al-Sahrawi was born in Laayoune, Western Sahara into a wealthy trading family that fled the city for refugee camps in Algeria. He joined the Polisario Front and received military training, but demobilised amid promises of a United Nations referendum on the status of the Western Sahara. He studied social sciences at the Mentouri University of Constantine, from which he graduated in 1997. A year later he joined the Sahrawi Youth Union. From 2004 he is said to have suffered health problems and depression, turning to Islam after contact with students from the Ibn Abbas Institute in Noakchott. Around November 2010, he left Tindouf in Algeria for northern Mali and joined the Katiba Tarik ibn Zayd, a unit of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb In October 2011 he was part of the group that founded the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, alongside the Malians Ahmed al-Tilemsi and Sultan Ould Bady, as well as the Mauritanian Hamada Ould Mohamed Kheirou. While part of MUJWA/MUJAO, he was one of its most senior leaders, serving on its shura council and communicating with international media as MUJWA's spokesman. By 2013, he was calling himself the leader of an organisation named the Mujahideen Shura Council in Gao, Mali. After MUJAO merged with Mokhtar Belmokhtar's Al-Mulathameen group in August 2013 to form Al-Mourabitoun, he was an important leader in Al-Murabitoun, later becoming its overall head. In March 2012, he was leading a group in control of the town of Askia. On May 13, 2015, Abu Walid declared his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and formed Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. Not all of Murabitoun accepted the move, with Mokhtar Belmokhtar denying that al-Murabitoun had pledged to Baghdadi, causing a split in the group. More than a year and a half later the allegiance was publicly accepted by IS's Amaq news agency. In May 2016, he was reported to have issued threats against the Moroccan government. In June 2017, al-Sahrawi accused the Imghad and Idaksahak communities of defending Niger and France and threatened retaliation against them. In October 2017, he led the Tongo Tongo ambush against Nigerien and US soldiers outside the village of Tongo Tongo, Niger. On 4 October 2019, the United States offered a $5 million reward under the Rewards for Justice program for information on his whereabouts.
Personal life
He is said to have married a Fulani woman from the village of Bouratam in 2016.
