The Casbah Connection
Why Morocco is producing some of the world's most feared terrorists
In the shadows. Morocco's shantytowns, or bidonvilles , seem to be producing terrorists who seek to wreak havoc across Europe--from the Netherlands and Belgium to France and Spain. Most Moroccans in Western Europe live peaceably, but their reputation as reliable workers and stout family men has lent cover to a lethal few to range across Europe's open borders. A shadowy group linked to al Qaeda operates disparate cells under the banner of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, a network thought responsible for the bombings both in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, and at Madrid's Atocha Station on March 11, 2004. The Madrid attacks left 191 people dead and 1,500 wounded; most of the suspects are Moroccan. In France, 13 more Moroccans were arrested last year as alleged members of Islamic terrorist groups. In Belgium, most of the terror suspects nabbed in the past two years have come from that country's Moroccan community. In the Netherlands, men of Moroccan origin await trial for the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a descendant of the famed painter, and for plotting other attacks.
The problem is big--and may be getting bigger. Spain's leading antiterrorism judge, Baltasar Garzon, has declared the Morocco connection "the gravest problem Europe faces today with this kind of terrorism." As many as 1,000 al Qaeda followers and 100 terrorist cells may have burrowed into Morocco, Garzon estimates. Authorities in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, cannot locate 400 veterans of al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, and they have placed some 2,000 people under antiterror surveillance. A senior European counterterrorism official calls Morocco "the priority country" for sharing intelligence. Adds a senior Bush administration official, "Extremism has deep roots in Morocco."
This is the Moroccan conundrum: Why has such a hospitable society spawned so many jihadists willing to kill and die for an ideology almost universally condemned here as un-Moroccan?
The stakes in Morocco are high--and not only for the stability of a U.S. ally and a force for moderation in the Arab and Islamic worlds. President Bush's foreign policy emphasizes counterterrorism and democratization--and both roads run straight through Morocco. Moroccan and U.S. officials alike describe their counterterrorism coordination as superb--" among the best," in the words of one American expert. The Bush administration has singled out Morocco and its young monarch as exemplars of the reforms it is promoting in the Middle East and North Africa. In the past year, Washington picked Morocco for its first free-trade pact in Africa, elevated it to a major non-NATO ally, encouraged Rabat to host the first regional forum on democratic reform, and made it the only additional country eligible for a pot of aid called the Millennium Challenge Account. Says a senior U.S. official: "We put Rabat as a model."
Combustible mix. It is a model, however, that is at risk both from the small cells of violent extremists and from a larger segment of Moroccans now gravitating toward Islamist politics. Some outside analysts see a combustible mix in Morocco's poverty, its lack of full democracy, and the lure of Islamist ideas. "When you connect all these dots," says John Entelis, director of Middle East studies at Fordham University, "you see a picture of violence and possible terrorism." A senior U.S. official warns against complacency. He likens the Moroccan bidonvilles to "dry timber . . . where a match could light a conflagration," adding, "An uneducated, unemployed young male is a great recruiting ground for anyone with a radical message."
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