Abd el-Krim

Mohammed ben Abdelkrim El Khattabi, better known as Abd el-Krim (12 January 1882 – 6 February 1963), was a Moroccan revolutionary, religious, political and military leader and the president of the Republic of the Rif.¹ He and his brother M'Hammad led a large-scale revolt by a coalition of Riffian tribes against the Spanish and French protectorates, and his guerrilla tactics directly influenced Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.¹ In Cairo exile he became one of the major figures of Arab nationalism.¹

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim was born in 1882 in the settlement of Ajdir, a son of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, a qadi (Islamic judge and chief local leader) of the Ait Youssef ou Ali clan of the Riffian Ait Ouriaghel tribe, who had been named qadi in the 1880s by Hassan I.¹ He received a customary formative education at a local school in Ajdir and attended an institute at Tetouan; at twenty he studied for two years in Fez at the Al-Attarine and Saffarin madrasas and then enrolled at the University of al-Qarawiyyin.¹ The Arabic article adds that he later studied Spanish law at the University of Salamanca for three years.² Both Muhammad and his brother M'Hammad received a Spanish education, the latter studying mine engineering in Malaga and Madrid, and both spoke fluent Spanish and Riffian.¹

In a 1952 interview he defined himself as an ethnic Berber, explaining that his ancestors were Berbers, while other accounts trace his family to an Arab patriarch from Yanbu in the Hejaz, and researchers disagree over his ancestry.¹

Following his studies, Abd el-Krim worked in Melilla as a teacher and translator for the Spanish native affairs office and as a journalist for the Spanish daily El Telegrama del Rif (1906–1915); in 1915 he was appointed chief qadi for Melilla.¹ Noted as Germanophile during the First World War, he was arrested on French insistence over an alleged conspiracy with the German consul, imprisoned from 1916 to 1918, then escaped and regained his post as a judge in Melilla.¹ In 1920, after his father had begun organising the resistance and died that year, Abd el-Krim together with his brother began the war of rebellion against the Spanish incursions.^{1 2}

In June 1921 a Riffian force attacked the Spanish post at Abarran, and then the army camp at Annual: in three weeks of fierce battles 13,000 Spanish and colonial troops were killed, a victory that established Abd el-Krim as a master and pioneer of guerrilla warfare and president of the Republic of the Rif, proclaimed on 18 September 1921.^{1 2} The French article describes the state he promoted as a modern reformist state inspired by Salafism and the Turkish reform movements, applying the sharia, abolishing the vendetta and making the five daily prayers obligatory across the Rif.³ By 1924 the Spanish had retreated to Tetouan, Ceuta and Melilla; after Abd el-Krim invaded French Morocco in April 1925 and reached Fez, France and Spain combined more than 250,000 soldiers against the Rif Republic, using chemical bombs against the population.¹ On 26 May 1926 Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French at Targuist.¹

Following his surrender he was exiled to the island of Réunion from 1926 to 1947, where he was given a comfortable estate and a generous annual subsidy, before ending up in Cairo.¹ In 1947, during his transfer to France, Moroccan nationalists freed him and escorted him to Cairo, where he received a hero's welcome and was nominally appointed head of the Liberation Committee of the Arab Maghreb, founded on 5 January 1948 according to the Arabic article.^{1 2} From Cairo he supported the Arab nationalist cause, corresponded with Ho Chi Minh during the First Indochina War, and encouraged the Algerian FLN during the Algerian War; he defined the Maghreb as Arab and Muslim, owing its existence to Islam.¹ After Moroccan independence in 1956, Mohammed V invited him back, but he refused as long as French forces remained on North African soil.¹

He died in Cairo on 6 February 1963, just after Algerian independence completed his hopes of a Maghreb free of colonial powers, and he was buried in the Martyrs' Cemetery in Cairo.^{1 2}

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