--- title: "The UN is Leaving Western Sahara. What Happens Now?" description: "After three decades monitoring a frozen conflict, UN peacekeepers are withdrawing from a territory Morocco annexed in 1975, leaving the Sahrawi people without international protection." url: https://fronts.co/videos/the-un-is-leaving-western-sahara-what-happens-now.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/the-un-is-leaving-western-sahara-what-happens-now/ datePublished: 2026-11-04T21:00:06.000Z dateModified: 2026-11-04T21:00:06.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 5014 --- After 35 years of continuous deployment, United Nations peacekeepers are leaving the disputed territory of Western Sahara. But the reason that those peacekeepers are headed home isn't because Westerns are a suddenly becomes safe, stable, or least of all sovereign. Instead, they're leaving because the United Nations has failed to renew their mandate following a slow but steady breakdown of consensus amongst global powers over how the territory should be handled. With UN forces on their way out, Western Sahara's frozen conflict is at risk of reigniting. Morocco has been eyeing total control of the territory for decades, and it's been working hard to consolidate its control over the vast area that it's already captured. Neighbouring Algeria is changing its approach to the wider region, seeming to anticipate the tensions will rise again very soon. The rebel Polisario Front is looking at what might be its final stand at a moment when other global conflicts have given the group a potential roadmap to get the whole world's attention through highly destructive means. And as we've become so used to seeing over the last couple of years, global powers have taken an interest in the region for decades now appear all too happy to abd icate the responsibility they once took on, even as hundreds of thousands of civilian lives still hang in the balance. Moving out Although the conflict in the Western Sahara region is mostly frozen today, it's been a fixture of North African affairs for more than half a century. The first kicked off in 1975, nearly two decades after neighbouring Morocco gained its independence, when Spain also withdrew from the territory, though as then known as the Spanish Sahara. Even then the vast mostly desert territory was regarded as a dangerous and law less place, with the Spanish occupying several key cities and pockets of land along the coast, but largely kept out of the interior by several generations of insurgency by the indigenous population. That population is known as the Sarawi, a group that had been working for decades by that time to establish its independence, including a return to military resistance to Spanish rule. After the leader of a peaceful Sarawi sovereignty movement, Muhammad Basiri always kidnapped and disappeared by the Spanish in 1970. By the following year, a group of Sarawi students in Morocco will lay in the groundwork for a new liberation movement, known today as the Polisario Front. By the time the Spanish departed in 1975, the Polisario Front was already the most powerful political group in the Western Sahara territory, according to UN observers, and it had secured the backing of neighboring Algeria as well as Libya. But although the United Nations had explicitly endorsed the idea of Sarawi's self-determination in Western Sahara, citing a "overwhelming consensus" among the population, the neighboring Kingdom of Morocco had other ideas. The agreement that dictated the Spanish withdrawal, known as the Madrid Accords, had called for administrative control of the territory to be divided between Morocco and Mauritania, in an arrangement that both nations tried to enforce, at least for a little while, but one that Mauritania backed away from by 1979. Drawing on the support of the civilian population, the Polisario Front opposed Morocco for nearly 16 straight years in a grinding guerrilla war that saw Moroccan forces creep across a greater and greater share of the territory. With Moroccan military action, came a corresponding push to settle the region, starting with a 1975 act known as the Green March, when around 350,000 Moroccan civilians entered Western Sahara under military escort, foreshadowing the waves of settlers that would arrive in the coming decades. While the total death toll of the Western Sahara War is unknown, most estimates placed the figure up between 10,000 and 20,000. Once the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 1991, Morocco set about entrenching its control of roughly 80% of the territory, reinforcing a massive fortified sand burn that it constructed during the 1980s around the area it occupies, while developing as much of the territory as it can. The Sarawi population was split. Some ended up living in Moroccan-controlled areas, where segments of the population engaged in a pair of long-running interfarders between 1999 and 2005, and have continued to advocate for self-determination, while others have integrated into Moroccan society. On