Nabil Ahamjik jailed for Rif protest role

Mohamed Ahamjik has worked to raise awareness about his brother Nabil's case since 2017, when Nabil was arrested over his role in Morocco’s Rif protest movement. Nabil is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.

The Rif protests were sparked by the death of fishmonger Mouhcine Fikri in 2016, who was crushed inside a rubbish truck in Al Hoceima while trying to retrieve his confiscated catch. Since then, the movement has faced repression, with six prominent Hirak figures still in prison, including its leader Nasser Zefzafi, who was sentenced to 20 years.

The state’s response to the Rif movement reached a new turning point in 2017 when riot police used tear gas and batons to disperse demonstrators in Al Hoceima, severely injuring Imad el-Attabi, who died the following month. This triggered widespread solidarity protests across Morocco throughout the summer of 2017.

The Rif uprising was driven by the rejection of ‘hogra’, a term referring to humiliation and oppression, and by what activists saw as ‘the historical injustice that the region suffered for decades from the central power’. The repression of the movement has continued, with rights groups denouncing the arrests of Rif protesters, along with allegations of torture, ill-treatment in custody, and violations of fair-trial standards.

Jamal El Khattabi, born in Al Hoceima in the early 1960s, grew up on stories of armed struggle and of relatives killed in the Rif War. His father was among the young fighters who joined Abdelkrim El Khattabi, the leader of the resistance movement who united the Rif’s tribes and proclaimed an independent republic in 1921. The Rif War ended in 1926, marking the end of the self-proclaimed republic.

For decades, thousands of families in the borderlands lived off the informal trade that flowed through the Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. In recent years, as controls on the borders with the Spanish enclaves tightened, that trade became impossible. This left the borderlands poorer and pushed more and more young people to risk their lives to reach Europe, as the latest mass attempt to cross to Ceuta this summer showed.