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Denver – Research by the African Forum for Research and Studies on Human Rights (AFORES) shines a light on a new worrying trend of Polisario members being recruited to fight for jihadist groups in the Sahel.
Senior AFORES representatives stated during a meeting in Geneva that jihadist groups located in the Sahel were actively recruiting members of the Polisario militia as additional soldiers.
Speaking during a session with the Working Group on Mercenaries and the UN’s Human Rights Council (HCR), AFORES President Zine El Abidine El Ouali highlighted new evidence indicating the potential dangers of this trend.
“The sending of mercenaries by the Polisario and the Algerian services was once again illustrated with the neutralization by the French army in Mali of the terrorist known as Adnane Abu Walid Al-Sahrawi, who was trained alongside several other young people in the Tindouf camps by Algerian security before sending them to northern Mali to serve their macabre plans in this already unstable region,” El Ouali stated.
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El Ouali also recalled the infamous Tindouf refugee camps in Algeria had been utilized as prime recruiting grounds during the dictatorship of Muammar Ghaddafi. He said the Polisario and Algerian military actively recruited young men in Tindouf, arming and training them before sending them to fight in Ghaddafi’s loyalist forces.
According to El Ouali, these forced soldiers often committed “serious human rights violations” during the Libyan civil war.
After the collapse of the Ghaddafi regime, the troops were then sent to the Sahel, where they continued to commit atrocities for extremist groups, he explained.
Of the human rights abuses committed by these Polisario “mercenaries,” El Ouali cited “ethnic cleansing, kidnappings and bloody terrorist attacks against local populations and UN peacekeepers.”
The Polisario Front’s recent setbacks, coupled with the withdrawal of French forces from the Sahel, have now caused a situation for jihadist groups to recruit these trained soldiers to carry out additional bloody attacks in the unstable Sahel region.
The AFORES president concluded his remarks by denouncing the recruitment of these soldiers, often while still children, as well as allegations of kidnappings of political opponents, torture in detention centers, and the diversion of critical humanitarian aid.
While AFORES maintains the Polisario’s role in conducting these attacks, it also highlighted the Algerian government’s complicity and active encouragement of these tactics.
