Word: ceuta
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Every afternoon, tens of thousands of Moroccans - mostly women in djellabas - trudge past the deserted guard posts that separate the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco, which surrounds it on three sides. The bundles of soap, noodles, socks, and oil they carry home for resale in Morocco are not an entirely legal traffic, but the Spanish authorities are less concerned these days about what leaves Ceuta than about what comes in - particularly to the impoverished hillside neighborhood of Príncipe Alfonso, whose unemployed and disaffected youth are a potentially fertile ground for jihadist recruiters. Last December, Al-Qaeda Number...
...many living in Ceuta insist that they have more important concerns than terrorism. "Our problems are the problems of the Paris banlieue," says Mohamed Laarbi, neighborhood spokesperson, "not of the Casablanca ghettos." He cites a litany of examples of official neglect contributing to the poverty and despair in Príncipe. Still, when a string of suicide bombings struck Casablanca and Algiers this spring, Spain's border police quickly sent extra troops to shore up Ceuta's border with Morocco...
...would consider Ceuta in a pre-jihadist stage," says Javier Jordan, a terrorism expert at the University of Granada. "But it takes outside recruiters to transform a marginalized area into a real jihadist breeding ground...
Still, there are worrying signs that some locals may be amenable to Zawahiri's message: For one, Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed, who spent two years at Guantánamo after his capture in Afghanistan, hails from Ceuta. And in 2006, two pilgrimage sites sacred to most Muslim North Africans but condemned as unorthodox by Qaeda-style Salafists were set afire. At least one local imam is known to have preached extremist messages, while the Spanish army based recently discharged three Muslim soldiers in Ceuta for allegedly holding radical views...
Desperate sub-Saharan Africans keep trying to reach a little slice of Spain - and, they hope, the chance of a better life - on the Moroccan coast. Patrolled by soldiers and surrounded by fences laced with razor wire, the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta have offered would-be immigrants a one-way ticket to mainland Spain; people who got through were typically released in Spain after 40 days, since no repatriation agreements exist with their native countries. While Melilla and Ceuta have attracted African migrants since the mid-1990s, the Spanish Civil Guard estimates that 13,000 people have tried...