The United Nations has begun winding down its peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara after 35 years, after the Security Council failed to renew the mission’s mandate and the operation stopped on Sunday, November 1, 2026. The mission, known as MINURSO, was created in 1991 alongside a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations between Morocco and the Polisario Front, and was meant to prepare a referendum in which the people of Western Sahara would choose between independence and integration with Morocco. That vote never arrived.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said November 1 marked the start of what the organisation calls a liquidation phase. Under that process, a smaller team under the UN Department of Operational Support will oversee the return of equipment owned by troop-contributing countries and the disposal of UN assets. Guterres warned of escalation risks and urged restraint, while reaffirming that the people of Western Sahara retain their right to self-determination.
How the Council deadlock unfolded
The immediate cause was the Council’s inability to agree on a successor to Resolution 2797 (2025), which had prolonged MINURSO’s mandate until October 31, 2026. On Friday, October 30, Russia vetoed a United States-backed draft that would have renewed the operation while changing the framework in which it worked: the text, backed by 11 of the 15 council members including France and the United Kingdom, would have made Morocco’s autonomy plan the sole basis for negotiations, cut the mission’s military component and renamed it MINUSO, dropping the ‘R’ that stands for referendum. A competing Russian draft, which would have rolled the mission over unchanged, then failed to secure the nine votes required for adoption, with the United States voting against it.
The end of the mission comes a year after the Security Council adopted a US-drafted resolution that accepted Rabat’s plan to give the territory autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty as the ‘most feasible’ solution to the conflict. Russia, which abstained in last year’s vote, this year vetoed the US-backed text. Morocco’s royal palace said the non-renewal of the mission was a ‘significant development’ towards withdrawing the Western Sahara issue from consideration by the Security Council, and said UN personnel and equipment should leave in the coming days. The United States has said it will work with the UN Secretary-General on an ‘orderly and stable drawdown’ that protects staff.
A monitoring gap in a fragile truce
The stakes of the withdrawal are real. Low-intensity hostilities have continued since the ceasefire broke down in 2020, and MINURSO’s presence, however limited, was the international community’s eyes on a vast desert territory on Africa’s Atlantic coast.
For the people of Western Sahara, the mission’s end closes a 35-year chapter that began with a ceasefire and a promise of a vote, and leaves the territory’s future unresolved. The political dispute is not settled by the mandate’s expiry, and the UN says its commitment to a political agreement providing for self-determination remains. What is gone, for now, is the peacekeeping force that watched over the truce.
