Seven Sahrawi men who launched a hunger strike last month at a jail in Moroccan-annexed Western Sahara have ended their protest after being promised better conditions, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

Citing witnesses, the London-based watchdog said on September 19 that the men had been beaten in front of other detainees at the prison in Laayoune after being arrested at a demonstration in early 2014.

Spain and Morocco on Friday arrested nine suspected members of a group in north Africa linked to the violent Islamic State jihadists, the Spanish government said.

Spanish police and Moroccan security forces "today detained nine members of a terrorist cell... linked to the terrorist organization Islamic State", Spain's interior ministry said.

Morocco has jailed four men convicted of planning to join the ranks of jihadists fighting to topple the Syrian regime, the official MAP news agency said Thursday.

The defendants received jail sentences of between three and five years, according to the report.

Seven Sahrawi men who were severely beaten at a Moroccan jail in Western Sahara have gone on hunger strike to protest their ill treatment, Amnesty International said Friday.

The men had been handcuffed and severely beaten Wednesday in front of other prisoners in the courtyard of the prison in Laayoune, as well as verbally abused, the London-based rights group quoted eyewitnesses as saying.

Rapper Mouad Belghawat, a voice of Morocco's February 20 protest movement, was released from jail on Thursday after serving a four-month sentence for assaulting police.

The 26-year-old known as Lhaqed was freed from prison in Casablanca, the country's commercial capital.

Powerful Al-Qaida branches in Yemen and North Africa called Tuesday for jihadists in Iraq and Syria to unite against the common threat from a U.S.-led coalition.

An unprecedented joint statement from Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb urged their "brothers" in Iraq and Syria to "stop killing each other and unite against the American campaign and its evil coalition that threatens us all."

Morocco's interior ministry said on Friday that seven jihadists have been arrested for recruiting fighters to join the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

The suspects were active in the central cities of Fez and Outat El Haj and in Zayou in the north and also planned attacks against Morocco itself, a statement said.

A far-right weekly has sparked a firestorm of controversy by describing France's new education minister as a "Moroccan Muslim" and calling the appointment of the 36-year-old rising star a "provocation".

Morocco-born Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is the first woman in French history to hold the office of education minister, the latest step in a brilliant career for the telegenic protegee of President Francois Hollande.

Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq has been invited to the Gulf Cooperation Council's interior ministers' meeting scheduled to be held in Doha next week, al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Al-Mashnouq will be the “guest of honor” in the meeting that would also be attended by five cabinet ministers from the GCC countries, the daily said.

A clash between sub-Saharan migrants and residents of a Tangiers neighborhood in northern Morocco left a Senegalese man dead, the prefecture and an NGO said on Saturday.

A "disagreement" late on Friday between residents and "would-be clandestine migrants" involving the throwing of stones led to one man being killed and 14 injured, the city prefecture said, without identifying the victim.