Places of memory of the Bougafer: Ikniouen and Alnif

On Wednesday 31 December 2025 a “space for the historical memory of the resistance and liberation” was inaugurated at Ikniouen by Mustapha El Ktiri, High Commissioner for former resistance fighters and former members of the Liberation Army, in the presence of the governor of Tinghir province and of Harou Abrou, president of the Drâa-Tafilalet regional council. The MAP dispatch, reproduced as it stood by the national portal, Hibapress and Le360, describes a building of over 500 m² on two floors. It contains a library with a reading room, a museum area displaying historical documents, manuscripts, photographs and tools, a multimedia room, a training room for young people and a lecture hall.

The dispatch explains the choice of Ikniouen by the battles the Aït Atta tribes fought there against the coloniser in the 1930s, and presents the space as one of 108 created in the Kingdom. The delegation also visited the military barracks built at Ikniouen in 1933; the first phase of its rehabilitation, 250,000 dirhams, was funded entirely by the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH).

Work had begun in spring 2025. On 28 April 2025 the website of the Authenticity and Modernity Party reported its launch by a vice-president of the regional council, for a duration of about five months. It describes in the future tense what the space will contain: an exhibition room for historical objects and documents, rooms for research, training and reading, and a meeting place for former resistance fighters. The High Commission was to equip it and supply archives and documents on the battle of Bougafer.

In March 2026, residents quoted by Hespress spoke of a “Resistance museum” built and equipped, and of the restoration of the former command headquarters at Ikniouen, said to have been used by Assou Oubasslam. SAGHRO believes these are the same works, without being able to verify it. None of the official texts names Assou Oubasslam or mentions a caïdat; only the 2025 text mentions the Bougafer, regarding the archives to be gathered.

The funding is unclear. According to the 2026 dispatch, the total cost is about 1.8 million dirhams, but the three contributions it lists (394,169 dirhams from the High Commission, 1,500,000 from the region, 300,000 from the commune of Ikniouen) add up to 2,194,169 dirhams. The 2025 text announced a total of 1,500,000 dirhams, of which 1,200,000 from the region and 300,000 from the commune. SAGHRO publishes both versions without choosing.

None of the texts consulted gives an inventory of the collections, the provenance of the documents on display, opening hours, staff or the activities held since the inauguration. The 2025 text assigns equipment and operation to the High Commission; the 2026 texts say nothing about management. SAGHRO therefore describes no object and publishes no opening hours.

On Thursday 12 February 2026 the “new cemetery and military plot of Alnif-Bougafer” was inaugurated after restoration. The communiqué published the next day by the French embassy in Morocco, repeated almost word for word by Le360 and Maroc Hebdo, states that the complete restoration of the site was funded by the French Ministry of the Armed Forces and its agency, the National Office for Veterans and Victims of War (ONaCVG). The site holds “notably” the graves of “fifteen Moroccan goumiers who fell in the battle of Bougafer, between 13 February and 25 March 1933”.

Present were the French consul general in Marrakech, Quentin Teisseire, the director of memory, culture and archives of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, Evence Richard, the director general of the ONaCVG, Marie-Christine Verdier-Jouclas, and “senior Moroccan authorities” whom the communiqué does not name. It gives neither the cost of the work, nor the history of the cemetery, nor the total number of graves, nor the names of the fifteen goumiers.

The dates vary slightly: Lakome2 places the delegation's visit on Friday 13 February, and the lead of an Al3omk article says “2025”, a typo (12 February 2026 is a Thursday). The ceremony took place in the anniversary month of the siege.

The sources disagree on who is buried in the cemetery. The French communiqué mentions only the fifteen goumiers, introduced by “notably”. The Bougafer Association of Alnif, which had proposed the restoration, counts about fifteen goumiers' graves and more than 63 graves of local residents, members of the makhzen and former officials, buried before the cemetery was closed; it mentions no French soldiers. The Abbas Messaadi Association of Tazarine, the regional office of a party in Errachidia and the World Amazigh Congress claim, on the contrary, that French soldiers and goumiers are buried there. According to Goud, members of civil society in Tinghir say the photographs show the site in the middle of a Muslim cemetery.

According to these accounts, then, Alnif is not simply a plot of goumiers, and not everyone buried there can be presented as an auxiliary of the colonial army. No document consulted gives the list of the graves; the names of the fifteen goumiers have been publicly requested, and SAGHRO has found no publication of them.

For the French embassy, the ceremony “illustrates the shared will of Morocco and France to value a common memory founded on respect, mutual recognition and the transmission of history to future generations” (translated). Le360's headline speaks of an inauguration “in tribute to the Moroccan goumiers”. According to the Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale website, which summarises a Le Monde article of 24 February 2026, a post by the embassy on X announcing the restoration was viewed more than a million times.

