The Arab rebellion that swept the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula in World War I is often viewed as a transitional event that signaled the evolution of’small wars’ from failed prenationalistic resistance to European colonialism into successful post-World War II insurgencies, infused with nationalism and guided by Maoist revolutionary strategies.

T.E. Lawrence encouraged this perception. The hero of the ‘Arab Revolt’ proved — at least to his satisfaction — that with proper organization and strategy, indigenous resistance could triumph over modern, or at least modernized, conventional forces. Given the dearth of military heroes to emerge from the undistinguished butchery of the Western Front, the charismatic Lawrence, tirelessly promoted by Lowell Thomas, argued in the 1929 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica that under optimum conditions the pendulum of victory had swung conclusively to the insurgent: ‘Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them the perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.’

Lawrence’s belief in the inherent superiority of insurgency can hardly have been ‘algebraical,’ because by 1929, few resistance movements had triumphed. Successful uprisings, such as the revolutions in Santo Domingo and others in the British and Spanish colonies in the Americas, had succeeded because of contingent factors. Nor was Lawrence willing to acknowledge that in the final analysis the Turks in the Middle East had been defeated by a conventional British army, not submerged by the Arab Revolt. Nevertheless, Lawrence was probably on to something, even though he also appears to have ignored the rebellion that did signal the shift from prenational to ‘modern’ insurgencies: the Rif rebellion of 1921-26, orchestrated by Mohammed ben Abd el-Krim.

Spain had been an African power since the reign of Philip II, but barely. Its presidios at Ceuta and Melilla on the Mediterranean had withstood Muslim sieges since the sixteenth century, and became the focus of indecisive skirmishes with local tribesmen in 1860 and 1893. Nevertheless, Madrid extracted some cosmetic concessions from the sultan of Morocco, while a penniless vanguard of Iberian immigrants trickled across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier, where they enraged the locals by pig farming or selling alcohol.

Left to its own devices, Madrid probably would have been content with the status quo. However, in the twentieth century Spain was enticed into Morocco furtively, on the coattails of the French and by permission of London. In November 1912, after more than a decade of intensifying anarchy and armed scuffles followed by meaningless treaties that the sultan was powerless to enforce, Paris ceded a zone in the north of Africa to Spain. ‘The bone of the Jibala and the spine of the Rif’ was not a gift. Rather, it comprised a tortured sliver of mountainous, unmapped, austere topography stretching 225 miles along the coast from Larache on the Atlantic to the Moulouya River near the Algerian border, inhabited by murderously independent Berber tribes.

The Spanish promptly set about segmenting what one Spanish official judged ‘the most intractable people on earth’ into territories and comandancias, administered by a military high commissioner through the nominal authority of a caliph appointed by the sultan. Tétouan, nestled beneath a sweep of somber granite mountains dominated by the majestic Gorgues on the banks of the Martn River, was occupied in February 1913 and promptly designated the protectorate’s new capital.

The inevitable swarm of Iberian riffraff trailed in the wake of the ill-disciplined, infrequently paid Spanish army to populate this beckoning colonizadora. Led by specially recruited units like the Regulares, a Muslim force created in 1911, and the Spanish Foreign Legion, established in 1920 and popularly known as the Tercio in memory of the troops of Imperial Spain, lice-ridden Spanish conscripts directed by a claque of corpulent, corseted generals cautiously crept beyond the Mediterranean fringe in October 1920.

Their objective was Chechaouen, a picturesque collection of whitewashed houses under pointed red-tiled roofs that stood in a gorge forty mountainous miles from Tétouan in the central Rif Mountains. Sergeant Arturo Barea found Chechaouen’s twisted maze of narrow streets that echoed with the sound of donkeys’ hoofs charming, more Spanish than Moroccan, like medieval Toledo on a moonlit night. However, the hate-filled glances of the population combined with the wind ‘growling in the depths of the gullies’ to lend an air of intimidating melancholy to the place.

