The Nomads' No Man's Land FREE ZONE, Western Sahara - Some parts of the Sahara are more of a no man's land than others. The most extreme example is the so-called Free Zone, a strip in the Western Sahara, with territory occupied by Morocco to the west and Algeria to the east. Strewn with mines and inhabited by just a smattering of nomads, the area is controlled by the Polisario Front, a state in exile that has been based in refugee camps in southwestern Algeria since 1976, when Morocco annexed Western Sahara after Spain's colonial forces withdrew. The Moroccan government claims that the Polisario Front is a cover for trafficking and terrorism and a puppet of Algeria, Morocco's rival regional hegemon. But Saharawi refugees, a group of Arab-Berber nomads, recognize the Polisario Front as the legitimate leader of the fight to free Africa's last colony, and they are backed by many African and Latin American countries. On a visit last week to the Free Zone and the Polisario Front-run camps in southern Algeria, I discovered members of a nation of about 120,000 growing increasingly frustrated as their struggle to return home founders. After Moroccan security forces shot and killed a peaceful Saharawi protester in the southern city of Asa, in Morocco, on Wednesday, Saharawis held rallies protest rallies. Hundreds of women in leather boots and brightly-colored malhafas, the three-meter cloth Saharan women wrap themselves in, marched on Thursday in the refugee camp called Laayoune, in Algeria, waving Polisario Front flags and ululating. Rest martyrs, because we will continue your ways. And despite tyranny we will prevail!" they shouted on the camp's sandy public square. Nana Moumen, a 26-year-old civil administrator, has never set foot in the disputed territory. "We were born here," she said of the camp in Laayoune, "but we want to go back to our land." "We want a peaceful solution, but if there isn't one, we will go back to armed struggle," she told me during the march. Her husband is a soldier with the army of the Polisario Front. The next day, I visited the wall Morocco built in the 1980s through the Western Sahara, creating a 1,500-mile diagonal division that is now guarded by 100,000 troops. A dozen enraged, waifish youths were camped out among the more than one million land mines in the area east of the wall. Moroccan soldiers and U.N. peacekeepers were filming them from the western side. "I want this wall to be removed so we can confront the Moroccans directly," said one 23-year-old female protester. The Polisario Front agreed to a cease-fire in 1991 in exchange for being allowed to hold a referendum that would let Saharawis choose between independence and integration with Morocco. Twenty-two years later, the referendum has yet to take place. Morocco still exploits the territory's natural resources, such as phosphates and fish stocks, and continues to install hundreds of thousands of settlers there. Meanwhile in Tindouf, the refugees are trying to make the most of nearly four decades in exile. They live in khaimas, traditional nomad tents, and boxy, cell-like buildings made of sand in one of the hottest, most remote parts of the Sahara. Although just two of the camps" six districts have electricity, all are clean and well-run, with schools and hospitals and training programs, as well as centers for women and youth and special-needs education. The Polisario Front even organizes an annual film festival and marathon. Boujdour, the newest district and home of the president's and many ministers" residential tents, is run by a female governor. All members of its Parliament and all government officials are female - a reflection of women's high status among the nomadic Hassaniya-speaking Saharan tribes that stretch from Mauritania to Timbuktu. The influence of accomplished women in senior administrative and diplomatic posts in the Polisario Front undermines the Moroccan government's narrative that the camps are founts of instability and insecurity. Likewise for the claim that they breed religious extremism. Saharawis overwhelmingly practice a moderate, regulated form of Islam and reject the misogynist radicalism of the jihadist groups that are multiplying in the Sahel. In 2011, several Western aid workers in the camps in Tindouf were kidnapped by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, which went on to seize and impose Shariah in northern Mali the following year. At least three Saharawis, including a senior intelligence official, described that event to me as their community's 9/11. I was put off by the metaphor at first but later understood what they meant - that the enemy penetrated what they had thought of as a safe space. The Saharawis" struggle is so painfully underreported that hosting the 7,000 or so foreigners, including human rights activists and journalists, who visit the camps every year is their best means of not being forgotten.