France, Spain and the Rif, Part 1

In the mountains of northern Morocco, between 1921 and 1926, Spain embarked on a colonial adventure that would destroy its monarchy and reshape Europe. The Rif War began over mining concessions in a territory the French had ceded to Spanish control, but it became a catastrophe that bled Spain of over forty thousand soldiers, humiliated a nation, and directly precipitated the fall of King Alfonso XIII. When France intervened to salvage its own colonial ambitions, the conflict devoured another eighteen thousand French lives and ignited furious anti-colonial sentiment across Europe. Harris, writing with intimate knowledge of the region, reconstructs a war that contemporaries called 'the Spanish Vietnam', a grueling guerrilla campaign where the Rif fighters, led by Mohammed Abdelkrim, inflicted on two European powers the kind of defeat that would inspire anti-colonial movements for decades. This is the forgotten origins story of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Franco, and the violent unraveling of Europe's imperial pretensions. For readers who understand that the twentieth century's darkest chapters often began in places the world chose to ignore.