Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni

Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni traced his descent from the Prophet Muhammad through Moulay Abdeslam ben Mchich. Operating from his mountain fortress of Zinat near Tangier, he became a legendary guerrilla warlord, defying both the central Sultanate and European powers.

His 1904 kidnapping of the Greek-American playboy Ion Perdicaris provoked President Theodore Roosevelt to dispatch the US Atlantic Fleet with the famous demand 'Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!' Raisuni compelled the Sultan to grant him ransoms and the governorship of the northwestern provinces. In the 1920s, after clashing with Abdelkrim al-Khattabi's Riffian republicans, he was captured and died in captivity in 1925.