Collateral Damage in the Desert: Civilians Pay the Price of America’s War - The Policymaker - July 2nd, 2025

[SSgt Waller]

Collateral Damage in the Desert: Civilians Pay the Price of America’s War
 

The smoke had barely cleared when villagers near Mheiriz discovered the bodies. Among them were men known not as fighters, but as farmers — unarmed, caught in the blast radius of what locals insist was an American airstrike. Grain sacks lay scattered among the rubble, a bitter symbol of lives cut short while tending the land.

 

In the dusty market square, grief turned to anger. Only hours earlier, American troops operating under the banner of “counter-insurgency” demolished a local shop said to have been frequented by ordinary families. Residents describe it as nothing more than a place to buy bread, oil, and tea. Its blackened walls now stand as stark testimony to what they call the indifference of foreign soldiers toward Sahrawi lives.

 

A typical local market in western sahara

 

For the Polisario Front, these incidents are not isolated accidents. They are the predictable outcome of a campaign that labels resistance as terrorism and dismisses local suffering as the price of “stability.” “Every bomb dropped, every shop destroyed, every farmer killed — it only proves what we have always said,” a Polisario representative in Tindouf declared. “The United States fights not for peace, but to keep Morocco’s grip on our homeland.”

 

Washington insists its operations target armed insurgents, not civilians. But on the ground, the distinction is lost in the dust. For the families burying their dead, the argument rings hollow. In refugee camps and villages alike, the message spreads: America has chosen sides, and the Sahrawi people — once promised self-determination — are now treated as collateral in someone else’s war.

 

As images of shattered fields and ruined storefronts circulate online, the Polisario claims momentum not from battlefield victories alone, but from what they see as growing proof that U.S. intervention deepens, rather than resolves, the suffering in Western Sahara.