By 1921 three hundred miles of roads protected by blockhouses and diminutive posts crisscrossed the colony, a narrow-gauge railroad linked Ceuta with Tétouan, and Africanistas — Spaniards who supported Spain’s colonial vocation in Africa — boasted that Morocco glittered like an imperial jewel, a replacement for Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, colonies that the United States filched in 1898. Nevertheless, Barea found Spain’s civilizing mission in Africa a hollow enterprise, a combination of battlefield, brothel, and ‘an immense tavern.’ More ominous, other observers noted that Spanish authority over the fiercely independent tribes remained a fiction of ‘indirect rule’ so long as they were present in only one-third of the territory of the Riffians.

Even to venture beyond the city walls of Tétouan invited a bullet from pacos — snipers armed with Remington rifles easily purchased in the French zone, who lurked along the main road and who even potted the ‘fish train,’ so named because it brought the daily catch from Ceuta to Tétouan. Worse for the Spanish, the casual violence that punctuated everyday life in the Rif masked deeper currents of resistance that were organizing beyond the areas of imperial control.

That resistance was orchestrated and channeled by a remarkable leader, Abd el-Krim. At first glance, Krim appeared an unlikely Mahdi of mayhem. Short and bearded, with penetrating brown eyes, Krim graduated from Spanish schools, and after a period studying Islamic law at the celebrated medersa at Fez, served as editor of the Arabic supplement of Melilla’s Spanish-language newspaper, occupied important positions in the Spanish-run Bureau of Native Affairs, and acted as a cadi, or Muslim judge.

But those closest to their imperial masters often converted into their most tenacious adversaries. Krim proved to be no exception. In 1917 the thirty-five-year-old Krim was jailed for anti-Spanish views. Released the following year, he eventually took to the hills in 1919 because he feared that Spanish authorities might extradite him to the French zone. By 1921, as the Spanish congratulated themselves on the occupation of Chechaouen, Krim, together with his younger brother (his father had died after eating poisoned eggs allegedly supplied by the Spanish), collected between three and six thousand notoriously factious tribesmen for a campaign to free the Riffians from Spanish rule. It proved easy enough to do — many tribes had been driven to starvation, and to Algeria, by Spanish exactions and punative campaigns.

Krim’s plan was simple: Take advantage of the overextension of twenty-five thousand troops under impetuous Africanista general Manuel Silvestre, who prodded cautiously west from Melilla toward Alhucemas Bay with the objective of pacifying the Beni Urriaguel tribe. Silvestre was spoiling for a fight that would intimidate the Moors into submission. This was imprudent, given the state of his forces. Morale, never high among Spanish conscripts at the best of times, had bottomed out in Silvestre’s command, which was scattered along a road that had reached Buy Meyan, a couple of kilometers past the outpost of Anual, an inland camp that sprawled over three small hills encased in a dusty valley.

Along the Melilla to Anual road, soldiers festered for weeks on end in hundreds of filthy, poorly constructed, lice-infested twelve-man blockhouses interspersed with larger battalion-sized forts. Because the Spanish army’s limited medical services remained well to the rear, a wound or an all-too-common affliction like typhus carried with it a virtual death sentence. Many soldiers shivered with malaria.

Nevertheless, when a group of tribesmen presented themselves to Silvestre in May 1921 and asked him to cross the Amekran River to establish a post to protect them from Krim, he jumped at the chance. It proved to be a mistake. On June 1, when a 250-man force crossed the Amekran at a place called Abarran, they tumbled into a well-crafted ambush. Native police turned on their Spaniard paymasters and joined in the butchery. The survivors fled back to Buy Meyan leaving 179 bodies behind.

Among the Riffians, news of Krim’s victory at Abarran, especially as the Spanish abandoned their dead ‘tragically denied the delights of paradise,’ was like flourishing a fish in front of a famished cat. Tribesmen wandered out of the hills in the expectation of an encore. When on July 17 Krim led his harka, or war party, against the etiolated line of Spanish posts, he took Silvestre completely by surprise.

