Iran and its Resistance Axis suffered heavy blows since October 7, 2023: Syria’s Assad regime lost, Hezbollah decimated, the Houthis degraded, and Hamas annihilated. Yet the Axis is not shrinking. Its latest addition is the Polisario Front, which has been fighting Morocco over sovereignty in the Western Sahara since 1975. Polisario has little in common with Iran’s Shi’a proxies Iran in the Middle East. Yet their alliance serves them well, with the Polisario receiving international anti-imperialist solidarity and contributing to the Axis military efforts.
Polisario fighters are currently being held in Syria by the new regime of Ahmad a-Sharaa. Trained by Iran, they were reportedly part of the Iran-sponsored international resistance brigades defending the Assad regime. When it collapsed, hundreds of Polisario militias were left behind and detained. A-Sharaa has now ordered the closure of the Polisario office in Damascus, which remained open throughout the civil war. Alignment with Iran and participation in its mercenaries’ savagery should earn Polisario Western sanctions and isolation. Instead, it provided Polisario a place among the global left’s social justice causes.
The Polisario contingent among Iranian proxies in Syria exposes the growing cooperation between Iran’s theocracy and a nominally Marxist, but increasingly Islamist, Sunni movement locked in a territorial conflict with Morocco. Yet, in the realm of political struggles, such confluence is hardly novel. And neither is Western revolutionaries’ enthusiasm for it.
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union sponsored guerrilla movements around the globe, using them as proxies against Western democracies. Terrorists from all over the world converged on training camps in Lebanon and Libya, where they rubbed shoulders, participated in each other’s operations, and felt the bond of a joint international struggle. Western youth lionized them as present-day partisans fighting for freedom (they still do).
Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, last year took pride in the fact that comrades from his own M-19 guerrilla trained in the Libyan desert shoulder to shoulder with PLO and Polisario rebels, back in the day when the late Colonel Qaddafi, financed and trained anti-Western armed revolutionaries in his own hosted terrorist training camps. Petro, who said that “we were there together touching the stars in the desert,” neatly captured the romantic throwback to a revolutionary past, which Iran has now revived, with an Islamist tinge, through its proxy policy.
Today’s revolutionary bromance is well on display, beyond the fields of battle where Sunni, Marxist, anti-Moroccan Polisario fighters bonded with Iran’s Shi’a proxies. Activists phrase its logic differently from their predecessors – through intersectionality, which “encourages solidarity and coalition-building between different marginalized groups, recognizing that … liberation struggles … are intertwined with other social justice movements.” It’s not classic Marxism, but it justifies an alliance between Iran’s Axis members, feminists, old-fashioned Marxists, indigenous rights and climate warriors that resembles Cold War era Soviet-backed Western activism.
Consider the growing crowds of Gaza flotilla activists. Last January, just months before she sailed to Gaza, as part of the Gaza Global Flotilla initiative, Swedish climate icon Greta Thunberg was in Tindouf, Algeria, to participate in a Polisario global solidarity event also attended by Kurdish separatists, Palestinian activists and a hodgepodge of other Western social justice groups: “The struggle for a liberated Western Sahara is everyone’s struggle” announced Thunberg on her Instagram, explaining that climate justice could not exist “on occupied land.”
This same vision guides others, such as French Member of the European Parliament, Rima Hassan, one of Greta’s Flotilla companions. Hassan is a veteran Polisario supporter and has called Algeria, Polisario’s main backer, as “the Mecca of revolutionaries and freedom.” For Greta and Rima, intersectionality means that each social justice cause is connected to the next. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Polisario are exploiting Western social justice activists’ naivete to blend their battles into a global struggle for social justice and recruit them to their ranks.
The Freedom Flotilla activists are not alone in their romanticized view of Iran and its proxies as worthy allies. Take Sayid Marcos Tenorio, a member of PCdoB, Brazil’s Communist Party. Tenorio is a long-time anti-Israel activist who presides the Brazil-Iran Friendship Institute and is the vice-president of the Brazil-Palestine Institute (IBRASPAL), whose president, Dr. Ahmad Shehada, is the brother of Salah Shehada, the late founder of the Hamas’ Izz al-Din Al Qassam Brigades and a personal friend of U.S. sanctioned, Italian based Hamas fundraiser, Mohammad Hannoun.
What binds them is the dream of global revolution, which Iran promotes through soft and hard power. Tenorio is a lifelong communist, a convert to Shi’a Islam, a frequent visitor to Iran, a regular speaker at Iran propaganda events, both in Iran and Brazil, and a Polisario advocate. He serves as vice-president of Assaraui Brasilia, a pro-Polisario NGO in Brazil. He traveled multiple times to Tindouf, attended a conference in Spain for the rights of the Saharawi people, and has a cordial working relationship with Polisario representatives in Brazil, with whom he traveled to Tindouf. Their cooperation has led to the blending of narratives and causes – joint events to support one another’s liberation struggles, including platforming, in February 2024, Thiago Avila, a spokesman for the Freedom Flotilla who last June sailed to Gaza alongside Thunberg and Hassan. The event marked the Iranian revolution’s anniversary. Avila, like Tenorio, Thunberg, and Hassan, supports the Polisario.
For these activists, their joint global struggle where multiple causes converge against a common evil – usually capitalism, the United States, the West, and Israel – may be a youthful impulse to mend the world. But Iran has captured their imagination and, through its support, cooperation, and exploitation of different causes, made them its unlikely cheerleaders.
The discovery of Polisario fighters currently detained in Syria shows the darker side of this confluence. It also highlights how activists, in their zeal for what they see as intertwined causes, could easily turn into agents of influence for the Axis, who, after all, represents the fighting arm of the causes they cherish.
Western societies know how these romantic pursuits end – in the 1960s and 1970s our youth turned to organized violence to usher in a better world. They should not treat them lightly.
Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi is an independent analyst and researcher focusing on Iran and Hezbollah hybrid threat networks.