the other side of the war, the Polisario's controlled, mostly depopulated, barren inland areas, while roughly 170,000 civilians lived across the border in Algeria, mostly in mass displacement camps in Tindouff province, where the Polisario Front rules that an autonomous local government would support from Algiers. While some Sarawis have moved elsewhere over the last few decades, most of the Algerian refugee population still lives in those same camps, in one of the longest ongoing refugee settlements anywhere in the world. As for the ceasefire, that broke down in 2020, and ever since, the Polisario's have fought a low-grade insurgency that mostly targets Moroccan installations across the sand burn. The death tolls believed to be in the hundreds since that time, with Morocco preferring to use drones and occasional manned airstrikes instead of pushing ground troops past the border wall. Since the ceasefire went into effect in 1991, the United Nations has sustained the peacekeeping force at the heart of today's problem, an unarmed mission known by the acronym MINUSO. Based in Laoon, the largest city in western Sahara, a dog-paper, the capital of the partially recognized Sarawi Arab Democratic Republic, MINUSO has never been a particularly large deployment, but its on-the-ground presence as a ceasefire monitor has helped to make it inconvenient for either Morocco or the Polisario's to change the situation on the ground by force. Even after the ceasefire fell apart, MINUSO has helped prevent a cycle of escalation. Morocco maintains international tolerance of its conduct in western Sahara by providing a carefully manicured image of stable, benevolent administration, while the Pol isario front preserves its relationship with world governments and international bodies by making sure not to engage in the sorts of tactics against the sorts of targets that might see it labeled as out of control or even terroristic in nature. While the size of the force has fluctuated, it generally consists of a bit over 200 uniformed personnel and a similar number of civilians distributed across total at nine camps, several on each side of the burn, as well as a liaison office in Algeria's Tindouff. But last week, MINUSO's mission came to an end after the United Nations Security Council failed to agree on an extension of its mandate. In the final series of votes on the topic on Friday, 30 October, Russia chose to use its veto to defeat a US-backed resolution that would have wound down MINUSO by 2027 while endorsing Morocco's demand for sovereignty over western Sahara. Russia had introduced its own counter-proposal, which would have extended MINUS O for another year and basically kicked the can until 2027. That vote failed too, although the US didn't have to exercise its veto, because 11 of the Security Council's 15 members chose to abstain. With no time left to introduce alternative proposals or even begin the process to find a compromise of some kind, MINUSO's mandate expired by default two days afterward on the 1st of November. So, as of now, this peacekeeping force, which had been active, again for 35 years straight, has already ceased to exist. A convenient destruction Now, if that seems like a suspiciously clean breakdown by the UN Security Council on an issue that doesn't seem clean or easy to navigate at all, well, you would be correct. The voters on the 30th of October were the quiet culmination of several years of diplomatic breakdown as a growing number of influential nations, including the United States, have chosen to move away from MINUSO and the UN-broke could plan to hold a referendum for Sarawi independence. Instead, those nations have started to rally around Morocco's vision for Western Sahara to the point that the ceasefire arrangements that were supposed to govern the territory's future have long since become a dead letter. To be clear, the movements of the United States and other countries in Morocco 's direction has only come after a protracted deadlock over the original referendum plan. Bravo was initially scheduled to take place in 1992, but the decision over whether only indigenous Sarawis could vote or whether the vote should include Moroccan settlers has paralyzed the process from the get-go. Morocco made its first big push to shift course on the issue in 2007, when it offered a proposal to transition into managed autonomy for the Sarawis who had retained the right to manage their domestic affairs, while Morocco oversaw diplomacy, defence, currency management and other key functions for an entire unified country. The Polisario rejected that proposal with Algeria's backing and insisted that the situation would only be solved through a referendum in which Sarawis and only Sarawis would determine their future. Morocco, of course, already controlled the vast majority of Western Sahara, including nearly all of its easily habitable territory and had fortified its own position, so Rabart was more than happy to sit in an extended deadlock. By the time the Polisario front announced