What happened next was to become a familiar story over the next five years: Posts, surrounded and cut off, heliographed desperate pleas for aid announcing the imminent exhaustion of munitions and water. The Riffians ambushed rescue columns and hacked those making breakout attempts to pieces. Survivors drank liquid from tins of tomatoes and pimentos, vinegar, ink, or cologne before they began drinking urine sweetened with sugar. Then, one by one, the posts fell silent.

At Anual Silvestre swore and chewed his ample moustache as his outposts succumbed. Finally, on July 22, he ordered a general retreat to Melilla. It proved to be among the last orders he ever gave. What was meant to be a measured and orderly withdrawal dissolved into panic as Spanish soldiers abandoned their blockhouses, jettisoned their weapons, and joined the sauve-qui-peut moving through the oppressive heat toward Melilla.

Few arrived, including Silvestre. The general’s body was never recovered, although Krim was rumored to have donned Silvestre’s colorful sash and even to have carried his severed head to the walls of Melilla. The avalanche of panicked soldiery in retreat brought out more Riffians who, with an admirable sense of economy, preferred to strangle or stab the sick, wounded, and merely exhausted, reserving their precious bullets for escapees who were more mobile. Regulares, sensing the way the wind was blowing, slit the throats of their officers and joined the mayhem. A few refugees bolted for the French zone, while the Spanish navy rescued others from the shore. Occasionally an officer attempted to organize a stand or foolishly negotiated a surrender, which merely handed his troops over to slaughter. Aviators flying over the road to Anual reported that broken rifles and bodies, gently decomposing in the July heat, lay everywhere.

By the second week of August, the Riffians were camped beneath the walls of Melilla, a town filled with terrified survivors defended by 1,800 ill-trained conscripts. The main Spanish outpost in eastern Morocco was there for the taking, but Krim’s harka melted back into the hills, as if satiated by the carnage and content with their booty.

The Spanish suspended operations in western Morocco against Raisuli, a wily warlord, and dispatched a rescue mission by sea to Melilla. Barea, a member of the relief party, discovered rotting corpses everywhere. ‘I cannot describe the smell,’ he remembered. ‘It saturated clothes and skin, it filtered through the nose into the throat and lungs, and made us sneeze, cough, and vomit.’ His indelible memory of Melilla in July 1921 was of ‘ceaselessly vomiting, smelling of corpses, finding at every step another dead body, more horrible than any I had known a moment before.’

The Spanish officially put their losses at 13,192 killed, although many thought this a gross underestimate. Worse, 20,000 rifles, 400 machine guns, and 129 cannons had been swept up by the enemy. The Spanish had suffered the worst military disaster in the history of European colonialism, besting by several thousand deaths the Italian debacle at Adowa in Ethiopia in 1896.

News of Krim’s humiliating victory, inflicted by fewer than four thousand warriors, hardly improved already tenuous relations between politicians and the military in Spain. Officers and their vocal right-wing supporters blamed government parsimony for the defeat. The antimilitaristic left and regional parties decried military incompetence, ‘praetorianism,’ and outright cowardice.

Spain’s Cortes ordered an investigation, uncovering mammoth army corruption, which ran the gamut from senior officers siphoning off money voted for roads and barracks to junior officers and NCOs selling rations and even weapons outright to the Riffians.

Among the soldiers, Barea noted that the Anual debacle reinforced an already pronounced sense of listlessness, passive resistance, and evasion of duty. He reported soldiers simulating illnesses by putting mustard paper up the urethra, eating tobacco to induce symptoms of jaundice, applying a heated copper coin to the leg to produce an ‘ulcer,’ or queuing up at a brothel known to hire diseased women. ‘When officers tried to tighten up discipline, matters only got worse,’ he wrote.

Moreover, news of Anual electrified the Rif. Surviving posts came under repeated assault by tribes eager to jump on Krim’s bandwagon. In March 1922, the Riffians even managed to employ a captured cannon to sink a Spanish warship that ventured too close to shore in Alhucemas Bay. Yet the situation for the Spanish was probably better than it seemed. Krim’s prestige hit its apogee. He created a flag, printed money, and even sent out diplomats to plead his cause with some success.

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