The Way of the Moroccan: How Cultural Stereotypes Shaped the Use of Moroccan Troops in the Civil War

When the Spanish founded the Regulares Indígenas (native regulars) corps in northern Morocco in 1911, thus using Moroccans to combat other Moroccans who resisted Spanish military expansion, they most certainly did not imagine that twenty-five years later, those same Regulares, along with the Spanish Legion and the Mehallas, who were troops belonging nominally to the Moroccan government but staffed by Spanish officers, would be crucial to defeating fellow Spaniards during a brutal civil war.¹ Yet the Moroccans’ role in the origins of Franco’s regime was not exclusively military, even if Francoists regarded it in such way. This chapter shows that