How Morocco uses terrorism to control the people’s movement in the Rif
Yassine Charaf, 19 September 2017
Mohammed VI follows in the footsteps of Hassan II.
An international media campaign is running against the Moroccan regime, which has become clearer following the recent terrorist attacks in Europe (17th August 2017, Barcelona) and directly points to the responsibility of the Moroccan palace for crimes against humanity. The aim of these attacks is to put pressure on European governments to stop the brutal repression and violation of human rights in the Rif region.
This is the general conclusion of the media reports, based on data from the European intelligence services. They report that King Mohamed VI has inherited not only the throne from his father Hassan II, but also the political policy, with minor corrections in terms of corruption and distractions.
King of Cannabis
In the days when the Moroccans had crowned their new king and named him the “King of Hearts”, the secret services on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea called him the “Hashish King”, just like they did with Hassan II. He succeeded in blackmailing Europe when Europe asked him to replace the cultivation of cannabis with profitable projects that would benefit the inhabitants. But the top manager of Morocco has confronted Europe with two options: Cannabis or cocaine. According to Hassan II, the ban on cannabis cultivation will relocate the Rif area for Europe to Colombia. Europe lost the bet and responded to the threats of Hassan II. Since then, 80% of the drugs on the European market have come from Morocco. However, the palace is the first to benefit from annual revenues of between 13 and 15 billion dollars. For the inhabitants of the Rif area, who are still living on structural support from relatives abroad, no change in living conditions can be seen. The regime refuses to legalise the cultivation of cannabis, so that the treasury benefits legally. Cannabis is considered one of the main causes of the Rif population movement because of the poverty, marginalisation and despair in which the inhabitants of the region live.
Moroccans remember the scandal when the chief of police of the Tangier region, Abdelaziz Izzou, organised major drug smuggling operations in the city during his police duties and continued the smuggling operations after being appointed by Mohamed VI on the recommendation of General Hamidou Laanigri to manage the security of the royal palaces. In this context, the European intelligence services confirm that the Palace is involved in international drug trafficking and that they are organised gangs operating under the Moroccan security and intelligence services.
The scandal that arose in Paris in 2017 when François Thierry, the former French head of justice of the anti-drug office, was summoned from Morocco to France for involvement in drug trafficking: He used his anti-drug office and organised gangs there. This is only the tip of the iceberg and it confirms the involvement of the Moroccan regime in the smuggling of hashish at the international level. Spanish parliamentarians have long pointed out that there is a kind of complicity between the Spanish and Moroccan security and intelligence services in drug smuggling from Morocco to Spain. But the justice system in that country does not reach the big fish because of the sensitivity of the issue.
King of terrorism
The involvement of the Moroccan regime in the exploitation, recruitment and support of terrorism is no longer a secret for anyone. There are many reports on this subject which point out that this commitment began with the war in Afghanistan, then with the wars in Iraq, Syria and Libya. And it still goes on. Terrorism is used for geopolitical and geostrategical reasons by Washington, Israel and the NATO intelligence service, the Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia in particular.
The regime of King Mohammed VI did not differ from that of his father. He continued to benefit from international cooperation with Western countries in the “fight against terrorism” in order to use it alongside illegal emigration as blackmail to achieve his own goals.
The news site Les Moutons Rebelles revealed in mid-August 2017 in reference to Edward Snowden that Morocco was part of a so-called Wasp Nest strategy aimed at bringing together terrorists from six countries, including Morocco, to train them and send them back to crisis areas. So Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi received military training from the Israeli Mossad in Jordan and in Morocco in communication and preaching. He also received practical training in Moroccan prisons, where Islamic prisoners served as practice objects. All this was sponsored by American, English and Israeli secret services. This undoubtedly confirms Morocco’s complicity in terrorism and not its fight against it. This has led Western governments to ask many questions about the King’s decision to pardon the Islamists who received instruction from the “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after the Barcelona attacks.
The Spanish newspaper La Crónica reports in its Sunday 17 September 2017 issue that Morocco’s sponsorship of terrorism is no news or surprise and that the late king Hassan II used religion as a weapon of “dual rule”: control of citizens and control of Europe. Hassan II explicitly raised the issue of terrorism in 1994 when he wanted the EU to give him permission to export Moroccan tomatoes to the European market without taxes. The palace is the beneficiary of the export of agricultural products to Europe, agricultural products in Morocco are tax-free. The President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, told Hassan II that Spanish, Italian and French lobbyists were against it. Hassan II replied: “Well, I understand these difficulties, but if Morocco cannot export tomatoes, it will be forced to export terrorists”.
The newspaper continues: “Here we see the harmful game between the king’s father, who gave Europe the choice between exporting tomatoes or terrorists, and his son, the current monarch, who is silent about everything that happens in the Rif or the rest of Morocco, such as oppression, arrest, torture and corruption that paralyses the state or the export of terrorists. According to La Crónica, this is the “formula” that has governed the relationship between Morocco and Europe since Hassan II’s time.
The Palace and their use of Religion for Political power
The dilemma of the Moroccan system is that it cannot continue this blackmail game for long. In Europe and America, the number of voices calling for a review of the relationship with the terrorist empire and an end to its blackmail due to corruption and serious human rights violations in the Rif, in the (Western) Sahara and throughout the country is increasing.
The regime can no longer claim to apply a moderate Islam, since Morocco is an Islamic state and the king is the supreme commander of the faithful (read Muslims), the chairman of the Scientific Council (see Supreme Islamic Council). He dominates the religious field of the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, which strictly supervises mosques. He spreads a unified speech in which the emir of believers is glorified and his deeds praised. Anyone who opposes his policies is seen as a foreign informant and separatist who tries to stir up the struggle between people.
