Like the US after 9/11, Morocco has waged a war on terror ever since bombers struck the city of Casablanca in May 2003.

On Sunday, the country appeared to have won a minor battle: Its official press agency reported that Moroccan police arrested 17 men on Nov. 11 who may belong to Al Qaeda, including two who were previously imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.

The arrests coincided with reports published in the newspaper Al Ahdath Almaghribia that Morocco's intelligence services were concerned about a serious threat of new attacks.

But in its struggle against Islamic extremism, Morocco faces challenges unknown in the US.

To combat terrorism, the country not only risks endangering the fragile civil rights its government has begun to encourage, but it must contend with the uncertain effects of emerging moderate Islamist movements. Indeed, the rise of Islamism in politics and Moroccan society will be a difficult test of the nation's proclaimed dedication to democratic reform.

For decades, Morocco has taken pride in its relatively liberal brand of Islam. Rather than an imam, King Mohammed VI is the chief spiritual leader here, and state law is influenced but not rooted in sharia, the Islamic code.

Diversity characterizes Moroccan Islam. Women's fashions, for example, range from head scarves to miniskirts. According to a recent Pew Research Center global survey, 79 percent of Moroccans - compared with 11 percent of Jordanians and 43 percent of Pakistanis - believe violence against civilians in support of Islam is never justified.

In the late 1990s, however, reports began to appear of Salafist radicals - many of them newly returned from the Afghan war - imposing a vigilante form of Islamic law in Morocco's shantytowns, stoning women who were "inappropriately" dressed, and throwing suspected drinkers and prostitutes into wells. The Casablanca bombings, which killed 45, awakened the country to an extremism within its own borders.

"We had always told ourselves that Morocco's Islam was tolerant," says Fatiha Ladayi, Morocco's director of communications. "I was aware that fundamentalism existed here. But I didn't think that our fundamentalists were violent."

The Casablanca attacks provoked fear among Moroccans that their homeland might succumb to the rigid Islamism that had overtaken neighboring Algeria. And the world at large noted the prominent role Moroccan-born men played in terrorist strikes in Madrid, Iraq, and elsewhere.

For Mohammed Darif, a political scientist at Mohammedia's Hassan II University, the connection is clear. "There are strong ties between the attacks in Casablanca and Madrid," he writes. "They were carried out by the same organization, the [Al Qaeda-linked] Moroccan Islamic Combat Group."

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