JOIN USMoroccan jihadis: seeds sown in Iraq, Syria
The August 17 Islamic State-claimed terrorist attacks in Spain have demonstrated, once again, that young Moroccan men are easy prey for recruiters of jihadi organisations. Eleven men of Moroccan heritage are accused of ramming a van and a car into people in Barcelona and the coastal town of Cambrils, killing 14 and wounding 150. A Spanish vineyard worker was murdered and his car hijacked by the driver of the vehicle that mowed down pedestrians in Barcelona, bringing the death toll to 15. Eight members of the terrorist cell were killed; three have been detained for investigation..
On August 18, an 18-year-old knife-wielding Moroccan, known for his extremist views, killed two women and wounded six others in the small Finnish town of Turku; he and six other Moroccans were arrested and are to be charged. The attack was the first terrorist incident in Finland.
While it has not been shown that the youth detained in Finland was either self-radicalised or consorted with other radicals, 10 of the men involved in the Spanish operation are believed to have been groomed by mosque preacher Abdelbakr Essati. He had served time in prison with a bomber affiliated to al-Qaeda and had spent time in radical districts of the Belgian capital, Brussels.
He chose to settle north of Barcelona in the small hill town of Ripoll with a 900-strong community of Moroccans in a population of 10,000. There, he created an underground cell of young men aged 17-27 to carry out a spectacular bombing of the Roman Catholic church, the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona's most iconic monument. After the explosives accidentally blew up, killing the cleric and the bomb-maker on August 16, cell members turned to vehicles as weapons.
Before the attacks, Essati's recruits did not appear to be religious and met him outside his mosque. A cleric at Ripoll's other mosque said they attended so rarely they would not know the colour of the carpet. They played football with local lads and spoke Catalan and Spanish as well as Arabic and Berber.
Nevertheless, the recruits were caught between two worlds. They lived with conservative, devout Moroccan parents who had immigrated in the 1990s to work in factories and fields. In school, in the streets and at work, the men mingled with Catalan-speaking townspeople who call for Catalonia's independence from Spain.
By convincing the Moroccans to take part in his operation, Essati solidified their identity as Arabs and Muslims although the Quran rejects violence except in self-defence. He offered them martyrdom as a means to punish Spain for supporting the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Three sets of brothers, cousins and friends took part in the Barcelona operation. Several of them visited France and Switzerland before the Barcelona operation.
Moroccans have taken part in the ‘jihad’ against the West since May 2003. As the US consolidated its occupation of Iraq, 12 suicide bombers slew 33 in Casablanca. Al-Qaeda-linked Moroccan jihadis made their debut in Europe with the 2004 bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, killing 192 and wounding 1,800. That still remains Europe’s worst terrorist attack.
Seven French and Belgian citizens of Moroccan origin, who lived in the ultra-radical Brussels district of Molenbeek, and two Iraqis carried out the attacks in Paris in November 2015, killing 130 and wounding 368. The mastermind was Belgian-Moroccan Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who had been accused of plotting operations in France and Belgium and had fled to Syria.
Surviving members of the Paris cell also executed the 2016 bombings at Brussels airport and metro station, slaying 32 civilians. Moroccan Najim Laachraoui, an Islamic State bomber trained in Syria, was in charge. Four members of the team were of Moroccan background, one was a Syrian-Palestinian resident of Sweden who had Brussels connections.
Since 2012, 1,600 Moroccans have left their homeland to fight in Syria and Iraq; 2,000 men of Moroccan origin living in Europe have also joined the battle, making the Moroccan contingent of jihadis one of the largest. Many of these man had been recruited by preachers like Essati or the Qatar-based Egyptian tele-cleric Yusif al-Qaradawi, a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, who argued it is a Muslim's duty to fight against Damascus.
In December 2012, the anti-Bashar al-Assad "Friends of Syria" – the US, Britain, France, Germany, Turkey and the Gulf states - met in Marrackech and designated the expatriate opposition coalition the "legitimate representative of the Syrian people," thereby legitimising Western aid for armed factions and the flow of foreign fighters to Syria. North African and West Asian governments cracked down hard at home but allowed radicals to go to Syria where al-Qaeda's Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State had become global threats.
Harakat Sham al-Islam, a group of Moroccan fighters, was founded in Syria's Latakia province by three former inmates at Guantanamo. One of their aims was to train Moroccans so they could return home and oust the regime. In 2016, the group split and fighters joined Nusra or Islamic State. Today Morocco, West Asia and Europe are reaping the crop of jihadi seeds sown in Syria and Iraq since 2012.