Rif War

 | MHQ  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Despite these rudimentary trappings of a modern state, the Rif remained an outpost of medieval factiousness, its people notoriously difficult to organize and eminently corruptible. The Spanish began to orchestrate a comeback with a combination of bribery and cautious advances out of Melilla. They cut a deal with the roguish Raisuli in the Jibala above Tangier, which allowed them to focus on Krim in the east. Battalions of conscripts poured in from Spain, along with armored cars and planes, raising the Spanish occupation force to one hundred fifty thousand men.

However, the brunt of the fighting was to be carried out by Regulares and legionnaires under tough, even ruthless, officers like forty-two-year-old Colonel José Millán Astray y Terreros, a veteran of the Philippine campaign against the Americans, and young Francisco Franco Bahamonde. ‘Believe me, it’s sticky going with Franco,’ Barea was told by one of his messmates. ‘He simply looks blankly at a fellow, with very big and very serious eyes, and says: `Execute him,’ and walks away, just like that. I’ve seen murderers go white in the face because Franco had looked at them out of the corner of his eye….You know, that man’s not quite human.’

Nevertheless, Spanish progress throughout 1922 remained intermittent, limited to lurches along the Anual road combined with small-scale amphibious operations on the coast designed, unsuccessfully, to pressure Krim into surrendering Spanish prisoners taken at Anual. Spanish troops reduced villages to heaps of smoldering straw, a few mangled bodies, and feathers of the chickens they liberated. Then they retreated to their camps that’smelled of jute from thousands of sandbags…of roast meat, of horses, and of soldiers, of sweaty soldiers with lice in every fold of their uniform,’ according to Barea.

These modest Spanish successes did not prevent Krim from consolidating power in the central Rif. He organized his mehalla, or army, around a core of six to seven thousand regular troops. He required them to pray five times a day, forego smoking kef (hashish), and suspend tribal and personal feuds. He supplemented these regular forces with tribal levies whose numbers were limited to around twenty thousand by the assortment of Mausers, old Remingtons, Chassepots, Gras, and even 1886 Lebels at his disposal. He also formed an artillery around two hundred 155, 75, and 65 mm guns captured from the Spaniards.

By 1923 he had established a hierarchy of rank, regular garrisons, and ammunition depots in designated strongpoints, with a system of distribution by mule trains and even a primitive medical service. Tangier, an international port, remained a sieve for the Spanish. There Krim could import supplies, weapons, and ammunition; court a crescendo of foreign sympathy; and raise funds, mainly by promising mining concessions to British and German firms. Furthermore, Spain was distracted by industrial and regional unrest and by political pressure to ransom the POWs.

The army reflected tensions in Spain. Juntas spawned in many mainland regiments to demand army reform. Increasingly acrimonious relations over pay and promotion, not to mention the future of Spanish presence in Morocco, developed between Iberian junteros and Moroccan Africanistas, a growing rift that culminated in Colonel Astray’s resignation as head of the Foreign Legion.

In February 1923, Krim proclaimed himself amir of the Rif, and by summer he had launched an attack on the Spanish outpost of Tizi Azza, tenaciously defended by the ‘Americans,’ as the Tercios were often called because so many of their recruits were pro-Spanish Cuban refugees. The standoff that resulted, combined with the fact that Spain’s high command obviously had no plan for winning the war, led to negotiations between Riffian and Spanish delegates in Melilla.

However, the war had caused ructions in Spain, where the abandonista position, enflamed by an antiwar press, was strengthened in August by mutinies in Barcelona and Málaga among conscripts bound for Morocco. So strongly was public opinion running against the ‘graveyard of the youth of Spain’ that when the army tried to discipline the mutineers, the government intervened and stopped the punishment. As Spain teetered on the brink of anarchy, fifty-three-year-old General Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaeja, marquis of Estella and captain general of Catalonia, intervened to set aside the constitution, dissolve the Cortes, and rule through a military directorate consisting of eight brigadiers and an admiral. Morocco had delivered Spain into the arms of military dictatorship.

In 1924 the Riffians increased activity against isolated Spanish posts. Worse for Madrid, a Krim protégé and ex-Regulare, Ahmed Heriro, emerged as an effective insurgent leader in the hinterland behind Chechaouen. Raisuli, whom the Spanish were now paying a princely sum to keep this territory free of rebellion, appeared powerless to stop Heriro. In retaliation for increasingly effective attacks on their armored cars — the Riffians dug trenches to stop the cars, then assaulted them with grenades — the Spaniards began to bomb Riffian villages indiscriminately.

