Sidi Slimane was built in 1951 by Atlas Construction, and it was the first of the Moroccan fields to see USAF aircraft: on 13 July 1951 six F-84E Thunderjets of the 36th Fighter-Bomber Wing flew in from Fürstenfeldbruck in West Germany. The host unit was the 3906th Air Base Group, later the 3906th Combat Support Group.

From 29 May 1954 the base also held the headquarters of the 5th Air Division, which had begun at Rabat/Salé in 1951 and controlled the three SAC bomber bases in Morocco: Sidi Slimane, Ben Guerir and Nouasseur. B-47 Stratojets, B-36 Peacemakers and B-50s rotated through on temporary duty, and F-86D Sabres provided air defence.

Sidi Slimane then became the proving ground for a new idea. In July 1957 four wings of SAC’s Second Air Force each sent five bombers to the base to prepare for overseas alert; the 5th Air Division’s history says the B-47s there were put on ground alert, armed, fuelled and ready to take off at short notice, in September. On 1 October 1957 the system went live as Operation Reflex, with bomber crews serving 90-day tours abroad. By mid-1958 SAC kept six bombers on alert at each of its bases in England, Morocco and Spain. The 5th Air Division was inactivated on 15 January 1958 and replaced by the 4310th.

A fortnight after the 5th Air Division was inactivated, Sidi Slimane had its most dangerous day. According to the Wikipedia list of military nuclear accidents, which cites Eric Schlosser in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a B-47 carrying a Mark 36 Mod 1 nuclear bomb was making a simulated take-off when a wheel casting failed. The tail struck the runway, a fuel tank ruptured and the aircraft caught fire.

The fire burned for some seven hours. The bomb’s high explosive burned without detonating, and radioactive contamination was detected afterwards. The account derives from a US Department of Defense summary of nuclear-weapon accidents published in April 1981. The sources read for this page do not say what happened to the crew, and that detail is left out here rather than guessed.

Moroccan independence in 1956 made the bases, built under the French protectorate, a political question. The Americans agreed in 1959 to leave, and Sidi Slimane closed as a US base on 30 September 1963, when it was turned over to the Moroccan government. Operation Reflex was scaled back the same year.

As the Royal Moroccan Air Force’s fifth base it became a fighter station. Morocco does not publish its squadrons; French Wikipedia records that a Mirage F1 crashed 6 km south of the base on Monday 17 August 2015, and the English Wikipedia article on the air force lists a crash at Sidi Slimane that year.

Like Ben Guerir, it kept its American runway: Wikipedia gives a single asphalt strip, 08/26, of 3,445 metres by 43 metres, at 55 metres above sea level. Unusually for Moroccan bases, its number is not in dispute: Wikipedia’s list and Morocco World News both call it the fifth air base.

Its next role is visible in public contracting. In November 2021 Morocco World News, citing the Spanish site Defensa, reported that the first project in a 4.7 billion dollar programme to prepare bases for 25 F-16 Block 72s concerned the fifth air base at Sidi Slimane, including an aircraft arresting system, a safety management system, an engine test area, safety simulators and a specialised facility for storing secure air combat data. On 31 August 2026 the US Air Force awarded CAE a contract worth up to 42.1 million dollars for two F-16 Block 72 full-mission trainers, with work at Sidi Slimane Air Base to be completed by 30 April 2029. No Block 72 had been publicly delivered by October 2026.