Seven Million Reasons to Remember Western Sahara's Forgotten Wall

There’s a wall stretching across the desert that most of the world has never heard of—and that’s partly by design. Longer than the Great Wall of China, the Moroccan Wall of Western Sahara stretches 2,700 kilometers across one of the planet’s most contested territories. But unlike its famous predecessor, this barrier isn’t revered as an architectural marvel. It’s called the“Wall of Shame,”and underneath its sand lie approximately 7 million buried land mines waiting in the dark.

The wall’s story begins in 1975, when Spain withdrew from Western Sahara, abandoning the region to neighboring powers. Morocco and Mauritania swooped in to divide the territory, completely sidelining the Sahrawi people who’d been fighting for independence since 1960. By 1976, the Sahrawi had formed the Polisario Front and declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), sparking an armed conflict that would reshape the region for decades. While Mauritania quit the fight in 1979, Morocco dug in—literally.

After suffering major military setbacks, Morocco began constructing its defensive line in the late 1970s. When work finished in 1987, the Berm had effectively split Western Sahara in two. The eastern section, controlled by SADR, remains economically isolated. Two-thirds of the territory, containing nearly all economic activity, stayed firmly under Moroccan control. The wall worked—SADR’s guerrilla campaign lost momentum, and a stalemate settled in that persists today. Since 1991, UN forces have monitored the ceasefire along the wall’s edges.

The human cost remains staggering. Those 7 million mines and countless pieces of unexploded ordnance don’t discriminate between combatants and civilians. The local population continues to suffer serious injuries and deaths from ordnance that refuses to stay buried. For the Sahrawi people, the wall represents something far worse than a military obstacle—it’s a physical manifestation of a conflict the world stopped paying attention to long ago.

What makes this story particularly haunting is how thoroughly it’s been erased from global consciousness. It’s the world’s longest continuous minefield, the second-longest wall in human history, and a symbol of a frozen conflict affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Yet it barely registers in international news cycles. The Moroccan Wall exists in a blind spot of geopolitical awareness, a scar on the landscape that remains largely invisible to those not directly affected by it.