By July Primo de Rivera had had enough. With the costs of war going through the roof, the number of Spanish casualties sky high, morale at rock bottom, and no victory in sight, he ordered a withdrawal from Chechaouen to the ‘Primo Line,’ a series of blockhouses sited on high ground to protect Tétouan and the coast. To appease the military, he pardoned and even promoted four officers implicated in the Anual disaster.

In September the evacuation of outposts around Chechaouen began. The Moroccans mounted no major opposition, but pacos picked off isolated soldiers, and on October 1 destroyed forty Spanish vehicles in an ambush. Africanistas oscillated between rage and depression; Franco had to be talked out of arresting Primo when he traveled to Morocco to supervise the evacuation.

On November 15, 1924, Chechaouen’s forty-thousand-man garrison began to filter down the mountain paths toward Tétouan and the coast, forty miles distant. The Moroccans, seven thousand Riffians and Jibalis commanded by Krim’s brother, bided their time, allowing the Spaniards to become strung out along the mountain trail before striking on November 19 in the midst of a thunderstorm. The result was predictable: Without proper maps, compasses, or good intelligence, officers of more than ordinary incompetence stumbled blindly at the head of their troops toward the coast.

Although the Riffian attacks did not touch off a panic similar to that at Anual, the result was probably worse. Every stream ford, every twist in the road crawled with shadows. The attacks splintered the Spanish column into small packets of desperate men. Wounded were abandoned, and even Franco, commanding the rear guard, forfeited five hundred legionnaires. When the last of the survivors crawled into Tétouan a month later, Spanish losses were estimated at between seventeen thousand and twenty thousand men. Krim had not only captured Chechaouen but the Spaniards had handed him another major strategic victory to raise his prestige, unite the tribes of the Rif and the Jibala, and supply bounteous loot to distribute among his followers.

Krim sent Ahmed Heriro to capture Raisuli, who subsequently died in captivity, thus eliminating Spain’s important ally in the west. Tribes between Ceuta and Tétouan, hitherto loyal, rebelled, requiring a costly campaign of subjugation led by Franco, whose legionnaires regularly sent ‘a hideous collection of mutilated human parts — severed arms, bunches of ears skewered together, hearts, and so on’ of their foes, in the words of one observer, to be publicly displayed in Tétouan’s Plaza de Espaa. Muslims in the French zone and even in Algeria began to speak of Krim’s rebellion in tones of admiration.

At this point, however, Krim overplayed his hand. Why, exactly, he opted to attack the French remains speculative. Up to this point his quarrel had been with Spain. The French had remained passive as Krim inflicted drubbing after drubbing on Spanish forces. True, Krim refused to recognize the Ouerrha River frontier established by the 1912 Treaty of Fez, one that divided several tribes between the French and Spanish zones. Yet most of the tribes south of the Ouerrha were Arabized non-Berber tribes, unmoved by the example of the Rif Republic.

Nevertheless, the prospect of an independent Muslim state in the Maghreb (chiefly the area of modern Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) stoked French insecurity. It took but a small leap of Gallic imagination to envisage Krim’s revolt igniting a rebellion that might sweep them out of North Africa altogether. Primo de Rivera’s retreat from Chechaouen only increased their anxiety.

So in May 1924 the French moved twelve thousand soldiers across the Ouerrha River and began to build blockhouses along a seventy-five-mile front garrisoned by Senegalese and Algerian tirailleurs, ostensibly to get a better handle on the Beni Zerwal tribe and protect them from Riffian intimidation. This was probably calculated as a preventive move rather than a war starter, a continuation of French attempts to strengthen control of tribes on the northern frontier.

True, the French advance did threaten to cut off a major source of grain for the Rif. Krim, already engaged in a two-front campaign against Spain, hardly needed a sustained war against a far more formidable French army. A general revolt in the French zone in his favor was out of the question given the firm hand with which the French controlled their territory. An attempt to seize a politically significant objective like Fez would simply offer up his army, whose strength lay with its mobility and dispersion, to French firepower.

Besides, inhabitants of Fez looked upon the Riffians as uncouth barbarians and were unlikely to rally to Krim. Moreover, the sultan, regarded as a holy figure in Morocco and whose attitude was critical to the success of any popular uprising, was a French puppet.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.