Rosa de Madariaga, En el Barranco del Lobo. Las guerras de Marruecos, Alianza, 2005.
- María Rosa de Madariaga, Abd el-Krim el Jatabi. La lucha por la independencia, Alianza, 2009.
- Rudibert Kunz & Rolf-Dieter Müller, Giftgas gegen Abd el Krim. Deutschland, Spanien und der Gaskrieg in Spanisch-Marokko 1922-1927, Rombach, 1990.
- Germain Ayache, Les origines de la guerre du Rif, Publications de la Sorbonne / SMER, 1981.
- André Tardieu, La conférence d’Algésiras, Félix Alcan, 1908.
- Expediente Picasso — Archivo Histórico Nacional (PARES), FC-Tribunal Supremo, exp. 50.
- ABC (Madrid), editions of 24-28 July 1921, 26 October 1921, 30 January 1923, 14 September 1923, 10-11 September 1925, 8 April 1956, 7 November 1975 — Hemeroteca ABC.
- Blanco y Negro, 14 August 1921 — Hemeroteca ABC.
- TIME, “Peripatetics: After 21 Years”, 9 June 1947.
- Boletín Oficial de las Cortes Generales, Serie D nº 255, 7 September 2005 (ERC motion); Diario de Sesiones del Congreso, Comisiones nº 747, 14 February 2007.
- Spanish-Moroccan joint declaration, Madrid, 7 April 1956; Fedala Protocol, 29 October 1956.
- Tratado de retrocesión de Ifni, Fez, 4 January 1969 — BOE-A-1969-694.
- United Nations General Assembly resolutions 2072 (XX), 3292 (XXIX), 3458 A and B (XXX).
- International Court of Justice, Western Sahara, Advisory Opinion of 16 October 1975.
- Madrid Declaration of Principles, 14 November 1975 — United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 988, I-14450.
- Letter from Spain to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, 26 February 1976 — A/31/56–S/11997.
- Statement by the Rif Memory Association, 24th OPCW Conference of the States Parties, The Hague, November 2019.
- Arthur Asseraf, “The Spanish-Moroccan letters of forbidden love that were never received”, BBC News, December 2023.
- El País, 21 and 28 July 2025 (classified-information bill; “Lo que ocultan los papeles secretos del franquismo y la Transición”, M. González); Congreso de los Diputados, initiative 121/000067 (lapsed 6 October 2026); Real Decreto 806/2026 de disolución de las Cortes, BOE of 6 October 2026.
- José E. Martínez, “Chemical weapons in the Rif War”, Frontiers in Political Science, October 2025.
- F. Ouahbi et al., Nador oncology hospital registry, 2023; Registre des cancers du Grand Casablanca.
- Mevliyar Er, “Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi: The Unknown Mentor of Che Guevara”, Terrorism and Political Violence, 29:1, 2017.
- APDHA, “Memory and reparation for the Rif” campaign, 26 May 2026; eldiario.es, 27 May 2026.
- Jesús Albert Salueña, « Mohammed ben Arafa », in El Protectorado español en Marruecos. Repertorio biográfico y emocional, Iberdrola, 2015.
- Gerardo Muñoz Lorente, Valencianos en la Guerra del Rif (1909), Editorial Club Universitario, 2012.