that they would break the ceasefire and return to an armed struggle, they'd gone another 13 years with exactly zero progress, and exactly zero reward for their decision to remain peacefully engaged with an internationally mediated process. By then, it was clear, in practical terms, that a Sarawi referendum, as written, was never going to happen. The alternative is Morocco's autonomy plan, which would, by nature, require Morocco's claim of sovereignty over Western Sahara to be recognised. For 13 years after it was first proposed, no nation was willing to overtly recognise Morocco's sovereignty, even if countries had quietly signalled to Morocco that they didn't actually have much of a stake in the matter. But that long diplomatic freeze began to thaw in late 2020, a bit less than two weeks before Morocco normalised relations with the nation of Israel under the US brokead Abrahamicards. The first endorsement of Morocco's plan didn't come from Israel, instead. It came from the United States, where Donald Trump and his first administration had offered the concession to Rabart in exchange for participation in the larger normal isation push. After the US, the freeze would otherwise continue for nearly a year and a half, until the former colonial power that once controlled Western Sahara, Spain, announced that it now considered the Moroccan proposal "the most serious, realistic, and credible basis for resolving the dispute." Just a few days later, France chimed in and agreed, completing a one-two punch that seemed to soften the global attitude toward the Moroccan plan considerably. By the end of 2022, two other countries, across the gap, Guatemala and Somalia. In 2023, Israel officially recognised Morocco's sovereignty claim, and after a year of no progress in 2024, the total of six states, which sides in 2025, including Kenya and Ghana and Africa and Britain, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands in Europe. Also that year, the UN Security Council adopted a US drafted resolution that said that a plan for true regional autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty could be the most feasible solution, Russia and China abstained, but neither nation cast a veto. After that, the floodgates had truly opened. Since the start of this year, the European Union has fallen into step behind Morocco along with two of the world's largest economies, Germany and Japan, and a total of ten other nations at last count. At the time of writing, 24 nations and the EU now support the proposal with a range of Latin American, European, African and Middle Eastern nations, regarded as being relatively likely to join the club sooner or later. The change certainly hasn't drawn the unanimous approval of world nations, though Algeria now remains Morocco's archival and an open supporter of the Polisario Front, while Algeria's main global backer, Russia, are stuck around in support of its allies' position. Over 20 African nations, including South Africa and Uganda, remain staunchly opposed to the idea, and it should go without saying that the Polisario Front considers both Morocco's proposal and the growing number of nations that have switched sides to be a grievous affront and an abandonment of their push for self-determination. Nevertheless, Morocco has played geopolitical chess deftly on this issue, regularly tying its demand that countries endorse the plan to all kinds of diplomatic and trade agreements. Morocco has also worked to shift the overtome window in the United Nations, and it's doubled down on overtures to the wealthy and influential nations that are helping to tip the scales. In one rather hamfisted example, but an example that seems to have been successful, Morocco has renamed the road leading into western Sahara, the Donald J. Trump Highway, and Robert has invested in a series of Gitzy infrastructure projects to expand and spruce up the roadway. Now with Manuso's mandate finally ended via the UN Security Council, Morocco has made it clear that there is no intention of either seeing the mission renewed later, or allowing it to be replaced with a comparable successor. Robert has instructed the UN to withdraw Manuso's remaining 155 military personnel and their equipment from the country right away, and has argued that with Manuso gone, the Security Council should now be finished weighing in on the western Sahara issue. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has emerged as one of the final, prominent voices pushing for a different approach, calling on the international community not to infringe the Sarawi's "inalienable right to self-determination." The UN will continue to work toward a resolution to the western Sahara issue, and Guterres personally voiced concern over the risk of escalation, offering that the UN could send a force to replacement also in the future. As the time of writing, there has been no sign of any new proposals to that effect, and Guterres' term is set to expire within the next eight weeks. As what happens next? Well, that may come down to the way Morocco chooses to handle the situation, now that Manuso is gone. Its expansion into western Sahara has always been a very careful dance, pushing for as much change as it can get away with, but never overstepping so far that the international community would feel pressure to step in. If Morocco were to react to the latest changes by, say, surging troops toward the territory beyond the Great Sandburn and starting a military campaign to seize the rest of western Sahara by force, then it would risk galvanizing international support for the Sarawi population and reopening historical wounds that it's been able to smooth over. Meanwhile, Morocco doesn't really lose much by maintaining the status quo, at least for a little while longer. It's convenient for Morocco's image to have this vast desert expanse that it doesn't actually control, but as we've mentioned, that expanse is barren, mostly depop ulated, and brings little economic or development potential aside from mineral and resource deposits where Rabart is going to keep itself busy for quite a while, exploiting the resources available in the parts of western Sahara that it already controls. Granted, we can't rule out the possibility that Morocco would send its military past the sandburm, betting on a globally permissive environment, and a growing dis interest among major powers to get in the way. And if that happens, then we also couldn't rule out a confrontation between Morocco and Algeria directly. Algeria's, like Rabart, has spent the last few years overhauling its military and a recent deployment of its forces to the war-torn nation of Niger demonstrates that after half a century of strict non-intervention abroad, Algeria is ready to start getting involved in global affairs again. As international crisis group regional director Ricardo Fabiani explained the Financial Times quoting here, "There may be a military incident or a Moroccan decision to take over the buffer zone because they don't think Algeria will respond." Then, all of a sudden, there is an impossible situation where the other side has to respond and accidentally, by mistake, you're on an escalatory ladder." But on balance, it currently appears more likely that Morocco will stick to its slow and steady assimilation. The Polisario front, however, is facing a very different situation. After Manurso's departure, the Polisario's will have practically zero international protection besides Algeria, no other nation or global body that's willing to step in and body-check Morocco. Whatever its next moves might be. The Polisario front itself is a shrinking movement, its fighters are under pressure from drones they can't deal with, and as young people become disillusioned with the status quo and with their own, Sarawi elders, those young people are choosing to seek opportunity abroad, migrate toward Europe, or even join trafficking networks in jihadist groups across the Sahel. Morocco has been leading a push to get other countries to reclassify the Polis ario front as an illegal, armed group, or even a terrorist organization, rather than primarily a political entity. All told, the Polisario front's position is deteriorating fast, but at the same time, the group can be reasonably confident that its strength today is the strongest that it's going to be for the foreseeable future. Among Sarawi's who seek to violent the oppose, Morocco's claim to the territory, that creates an acute immediate pressure toward armed conflict, toward radicalization, and toward the adoption of whatever new previously unthinkable tactics might provide some hope of changing the situation. And if the Polisario front has studied other global conflicts, then they know there's one particular tactic that is in vogue right now, long-range drone attacks against international maritime traffic. Over the last year, Moroccan and international authorities have warned of alleged connections between the Polisario front, Iran, and Hezbollah, including the supply of long- range Kamikaze drones, and while those claims haven't been publicly substantiated, the theoretical tactical upside is hard to ignore. The waters off Western Sahara support massive international fleets of fishing trawlers and processing vessels from Russia, Europe, and elsewhere, and cargo ships and tank ers rely on the nearby shipping lane to travel between Europe and Africa's Atlantic coast. Times went other strategic choke points, especially the Red Sea have been cut off. The area is even more important to handle ships that have been rerouted. Again, the claims that the Polisario front has gained the ability to target those vessels have not been publicly substantiated at this time, but the danger is impossible to ignore nonetheless, both because conflicts in the Middle East and the Black Sea have shown that strikes against trade ships are a very meaningful tool of coercion for a non- state actor, and because any such campaign could grant Morocco the pretext it needs to begin the military campaign that would otherwise be unthinkable.