In late June 2025, Moroccan newspapers reported that General Saïd Chengriha, Algeria’s chief of army staff, had ordered the Polisario Front to surrender Iranian drones to the Algerian intelligence services, and redeployed Iranian militias from secret bases in Algeria to Sahelian states and the Libyan border.

The Moroccan outlets that reported the story cited a specialist publication called Sahel Intelligence, which in turn referred to unnamed sources close to the Algerian general.

While The New Arab (TNA) was unable to independently verify Sahel Intelligence’s claim, the publication frequently reports dubious stories damaging to Algeria and the Polisario Front citing anonymous sources, casting doubts over the site’s aspiration to be an “accurate gauge” of geopolitics in the Sahel.

TNA uncovered evidence that suggests that, rather than being the impartial organisation it claims to be, Sahel Intelligence is a player in the long running disinformation war between Morocco and Algeria.

Moreover, Sahel Intelligence was found to have been cited in well over a dozen academic papers, as well as reports by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the African Union.

The Polisario’s alleged ties to Iran

Sahel Intelligence’s June report came at a particularly sensitive time: amid calls in Washington for the United States to designate the Polisario Front as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation for its alleged links with Iran’s International Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The Polisario Front, backed by and based in Algeria, has sought an end to what it sees as Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara since Spain’s withdrawal in 1976. Rabat sees the territory as part of its historic lands.

The United Nations had recognised the region as a non-self-governing territory already in 1963, but a UN-sponsored referendum on self-determination has yet to be held.

Despite this, US President Donald Trump proclaimed US support for Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara in the last weeks of his first presidency. In exchange, Morocco signed a tripartite agreement with Israel and the US, now considered part of the Abraham Accords, that saw Rabat normalise ties with Tel Aviv in 2020.

Soon thereafter, the 29-year ceasefire between the Polisario Front and Morocco broke down.

Moroccan authorities have since accused Iran of supplying the Polisario Front with arms and training through Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and most recently kamikaze drones.

For its part, the UK government said in May that it “ha[d] not seen requisite evidence to raise concerns with allies regarding the allegation of Iranian involvement in training of Polisario Front”.

Sahel Intelligence

Sahel Intelligence presents itself as a specialist website providing “weekly strategic reviews” of Sahelian politics written by experts and published by a French firm based in Paris, GIC Conseil.

While much of the information concerning other regional states appears to be accurate, the website frequently publishes reports framing Algeria as a failed state on the precipice of balkanisation, as a result of “violent repression, risky foreign influence games, aggressive diplomacy and ideological propaganda”.

Much of the reporting consists of invective directed at General Chengriha, a figure viewed in Rabat as being particularly hostile to Morocco. Misbar, TNA’s sister fact-checking site, flagged Sahel Intelligence for disinformation in 2024, when the site used footage of a car accident from 2016 to claim that General Chengriha had survived an assassination attempt.

Sahel Intelligence’s editorial team consists of four members of staff: Samuel Benshimon, Marion Zunfrey, Frédéric Powelton, and Karol Biedermann.

When TNA searched for GIC Conseil in the French commercial registry, the only company bearing that name was established in 2004 and registered to an address in Marseille’s suburbs, not Paris. The company was then dissolved in 2010. Archived versions of the site indicate that it has been operating since at least late 2007.

Neither of the two company’s co-founders, Gilles Clavaud and Patrick Cournet, were among the staff listed on the Sahel Intelligence website.TNA found contact details for Gilles Clavaud, the former director of GIC Conseil, but he did not respond in time for publication.

The Sahel Intelligence’s four editors were found to have virtually no public profile.
The editor-in-chief, Samuel Benshimon, who according to Sahel Intelligence was an Israeli army lieutenant colonel, has a sparsely populated LinkedIn profile sporting only six followers. The profile claims he has been the director of GIC Conseil since 2001, three years prior to when the French company of the same name was established.

As for the other three, Marion Zunfrey, Frédéric Powelton, and Karol Biedermann, TNA was unable to find any public profiles for them. This is despite two members of Sahel Intelligence’s editorial team having reportedly had relatively illustrious careers. According to the website’s “About Us” page, Zunfrey was formerly an analyst for the Russian ministry of foreign affairs. A profile on French networking website Copains D’avant, suggests that Powelton formerly worked at the World Bank and Saudi Aramco.

Crucially, Sahel Intelligence’s internet domain was not registered in France, but rather in Morocco.

TNA contacted Samuel Benshimon, Marion Zunfrey, and Frédéric Powelton for comment via the email addresses provided on Sahel Intelligence but most of the website’s email servers were unreachable.

Taken together, the evidence points to Sahel Intelligence having been set up by Morocco-based actors to disseminate anti-Algerian narratives to be laundered into legitimate Moroccan outlets, such as in the case of the June report.

Sahel Intelligence’s output has also reached Spain, one of the main stakeholders in the Morocco-Western Sahara conflict. In a December 2019 issue of Ejército, the official magazine of the Spanish army, a report on Mali referenced an article by Sahel Intelligence.

TNA found that Sahel Intelligence had been cited by well over a dozen academic and research papers.

We asked AI chatbots whether the June reports of General Chengriha ordering the Polisario Front to surrender Iranian drones were true. ChatGPT-5 replied that they were true and corroborated among multiple sources, specifically citing Sahel Intelligence and the outlets which republished its articles.

Gemini Flash 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok 3 confirmed the existence of such reports, again citing Sahel Intelligence, but cautioned against relying on a single source, while highlighting that pro-Moroccan bias might affect credibility.

Riccardo Fabiani, International Crisis Group’s interim Middle East and North Africa programme director told TNA that Sahel Intelligence “is nominally independent but de facto controlled by Morocco and part of its propaganda campaign against Algeria and the Polisario”.

Moroccan authorities maintain “a façade of pluralism and freedom of the press through the multiplication of these private outlets, which are directly or indirectly controlled or policed by the security forces”, he continued.

Commenting on Sahel Intelligence’s self-portrayal as being based in France, Fabiani said that the North African kingdom “often employs non-Moroccan voices too to strengthen this perception of independence”, but in reality “they all sing from the same sheet and repeat the same ideas, which originate from Rabat’s security apparatus.”

In contrast, Algeria “has a tighter grip on the media and doesn’t entertain this fiction of pluralism”, he concluded.

Rising tensions

Amplified by Moroccan newspapers, Sahel Intelligence represents a sophisticated narrative laundering operation that disseminates inflammatory disinformation about Algeria and the Polisario Front.

Misinformation has also been a pervasive issue in Morocco. According to research by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, low trust in traditional media, paired with the heavy use of social media to access news, has left Moroccans vulnerable to “regular bouts of misinformation”.

Fabiani told TNA that disinformation and hostile rhetoric online from both sides poses risks to regional stability: “[It] poisons the atmosphere outside of social media […], infecting perceptions and debates in the real world in both Algeria and Morocco, fueling resentment and polarisation”.

So far, Algiers and Rabat have shown restraint over civilian casualties caused by the resumption of low-intensity fighting in Western Sahara. An increase in hostile rhetoric might however complicate the de-escalation of security incidents, warns Fabiani, adding that “popular pressure” and “violent rhetoric” might prevent policy makers’ abilities to call for a détente with their neighbour.