Maghrebi.org

Here in Saidia, Morocco, it sometimes feels like—or smells like—the world is ending.

I’m not just talking about AI preparing to exterminate humanity, or Trump threatening to nuke Iran while publicly lusting after men’s private parts as the first Muslim US senator dances mincingly to Taylor Swift. No, it’s even worse than that. It’s the smoke.

The Qur’an’s Surat Ad-Dukhan (“The Smoke”) warns: “Then watch for the Day when the sky will bring a visible smoke, covering the people. This is a painful torment.”

“The Smoke” has been interpreted by Imam al-Qurtubi and other great scholars as a sign of Akhir uz-Zaman, the end times—the global catastrophe that will occur shortly before the Final Judgment. A common interpretation is that a thick, suffocating smoke will fill the Earth’s entire atmosphere between the east and the west and persist for 40 days and 40 nights.

Interestingly, in 1985—1,375 years after the Qur’anic revelation—scientists discovered that the primary driver of Earth’s biggest mass extinction events has been planet-enveloping smoke. The evidence: a global layer of 65-million-year-old soot (the Cretaceous Extinction), a 201-million-year-old layer (the Triassic Extinction), and a 252-million-year-old layer (the Permian Extinction).

The strongest evidence concerns the most recent extinction. Sixty-five million years ago, a gargantuan asteroid or comet collided with the Earth, creating the Chicxulub Crater in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. The impact triggered global wildfires, and the soot from those fires blocked the sun, creating up to 15 years of winter. 80% of all species on Earth went extinct.

Scientists warn that a nuclear war today could have a similar effect. Even a “small” war using 1 to 2% of the global nuclear arsenal, meaning 100 to 250 bombs, could trigger mass firestorms and enough smoke and soot to make Earth colder than the deepest ice age. Crops would fail, and an estimated two billion people would die of starvation. A larger war could kill most or all of humanity. For an agonizing description of life in a smoky post-nuclear-war world, nothing beats Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road.

So planet-enveloping smoke really could be a sign of the end of the world. If Trump uses nuclear weapons against Iran, and Russia follows in Ukraine, we could be off to the races.

Meanwhile, here in Saidia, the smoke is—fortunately for the world—more localized. But if you live here, it is definitely a “painful torment.”

Nobody has dropped a nuclear weapon on Saidia, though the jealous Algerians eyeing our magnificent 14-kilometer beach from their humble mountain redoubts across the border may be fantasizing about it. Instead, the damage is self-inflicted. Someone, somewhere, has been burning rubbish. A lot of it. Frequently. And with apparent malice.

Who’s doing it? Nobody seems to know. When we ask the baladiya, the municipal government, they feign cluelessness. And when we ask the rubbish collectors on the street, they say it isn’t them, it must be someone else. Occasionally we manage to locate the vacant lots with the fires, which are lit late at night and burn down by morning. But by the time we get there, the culprits have already absconded.

Thanks to the rubbish fires, our lungs are endlessly irritated. It’s like having permanent COVID.

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This ongoing assault on the health of residents is presumably related to Saidia’s great 2026 rubbish crisis. Prior to this year, Saidia’s rubbish collection was contracted to Ozone, a Moroccan company founded in 2008 by Aziz El Badraoui to compete with the European rubbish giants that had dominated the Moroccan market. Though initially touted as a success story, the company faced headwinds after the 2024 arrest and imprisonment of El Badraoui for embezzlement, fraud, and forgery. Apparently Saidia trash collectors at some point stopped being paid, as the Baladiya cut ties with Ozone and contracted with a new company, SNJH1, over the summer and fall of 2026.

Unpaid trash collectors affiliated with the Moroccan Labour Union (UMT) went on strike. In July, Saidia, the famous “blue pearl of the Mediterranean,” started to resemble a garbage dump. The summer population explosion, during which the 10,000 off-season population swells to as much as 200,000, brought vast mountains of trash, which piled up in the streets and rotted.

During the autumn months the situation has improved, in terms of trash being removed from the streets. But some of it, somewhere, is being illegally burned.

Will the “painful torment” of Saidia’s lethal rubbish-smoke abate before the world ends? Or we all drop dead of toxic inhalations first? Only Allah knows. The baladiya certainly doesn’t.