The striped ground squirrel has a wide distribution in the Ethiopian region but is restricted to a small isolated area in Palaearctic Africa. This fragment was first recorded in the late 1940s in the Souss Valley (Morocco), however, not a single new observation has been published in the following decades. In September 2016 we surveyed the Souss Valley and found squirrels at 43 sites within the triangle between Agadir–Taroudant–Tiznit. Occupied sites were not distributed at random but occurred between an altitude of 45–254 m and on a substrate with coarse texture containing >65% sand. The vast majority of the sites with squirrels (69%) were classified as suburban, cultivated or both. Habitat suitability was estimated by applying geographically weighted logistic regression analysis. The influence of local predictor variables varied across the study area indicating the heterogeneous effects on the determination of the occurrence of the species. The modelled highly suitable habitat area for the striped ground squirrel in Morocco covers almost 690 km2 and only marginally overlaps the range for the species reported in the literature.