Independens Nortb Africa
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Crescent, one of the underground groups that had Communist affiliations. Individually the resistants were heroes, however, and the movemens were judiciously signaled out for praise in royal speeches although less favorably viewed by the Istiqlal, which did not intend to lose the fruits of its generarion-long campaign. Only gradually was urban order restored as the police got the upper hand, and as some of the resistants themselves were incorporated into the police while others drifted back to their ordinary occupagions wich the assurance that they would be given a ganut of veterans' benefits and special consideration.
The reintegration of the Liberation Army in che countryside
was more delicate. In the spring of 1956 it was continuing attacks on French outposts and government offices, and presented
a serious threat to order in rural areas where dissidence was an
old habit. If the new state was unable to control all its territory, there could be serious consequences. A Royal Army was created, mainly with volunteers who had served with French forces and on the basis of personal and tribal loyalty to the King. It was possible to integrate some of the rank-and-file of the Liberation Army, who themselves came from rural backgrounds, into the Royal Army after careful screening. But the Liberation Army had also recruited urban resistants and political leaders whose ideas did not seem suitable to the force the palace was building up, and so good parts of it were never incorporated. Regrouped in the far south of the country, they were patronized for a time by Allal Al Fassi and his wing of the Istiqlal, which began making claims to large pars of the Sahara in French and Spanish hands, and they unsuccessfully tried to seize Ifni from the Spanish in November 1957, a move which was meant to emphasize the intransigence of their outlook-for they had originally considered themselves part of a unifed force meant to liberate all North Africa and had close ties with the Algerian rebels-and embarrass the government. Although this was the last major enterprise of the Liberation Army, it lingered on in
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