A military leader of the separatist Polisario Front and three of his fighters were killed yesterday Friday in a Moroccan drone strike in the disputed region of Western Sahara, in the middle of a visit by a US diplomatic delegation to the region, the official Sahrawi news agency, SPS, reported.

The case of Western Sahara, characterized as a “non-autonomous region” by the UN, in the absence of a definitive settlement, has been pitting the Moroccan army against the Algerian-backed Polisario separatists for decades.

“The commander of the sixth military district, Aba Ali Hammoudi, a member of the national secretariat of the Polisario, fell in the field of honor along with three other fighters,” according to the agency.

The Sahrawi presidency declared three days of national mourning starting today.

According to a Saharan news website, “after fighting in the Mahbes area, the Moroccan air force retaliated using two Israeli-made drones.”

The Moroccan side neither confirmed nor denied this information.

A US delegation led by Joshua Harris, undersecretary of state for northern Africa, began a visit to the region on Friday as part of efforts to restart the UN-sponsored peace process in Western Sahara, according to SPS.

In April 2021, another Sahrawi military leader, gendarmerie chief Ada Al Bedir, was killed in a drone strike in Tifariti, a community in northern Western Sahara under Polisario control.

The movement, which proclaimed the establishment of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in 1976, following Spain’s disengagement, is demanding a UN-sponsored self-determination referendum that was agreed in 1991 but never held. , while Rabat, which controls 80% of the region, promises autonomy, but without questioning the national sovereignty of the Kingdom of Morocco.

After nearly three decades of a ceasefire, hostilities between the Polisario and Morocco resumed in mid-November 2020, following the deployment of Moroccan troops to a buffer zone in the southern tip of Western Sahara with orders to drive out separatists who had blocked the only road to West Africa, which they describe as illegal, since it did not exist when the two parties signed a truce in 1991.

In the last almost three years, the Sahrawis often talk about fighting and say that they are causing human losses on the Moroccan side. This information is never confirmed by the Moroccan authorities.

Once a Spanish colony, the Western Sahara is a vast area covered in desert and washed by the Atlantic Ocean, with waters rich in fisheries and significant reserves of phosphates.