Polisario Chief Back in Algeria After Spain-Morocco Row

The leader of Western Sahara's independence movement returned to Algeria Wednesday after six weeks of medical treatment in Spain that unleashed a tetchy diplomatic standoff between Rabat and Madrid.

Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali flew out of Pamplona airport in northern Spain overnight, with a Spanish government source telling AFP on Wednesday morning he was "in Algeria".

Ghali arrived in Algiers at around 3:00 am (0200 GMT), where he will continue his recovery from a severe case of Covid-19, top Polisario official Abdelkader Taleb Omar told Algeria's APS news agency.

He added that Ghali's improving health meant he no longer needed hospitalization in Spain.

However Ghali was nonetheless immediately admitted to a military hospital in Algiers, where he was visited by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune and army chief of staff Said Chengriha, Algerian public television showed.

Tebboune described the visit as "his duty" and reaffirmed his support for Ghali's cause, APS reported. The Algerian president also thanked Spain for welcoming Ghali and for the "delicate" care he had received.

Algeria is the main supporter of the Polisario Front, which has for decades fought Morocco for the independence of Western Sahara, a desert region bigger than Britain which was a Spanish colony until 1975.

Ghali's imminent departure had been announced late Tuesday by Spain's foreign ministry -- who had informed their Moroccan counterparts -- without saying where he was going.

His departure came hours after he was quizzed by a Spanish judge over allegations of torture and genocide, which he denied, in a video hearing from a hospital in the northern town of Logrono.

During the hearing, the judge declined to issue any precautionary measures such as seizing Ghali's passport or holding him in preventative custody, saying there were no "clear indications of his involvement" in the alleged crimes.

Critically ill, Ghali secretly landed in Spain on April 18 aboard a medicalized Algerian government plane, sparking a diplomatic standoff with Morocco.

The incident triggered a string of terse exchanges which sharpened after up to 10,000 migrants surged into Spain's North African enclave Ceuta, as guards in neighboring Morocco looked the other way.

The Socialist government of Pedro Sanchez accusing Rabat of "blackmail" and "aggression" over the influx.

It was not immediately clear how Ghali's departure from Spain would affect the tension -- although Madrid appeared to be easing its tone on Wednesday, with Sanchez's deputy Carmen Calvo speaking of "respectful and constructive relations" and "common interests".

Rabat remained silent, although it too had sought to step back from the crisis on Tuesday, with King Mohammed VI saying Morocco wanted to "settle definitively" the situation of the unaccompanied minors still in Ceuta.

However, on Monday it had said the crisis between the two countries "would not be resolved with (Ghali's) departure" because it was linked to Spain's position on Western Sahara which was "a sacred issue for the Moroccan people".

Speaking to AFP, a diplomatic source said the Moroccans had been "threatening to break off diplomatic relations with Spain for a few days now.

"But the question is whether they will go that far, and if not, what options are on the table after the rhetorical outburst of the last few days."

Isaias Barrenada, an expert on international relations at Madrid's Complutense University, said Ghali's departure meant Morocco had nothing left to complain about.

Ghali's presence in Spain "was just an easy pretext... to put pressure on Madrid and its position on the Sahara," he told AFP.

Morocco's authorities have long wanted Spain to acknowledge their authority over Western Sahara, as Washington did in December under former president Donald Trump.

But Spain says a solution to the status of the disputed territory can only come from a United Nations-brokered agreement.

Considered a war criminal by Morocco, Ghali has headed the Polisario Front since 2016 and is president of the Sahrawi Democratic Arab Republic, a self-declared state in an almost-landlocked area flanking Mauritania's border.

It covers around a fifth of Western Sahara, while the rest is run by Morocco.

Rabat has offered Western Sahara autonomy but insists that the territory, which is rich in phosphates and offshore fishing, is part of the Moroccan kingdom.

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.

Polisario Chief Back in Algeria After Spain-Morocco Row