Before the French colonization in the 19th century, parts of southern and western Algeria belonged to Morocco. In the 1930s and later in the 1950s, France had integrated into what was known as the Overseas Département of French Algeria, the areas of Tindouf and Bechar. When Morocco gained independence in 1956, it wanted to reassert sovereignty over these areas. In an effort to cut the support that the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) was getting from Morocco, France offered to return those areas in exchange for Morocco stopping that support. King Mohammed V refused to make a deal with France behind the back of the "Algerian brothers", and agreed with the Algerian provisional government's nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas, that once Algeria gained its independence it would renegotiate the status of the Tindouf and Bechar areas.