Perhaps the mistake that Europe in general and Spain in particular have made is to allow the Moroccan regime have full access to the mosques by recruiting, training and funding imams, claiming that Morocco monitors the psychological safety in the diaspora. This strategy allowed the regime to spread terrorism in Europe and then say that it had nothing to do with these attacks, because the perpetrators were European citizens who could not integrate in Europe. Like the attacks in Barcelona. The Moroccan regime has declared itself innocent. The person who supervised a Moroccan imam confirms that he had already planned it in Morocco.
So the truth is the opposite of the official reading: Muhammad VI. It is not the modern king whom he wants to show in his speeches and deeds. He is worse than his father because, despite his so-called religious reforms during their reign, the Moroccans form a huge army of terrorists who are fighting in Iraq and Syria. 70% of the terrorist attacks that Europe has carried out in the last 15 years have also been carried out by Moroccans. Is this a coincidence?
The newspaper La Crónica wonders about the fact that the European secret services have highlighted the mystery that Moroccan terrorism is directed only at European countries such as France, Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, Spain and Finland and it does not affect Morocco.
The newspaper does not say so because the Moroccan secret services effectively protect Morocco’s territory from terrorism. On the contrary, according to Yassine Mansouri, Director General of the DGED’s Directorate-General for Studies and Documentation, dozens of terrorist cells were dismantled between 2002 and 2014, around 12 jihadist cells (41 for Syria, Iraq and Sahel) were dismantled and 2667 extremists arrested. In addition, 276 attempts were prevented, including 119 bomb attacks on several targets such as official buildings, tourist resorts, diplomatic missions and Christian and Jewish houses of prayer. This raises many questions about its supposed effectiveness. This is what the newspaper proposes, operations organised and carried out by the secret services themselves to give the impression that the Moroccan secret services are more effective in the fight against terrorism than their Western counterparts and then present themselves as forced cooperation partners. That is the game.
With regard to the attacks on Moroccan territory — Casablanca in 2003 and Marrakech in 2011 — the former Minister of the Interior, Driss Basri, declared in Paris that the bomb attacks with 45 deaths, including 5 Spaniards, took place on 16 May 2003 in the Casa de España, the Italian restaurant, Farah Hotel and an Israeli synagogue, as well as a Jewish cemetery. The former minister declared immediately after the attacks against the correspondent of Al Jazeera: “The attack is not the work of Islamic groups inside or outside Morocco, not even by another foreign organization, but an internal job taken over by the regime”.
A similar case was the attack on the Café Argana in Marrakech on 28 April 2011. The Moroccan authorities attributed the attack of the Salafi Jihadist movement, which is too general and too broad in scope for various extremist groups to represent the ideological prohibition of all — including Qaeda. However, the results of the European intelligence services’ investigations into the fight against terrorism did not shed light on this gelatine-like organisation, as there is no information to confirm its existence.
However, it is remarkable, the paper writes, that the attacks in Casablanca in 2003 helped the regime to control the Islamists because of the massive arrests and at the same time silence the media, which led to a decline in freedoms. During this time Mohammed VI became one of the richest kings in the world.
It is clear that Morocco is benefiting from the attacks on its territory and in Europe, according to the newspaper quoted by former minister Driss Basri. This underlines that the objective of the attacks of May 2003 was achieved both in terms of restricting freedoms and controlling Islamists (more than 7,000 detainees).
At the same time, the king was given enough time to outrun his wealth and became the seventh richest king in the world, while poverty and repression among the Moroccan population increased dramatically.
The paper notes that the attacks of Argana in Marrakech have helped the regime to significantly limit the February 20 movement and call for a war against tyranny and corruption.
Félix Sanz Roldán, director of the Spanish intelligence agency Centro Nacional de Inteligencia CNI, reports in a confidential report presented to the Council of Europe’s interior and defence ministers in May 2011 that Morocco has taken an important “strategic step” in Spain. The purpose of this strategy is to increase its influence and control over what the report calls “Moroccan colonies”, using religion as a weapon. This strategy was conceived and developed by the Alawieten regime.
In a report on the financing of Islam in Spain, the National Statistics Institute presents the Instituto Nacional de Estadística INE, another example of the use of Islam for political purposes. In November 2008, the Moroccan Ministry of Islamic Affairs held a meeting in Marrakech attended by numerous imams and leaders of Muslim communities in Spain. During this large meeting, the Imams were promised funding for their organizations and mosques in exchange for their loyalty to the Moroccan concept of the State of Islam. The question asked by the Spanish secret service at the time was: What is the relationship between the head of the DGED secret service, Yassine Mansouri, and religion, to organise this meeting of Imams who worked for DGED in Spain?
The game is based on the use of the Moroccan Intelligence Jihadist map to blackmail Europe in general and Spain in particular. The regime has already managed to put pressure on Europe to give up the Sahrawi support, which demands the independence of the Western Sahara and the pressure not to support the Rif and to mention corruption and human rights abuses of the regime, otherwise one fears that the Rif people’s movement will turn into a rebellion movement.
Religion has been transformed from a time of the emirate of believers into a weapon that protects corruption and legitimises injustice and tyranny. The problem is that those who support terrorism and use it as a weapon against their own people and against the peoples of Europe say that “moderate” Islam has nothing to do with terrorism and that Morocco has nothing to do with terrorism.
Translated by: Najat M.
