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. He and his brother M'Hammad led a large-scale revolt by a coalition of Riffian tribes against the Spanish and French Protectorates of the Rif and the rest of Morocco. His guerrilla tactics, which included the first-ever use of tunneling as a technique of modern warfare, directly influenced Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. He also became one of the major figures of Arab nationalism, which he supported during his stay in Cairo.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim was born in 1882 in the settlement of Ajdir, Morocco. He was the son of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, a qadi (Islamic judge and chief local leader) of the Ait Youssef ou Ali clan (or Aith Yusif w-'Ari) of the Riffian Ait Ouriaghel tribe. The Ait Youssef ou Ali is part of the two fifths that belong to the Ait Khattab hence the nisba al-Khattabi. He was named qadi in the 1880s by Hassan I.
Abd el-Krim received a customary formative education at a local school in Ajdir and subsequently attended an institute at Tetouan. At the age of 20, he studied for two years in Fez at the Al Attarine and Saffarin madrasas and subsequently enrolled as a student at the University of al-Qarawiyyin, the world's oldest institution of higher education. Both Muhammad and his brother M'Hammad received a Spanish education, the latter studying mine engineering in Málaga and Madrid. Both spoke fluent Spanish and Riffian.
In a 1952 interview with the weekly Akher Saa, Abd el-Krim defined himself as an ethnic Berber. He explained that his ancestors were Berbers and described the Berber people as "advanced people, who have inherited many civilizations", adding: "We speak Arabic, the language of the Quran, and we understand ourselves in Berber, the language of our ancestors".
Other accounts have offered different perspectives on his background. Riffian families did not keep formal genealogical records, making Abd el-Krim's ancestry difficult to trace. In his memoirs authored by Jacques Roger-Mathieu, Abd el-Krim traced his lineage to a patriarch named Zar'a from Yanbu in the Hejaz, belonging to an Arab tribe known as Ouled Si Mohammed ben Abd el-Krim, from which he derived his name. Zar'a is believed to have immigrated to the Rif and settled among the Beni Ouriaghel in the 10th century.
The researcher Mohamed Tahtah notes that most Moroccan and Arab authors consider Abd el-Krim's family to be Arab. Among these, some trace his surname al-Khattabi back to the second caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, while others assert a Sharifian ancestry. Abd el-Krim's father traced their family's lineage to a noble Arab family from Tlemcen or from the Draa in the Sous.
By contrast, Mohammed Azarqan, the foreign minister of the Republic of the Rif, maintained that his surname comes from the Aït Khattab clan of the Ait Ouriaghel and has no relation with Umar ibn al-Khattab. Orientalist Pessah Shinar argues that such claims of Arab ancestry "merely accord[s] with the universal practice among Berber leaders attaining prominence and need not to be taken seriously".
European authors such as historian Germain Ayache and anthropologist Robert Montagne assert that his family is entirely of Berber origin. Historian María Rosa de Madariaga also denies Abd el-Krim's alleged sharifian lineage.
Following his studies, Abd el-Krim worked in Melilla as a teacher and translator for the OCTAI, the Spanish 'native affairs' office, and as a journalist for the Spanish daily newspaper El Telegrama del Rif (1906–1915). In 1907, he was hired to edit and write articles in Arabic for El Telegrama del Rif, where he defended the advantages of European—especially Spanish—civilization and technology and their potential to elevate the economic and cultural level of the Moroccan population. In 1910, Abd el-Krim took a position as secretary-interpreter in the Native Affairs Office in Melilla, which brought him into close contact with the Spanish military bureaucracy and the town's civil society and gained a reputation for intelligence, efficiency and discretion.
Early in his career, he was designated in an 1879 document as "Abd al-Karim b. Muhhamad al-Waryaghli". This designation continued until 1902, when it appears to have changed after he became a judge, likely due to the prestige of his new position.
Abd el-Krim entered the Spanish administration first as a secretary in the Bureau of Native Affairs, and he was later appointed chief qadi for Melilla in 1915. He taught at a Hispano-Arabic school and was an editor for the Arab section of the newspaper, El Telegrama del Rif.
Before and after the outbreak of World War I, Abd el-Krim was noted as Germanophile, defending it on the basis of arguments brought from the Egyptian and Turkish press. Abd el-Krim offered himself as broker to the Germans to get them mining licenses in the mountains of Beni Uriaguel. His father was indeed one of the leading elements of the German–Turkish operations in the Rif.
In the midst of the conflict, he was arrested. The Spanish authorities sought to please the French, who had claimed the German agents roamed free in Melilla, thus they proceeded to hear a number of complaints on Abd el-Krim. One of the complaints dealt with an alleged involvement in a conspiracy with the German consul Walter Zechlin (1879–1962). He was imprisoned in Chefchaouen from 1916 to 1918 but then escaped. He regained his job as a judge in Melilla.
In 1920, Abd el-Krim, together with his brother, began a war of rebellion against the Spanish incursions. His goal was to unite the tribes of the Rif into an independent Republic of the Rif, to dismantle the entire French-Spanish colonial project in Morocco and to introduce modern political reform.
In 1921, as a byproduct of their efforts to destroy the power of a local brigand, Ahmed er Raisuni, Spanish troops approached the unoccupied areas of the Rif. Abd el-Krim sent their commander, General Manuel Fernández Silvestre, a warning that if the troops crossed the Ameqqran River, he would consider it as an act of war. Silvestre is said to have dismissed the warning, and shortly afterwards, crossed the river with 60,000 men and set up a military post in the foothills of the Abarran mountains. In June 1921 a sizable Riffian force attacked this post killing 179 of the estimated 250 Spanish troops there. Soon afterwards, Abd el-Krim directed his forces to attack the Spanish army camp at Anwal, which they did with great success. During the attack, General Silvestre, head of the Spanish forces, committed suicide when he saw that defeat was inevitable. In three weeks of fierce battles, 13,000 Spanish and colonial troops were killed. The Rifians' colossal victory established Abd el-Krim as a master and pioneer of guerrilla warfare, and the president of the Republic of the Rif. By July, the remainder of the 60,000 Spanish soldiers who were not killed or captured had fled to the coast, and into Melilla, defeated by an army of 30,000 Rifian fighters.
The catastrophic defeat of the Spanish forces at Annual and the ensuing massacre of Spaniards at Monte Arruit delivered a coup de grace to the Restoration regime in that country, and what it was known as the African "adventure" became referred to as the Moroccan "mess" or "cancer". A coup d'état led by Miguel Primo de Rivera installed a dictatorship in Spain in September 1923.
By 1924, the Spanish forces had retreated, because of more defeats at the hands of Abd el-Krim, to three isolated cities along the Moroccan coast: Tetouan, Ceuta and Melilla (the two latter under Spanish jurisdiction to this day). After Abd el-Krim invaded French-occupied Morocco in April 1925 and made it as far as Fez, France decided to take strong steps to put down the revolt. The French government, in 1925, after conferencing with the Spanish in Madrid, sent a massive French force under Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain to Morocco, where it joined with a Spanish army, with a combined total of more than 250,000 soldiers, supported by large numbers of aircraft and artillery, and began operations against the Rif Republic. By September 1925 the Spanish Army of África, supported by a combined Spanish-French fleet, landed in Alhucemas bay, barely a dozen miles from Abd el-Krim's capital and birthplace, Axdir, while several colonials and even metropolitan French regiments were coming from the south toward the heartlands of the Rifian rebellion.