On the Moroccan side, the sources consulted quote no official statement. Goud claims that the president of the commune attended the ceremony and had coordinated it with the consulate before remaining silent, and that the High Commission for former resistance fighters did not speak; no other source consulted confirms this.

In a column in Maroc Hebdo (20 February 2026), Abdessamad Naimi calls it “a pure provocation”: “To honour the goumiers is implicitly to celebrate the French victory, the one that broke the local resistance” (translated). He asks how many resistance fighters have been forgotten, “their anonymous graves erased by time”, and rejects any tribute to Bournazel in Morocco.

The Errachidia regional office of the Annahj Addimocrati Al Amil party and the signatories of a petition in Drâa-Tafilalet (Lakome2, 18 February) see it as a provocation against national memory. The petition asks whether France would agree to restore and honour the graves of collaborators of the Vichy regime, mentions the graves of harkis in Algeria and demands an official apology. According to Goud, the Justice and Development Party called it a provocative act. According to Histoire coloniale's summary of the Le Monde article, Moroccan internet users objected to honouring those who allegedly betrayed the nation rather than its heroes, and part of collective memory likens the goumiers to the Algerian harkis.

The World Amazigh Congress (statement of 24 February, published by Amazigh24) denounces the absence of official recognition of colonial crimes and a tribute paid “exclusively to the colonial aggressors”. It demands an independent inquiry into who authorised the project and why residents were not consulted, and the location, identification and restoration of the graves of the resistance fighters who fell at Bougafer. The troop numbers it gives for 1933 are unsourced; SAGHRO does not repeat them.

Several of these texts call the goumiers “traitors” or “hired traitors”. These words belong to those who use them; SAGHRO does not adopt them.

The Bougafer Association of Alnif, founded in 1992 to do justice to the Bougafer epic according to Al3omk, says it proposed the restoration as early as 2012; the project then stalled, it says, for lack of sufficient funding after the commune built the enclosure wall. In a statement (Al3omk, 20 February) it dissociates itself from the ceremony: it says it neither organised it nor knew the guest list, and was invited as the originator of the idea. It nevertheless defends the restoration: “الترميم لا يعني التكريم” (“restoration does not mean tribute”), since in its view the aim is to preserve a material witness of the battle.

It demands an official apology from France, the protection of intangible heritage and collective redress through investment and infrastructure, and recalls that the remains of the martyrs lie in mass graves on the summits of the Bougafer. Goud claims that its president gave a welcome speech at the ceremony; the association's statement does not mention it.

The Abbas Messaadi Association for Development and Culture, in Tazarine (Al3omk and Anbaa Marrakech, 25 February), condemns the ceremony on the contrary: a provocation towards the people of the South-East, and a tribute to soldiers of colonisation and to elements who served it. It calls for the preservation of the memory of the resistance and for redress, in development and social terms, for the South-East.

The two associations agree on two points: the memory of the resistance fighters is poorly honoured, and the region is waiting for redress. They differ on the restoration itself.

The goums were Moroccan auxiliary units commanded by French officers. At Bougafer, goums, partisans and harkas made up the bulk of the assault troops, supported by the Legion, artillery and aviation; Gérardin names the 7th, 16th, 17th, 21st, 28th and 34th goums. On 25 February the 34th goum lost half its strength near the summits. The partisans included “Aït Atta of Alnif and the Rteb” (23 February, according to Gérardin); in mid-March the command kept 1,800 partisans, drawn mainly from the harkas of the Drâa and the Regg (Saulay).

The goumiers who fell at Bougafer were thus Moroccans, and Aït Atta partisans from Alnif also fought on the French side. For some, they are soldiers killed in action whose graves deserve upkeep; for others, men who served the conquest. SAGHRO sets out these readings without deciding between them. The defenders' dead, for their part, have no identified graves according to the Bougafer Association and the World Amazigh Congress; as early as around 1946 the journalist Jacques Soubrier described bones from both sides left unburied.

The two inaugurations belong to two distinct public policies. On the Moroccan side, the battle is commemorated every year (93rd anniversary in 2026) and the High Commission for former resistance fighters creates spaces of memory, 108 in the Kingdom according to its head; the one at Ikniouen places the Bougafer within the narrative of the national struggle. On the French side, the Ministry of the Armed Forces and the ONaCVG fund the restoration of a cemetery where goumiers are buried, presented as the expression of a “common memory”.

Each honours some of the dead within its own framework. None of the sources consulted mentions any programme to locate or identify the graves of the defenders of the Bougafer, which the World Amazigh Congress and, in substance, the Bougafer Association call for. Finally, local associations tie memory to a demand for development: it is absent from the official texts on Alnif and present, at Ikniouen, in the form of a cultural and training facility.

This reading is SAGHRO's own. It brings together texts that do not always answer one another, and new documents may correct it: an inventory of the Ikniouen space, a list of the graves at Alnif, official statements.