El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed (also known as El Uali, El-Wali, Luali or Lulei; Arabic: الوالي مصطفى السيد; 1949 – 9 June 1976) was a Sahrawi nationalist leader, co-founder and second Secretary-General of the Polisario Front.

His parents were poor and his father disabled, and with the sum of the severe drought on the Sahara that year, and the consequences of the Ifni War, the family had to abandon the traditional bedouin lifestyle of the Sahrawis, settling near Tan-Tan (nowadays southern Morocco) at the late 1950s.

[3] There he studied Laws & Political sciences, and met other young members of the Sahrawi diaspora, who like him were affected by the radicalism sweeping Moroccan universities in the early 1970s (heavily influenced by May 1968 in France).

[2] In 1972, he returned to Tan-Tan (former Spanish Sahara), where he began organizing a group called the Embryonic Movement for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro.

At that point, the Polisario Front, backed by Algeria and Libya, reinforced a guerrilla war against Morocco and Mauritania, who had substantially larger forces and armament, mostly from French and Spanish origin.

On 9 June 1976 El-Ouali was killed by a shrapnel piece through the head returning from a major Polisario raid on the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, in which they bombarded the Presidential palace.

In the retreat, pursued by Mauritanian troops, armored vehicles and aviation, a group with Ouali separated from the principal column, going to Benichab (about 100 km north of Nouakchott) with the intention of destroying the water pipeline that supplied the capital.

His position as Secretary-General was briefly assumed in an interim capacity by Mahfoud Ali Beiba, who was then replaced by Mohammed Abdelaziz at the Polisario's III General Popular Congress in August 1976.

[citation needed] El-Ouali is revered as a Father of the Nation by the Sahrawi refugee population, and there is a simple stone memorial built to his honor in the desert.