Tissa and the Rif War

If you drive northeast of Fes today on the N8, in about an hour you reach the turnoff for Tissa, a small town situated on a slanted plateau between sets of steep, red hills. In the 1950s, Moroccan nationalist Mehdi Ben Barka gave this road a bit of notoriety when he set out with a team of his compatriots to extend it from Taounate (today the seat of the province) to Ketama in the Rif Mountains. Called the "Route de l'Unité," the goal was as symbolic as it was functional: to connect the Spanish colonial zone to the north with the French to the south.

All this channeled through Tissa, which today is a scenic and friendly place comfortably off the beaten tourist circuits. Its best known for its annual fantasia festival, making it one of the few places to see Berber horsemen in action outside of a dinner theater, Medieval-times setting. 

The sleepy town was also at the heart of the joint French and Spanish campaign to defeat the rebellion-turned-Republic in the Rif in the 1920s. After 'Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi's forces inflicted embarassing defeats on the Spanish, they turned south and pushed towards the French zone. The French had used Tissa as a garrison town and administrative center from which they coordinated a line of defense further north across the Oued Ouerrha, below Taounate. The Rifi offensive officially lured France into the war; they would eventually send over 120,000 troops to defeat 'Abd al-Karim, who surrendered in 1926. 

This postcard, from the digital collection of the Fondation du Roi Abdul-Aziz al-Saoud (aka the "Saudi Library") in Casablanca is a small reminder of Tissa's time on the map. Sent from a French soldier back home to his family after the war's conclusion, it offers only a fleeting life in the field itself -- except his surprise at serving with so many Senegalese troops and so few Europeans -- amidst his wishes back to loved ones in France. The photo on the front side shows the town of Tissa (which now spills down the slopes), looking almost due north.