Askari - Spanish Colonies

Spanish Colonies

As noted above "askari" was normally a designation used in Sub-Saharan Africa. Exceptionally though, the term "askari" was also used by the Spanish colonial government in North-West Africa, in respect not of their regular Moroccan troops (see regulares), but of a locally recruited gendarmerie force raised in Spanish Morocco in 1913. They were known as the "Mehal-la Jalifianas". This was the equivalent of the better known Goumiers employed in French Morocco.

Indigenous members of the Tropas Nomadas or desert police serving in the Spanish Sahara were also designated as "askaris", as were the other ranks of the Native Police (Policia Indigena) raised in Melilla in 1909.