David Woolman, a free-lance journalist and long-time resident of Tangier, has written a vivid but balanced and scholarly account of what might be deemed the first modern guerrilla war launched by a colonized people. From 1921 to 1926, Abd el Krim's Berber tribesmen from the Rif mountains in northern Morocco resisted a Spanish army of up to 200,000 men, in the end re-enforced by 150,000 French troops led by Marshal Petain.

Abd el Krim probably had no more than 20,000 tribesmen under arms at any given time. He was nevertheless able to inflict crushing defeats on the enemy. With their lines miserably organized and overextended in 1921, the Spanish may have lost as many as 19,000 men as they retreated in panic from Anual. Their losses were probably as great three years later, when their retreat from the holy city of Chaouen was a strategic victory of Spain, but a catastrophe as well.

Had the French not provoked him into making war on them as well, Abd el Krim might have succeeded in establishing an in- dependent Rifian state at the expense of an exhausted Spain. But any independent Moroccan entity would have endangered the French as well as the Spanish Protectorate that had been established over Morocco in 1912.