Western Sahara was an overseas Spanish colony from the 1880s until the mid-1970s. Mauritania and Morocco both laid claim to the territory after Spain withdrew, partitioning it between them.

We go to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, where activists are shining a light on Morocco’s brutal occupation of ...

"One of the more difficult places to visit is the sparsely populated territory known as Western Sahara," writes John P. Smith ...

Morocco and Mauritania occupied the main towns and oases of Western Sahara, and the POLISARIO's tactics were to attack these fortifications and attack enemy transports. A key target was the phosphate ...

Mauritania's Foreign Minister, Mohamed Salem Ould Merzoug, met with Staffan de Mistura, the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy for Western Sahara, on Tuesday, May 20, at the Mauritanian ...

News about Western Sahara, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. ... The former Spanish colony was divided in 1975 between Mauritania and Morocco.

Mauritania withdrew from the ensuing conflict in 1979, but the other two parties continued to fight. ... Morocco controlled about two-thirds of Western Sahara and all its coastline; ...

The dispute over Western Sahara – roughly 100,000 square miles of sparsely populated land to the south of Morocco and Algeria, and to the west of Mauritania – has become an "intricate" and ...

A recent report by the Migration Research Institute identifies Morocco as “the most stable country in the entire Maghreb” and ...

Choose more wisely. Perhaps these people could be resettled in the Spanish Sahara, which is a no-man’s land along the Atlantic Coast between Morocco on the northern side and Mauritania on the south.