Canarian victims’ association urges US to designate Polisario as terrorist organization

As calls grow within American political circles to designate the Polisario Front as a terrorist organization, the Canarian Association for Victims of Terrorism has urged the U.S. administration not to overlook the group’s bloody past. In a statement, the association warned that any decision that fails to account for crimes committed against Spanish citizens would be ethically and historically incomplete.

According to the statement, the «dark decade» of the 1970s and 1980s saw nearly 300 violent attacks by the Polisario Front targeting workers at the Phosboucraa mine and fishermen from the Canary Islands, Andalusia, Galicia, and the Basque Country. These incidents, the association noted, are well-documented but have been largely ignored politically and in the media, particularly in Spain itself.

The association highlighted that Brahim Ghali, the current Secretary-General of the Polisario, was serving as Minister of Defense at the time and held direct responsibility for several deadly attacks. Among the most notorious was the 1978 massacre of the Cruz del Mar fishing vessel, in which seven Spanish sailors were executed in cold blood, and the 1980 hijacking of the Menci de Abona, whose captain, Domingo Quintana, was found strangled with a Polisario flag wrapped around his body.

In Washington, Senator Joe Wilson is championing a bill to classify the Polisario as a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, the Hudson Institute, a think tank focused on national security, has released a study detailing the group’s ties with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and its role in arms trafficking to jihadist groups in the Sahel.

The Canarian Association also cited an April report by The Washington Post, revealing the involvement of hundreds of Polisario fighters, trained by Iran, in the Syrian war. For the association, these revelations must not overshadow the older, unresolved crimes committed against Spanish citizens, which have yet to be addressed by any serious judicial process.

The group also warned that the Polisario’s violent rhetoric persists. In January 2025, senior Polisario figure Bashir Mustafa Sayed threatened neighboring Mauritania over its cooperation with Morocco. In publicly documented remarks, he called for bombing operations in Smara, Dakhla, and Boujdour, declaring: «Every activist should detonate three or four explosives every night».

In closing, the association stressed that labeling the Polisario a terrorist organization is not just a political or security issue, but a matter of transnational justice. Such a move, they said, would offer long-overdue recognition and redress to victims who have been abandoned by their own government and whose suffering has been ignored for decades.

The U.S. administration, the statement concluded, has a historic opportunity, to blacklist the Polisario not only because of its alliances in the region, but for its terrorist acts against Spanish civilians, many of whom perished in the cold Atlantic or beneath the rocks of desert mines, their stories long forgotten.