In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes a massacre of French colonial soldiers in North Africa, carried out by a local chieftain by the name of El Mammoun (El Mammun in the English translation by Lewis Galantière). The location seems to be what is now Mauritania.
This reminded me of the green-on-blue attacks that happened in Afghanistan. For some time, there were constant reports of NATO coalition members being killed by supposedly allied Afghan forces. In 2012, 51 coalition members died from such insider attacks.
Here is Saint-Exupéry’s story about the insider attack in French Mauritania:
I had known el Mammun since he was our vassal. Loaded with official honors for services rendered, enriched by the French Government and respected by the tribes, he seemed to lack for nothing that belonged to the state of an Arab prince. And yet one night, without a sign of warning, he had massacred all the French officers in his train, had seized camels and rifles, and had fled to rejoin the refractory tribes in the interior.
Treason is the name given to these sudden uprisings, these flights at once heroic and despairing of a chieftain henceforth proscribed in the desert, this brief glory that will go out like a rocket against the low wall of European carbines. This sudden madness is properly a subject for amazement. And yet the story of el Mammun was that of many other Arab chiefs. He grew old. Growing old, one begins to ponder. Pondering thus, el Mammun discovered one night that he had betrayed the God of Islam and had sullied his hand by sealing in the hand of the Christians a pact in which he had been stripped of everything.
Indeed what were barley and peace to him? A warrior disgraced and become a shepherd, he remembered a time when he had inhabited a Sahara where each fold in the sands was rich with hidden mysteries; where forward in the night the tip of the encampment was studded with sentries; where the news that spread concerning the movements of the enemy made all hearts beat faster round the night fires. He remembered a taste of the high seas which, once savored by man, is never forgotten. And because of his pact he was condemned to wander without glory through a region pacified and voided of all prestige. Then, truly and for the first time, the Sahara became a desert.
I was curious if this describes a real incident. The answer is no, this didn’t actually happen. I couldn’t find any record of this warlord having existed or the massacre having taken place. A massacre of French troops of these dimensions would likely have left a trace in the historical record besides Saint-Exupéry’s recollections. El Mammoun must therefore be a literary composite. There doesn’t seem to be any record of any massacre carried out by supposedly allied North Africans on French troops that fits the description either.
Nehaveigur 