Morocco
struggles with Wahhabi legacy By
Ilhem Rachidi
RABAT - The Madrid terror attacks
have attracted world attention to the district of Beni
Makada, a fertile Islamist area south of Tangiers in the
northern tip of Morocco, just a few miles of sea from
Spain.
In the neighborhood's mosque, Jamel
Zougam, one of the main suspects in the March Madrid
attacks, which killed 191 people and injured more about
1,900, used to regularly attend the sermons of Mohamed
Fizazi, considered by Moroccan authorities as the
ideologist of the extremist organization, Salafiya
Jihadia.
Zougam, Mohamed Chaoui and Abelaziz
Benyaich, all prime suspects in the Madrid bombings,
were drenched by the words of Fizazi. The jihadist
imam also once preached at the al-Qods mosque in
Hamburg, where September 11 terrorist Mohamed Atta
attended prayers.
Several of the suspected
Madrid bombers grew up in Spain and were described as
modernists fully integrated into Spanish society. But as
university professor and Islamism specialist Mohamed
Darif points out, it is the core of the al-Qaeda
strategy to choose operators who melt into their
welcoming society and don't attract any particular
attention from the local population and authorities. The
involvement of Moroccans in the bombings is, in this
context, a matter of practicality, since they are the
most integrated Muslim community, not an expression of a
possible rise in the number of Moroccan radical
extremists.
The investigation following the
Madrid bombings soon focused on a "Moroccan connection",
a loose group of Moroccans on both sides of the
Gibraltar Strait who belong to the Moroccan Islamic
Combattant Group, a terrorist organization with links to
al-Qaeda created in 1998. Its suspected chief, Mohamed
Guerbouzi, has been sentenced for contumacy to 20 years
in prison in Morocco and reportedly lives in London, in
spite of Morocco's demands for his extradition.
What the Madrid investigation revealed is the
gap in international cooperation in the fight against
terrorism. According to the local press, the latest
diplomatic tensions between Morocco and Spain played a
major role in the intelligence failure preceding the
Madrid attacks.
Moroccan intelligence services
had informed their Spanish counterparts of the potential
threat of several individuals of Moroccan origin.
Indeed, Zougam and Benyaich were both known by Moroccan
and Spanish intelligence services. Benyaich has been
held in preventive detention since May 2003, pending
extradition to Morocco, but was never interrogated,
according to a source close to the Ministry of the
Interior who spoke on condition of anonymity. What went
wrong, he further explains, while strongly rejecting the
allegations in the press, is the "functioning between
the Spanish justice and the Spanish services".
Following Morocco's indications, Spanish
services arrested Zougam before the attacks, but he was
later released for lack of material proof. "After May
16, we have insisted on Zougam by saying that he was
part of the al-Qaeda structure. Knowing that, the man
has been heard by the judge and later released. What can
the services do when the judge releases him because he
has not found anything? Do you think that when we say
someone is dangerous, that's it, it justifies his
arrest?" the same source added.
Darif, on the
other hand, explains the failure of cooperation between
the two countries by what he describes as "a problem of
credibility" for Moroccan authorities since the raking
among Islamist ranks that followed terrorist attacks in
Morocco last May. On May 16, five coordinated terrorist
attacks later attributed to the Combattant Group shook
Casablanca, Morocco's business capital, hitting two
restaurants, a hotel, and two Jewish centers, killing 33
people and 12 suicide bombers.
Critics have
since regularly voiced their concern over the wide range
of arrests carried out after the bombing. Five-thousand
people have been arrested since last May, and about
1,300 have been tried in connection with the terrorist
attacks.
The struggle against radical Islam had
initially started after September 11, with a number of
arrests for several religiously motivated murders
attributed to the Salafia Jihadia and the dismantlement
of an al-Qaeda cell which planned several attacks across
the country as early as May 2002. It greatly
intensified, however, after the bombings, especially
after the Moroccan parliament passed tough
anti-terrorist legislation, less than two weeks after
the Casablanca attacks.
In a series of speedy
trials last summer, four men were sentenced to death,
while 39 were given life sentences. But the main shift
in the state's strategy was illustrated with the
official condemnation of religious theorists, who were
not directly linked to the attacks but nonetheless
accused of spreading calls for jihad and inciting the
murder.
Fizazi was arrested two weeks after the
Casablanca attacks, the day a controversial interview in
the Arab newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat was published, in
the tense atmosphere surrounding the attacks, and was
later sentenced to 30 years in prison. Three other
well-known hardline Islamic clerics, including Abou Hafs
and Hassan Kettani, were arrested prior to the
Casablanca bombings, and were convicted to respectively
30 and 20 years in prison for being the ideologists of
the Salafia Jihadia.
Morocco's firm stance
against religious theorists has drawn sharp criticism
not only from moderate Islamists, but also from human
right activists. For Darif, there is no proven link
between these theorists and the terrorists who struck
last year. "There are no organizational links, there are
spiritual links," he explains. "They have always
delivered their sermons with the approval of
authorities."
The Wahhabi doctrine preached by
Fizazi, at odds with Morocco's more open Malekite rite,
has been tolerated, even encouraged by the state for
about two decades, analysts say. The imported Saudi
doctrine was key in preventing the spread of two other
forms of Islamism: rising political Islam on one side,
and the Iranian Shi'ite revolution, on the other.
Wahhabi leaders denounce other Islamic groups,
such as Shi'ite and political Islamist figures like
Sheikh Yassine, the leader of the popular and extremely
conservative Islamist organization Justice and Charity,
once believed to be the main Islamist threat by the
Moroccan regime. Furthermore, Morocco suffered the
drawback of important financial aid from Saudi Arabia,
and had no political choice other than to "import" the
Wahhabi doctrine, which was radical yet non violent at
that time.
This tacit encouragement nonetheless
became a serious threat to the local regime when,
following the schism in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War
in 1991, a violent branch, the Salafia Jihadia, emerged
in Morocco and called for jihad against the West and
allied governments in order to expel foreign forces from
Arab land.
Radical Wahhabi theorists started to
spread their call for jihad in clandestine mosques,
which escaped the control of local authorities,
denouncing oriented prayers in state-controlled mosques
as well as the religious status of the king, the highest
religious authority in the country, once believed by
many to be rampart against radical Islam.
It
then became increasingly difficult for the state to
control these international imported radical doctrines.
In isolated neighborhoods like Casablanca's shanty towns
of Sidi Moumen, where most of the suicide bombers came
from, auto-proclaimed leaders (emirs) substituted
themselves for local authorities, going as far as
issuing death sentences to the ones they judged as
"apostates".
In a well-publicized move earlier
this year, the Ministry of Religious Affairs vowed to
tackle the intellectual roots of extremism and announced
the creation of two new departments designed to control
mosques (32,000 throughout Morocco) and oversee
religious education in the country. Earlier, in his
annual latest throne speech, King Mohamed VI had firmly
stated that no foreign religious doctrine would be
tolerated in the kingdom in the future.
Confirming this point, Darif claims that the
urgency today is to prevent the Wahhabi ideology from
spreading locally; but this will require a dialogue with
all the religious actors of the country, especially
Yassine's unofficial yet rooted Islamist organization,
he says.
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