Is Al Qaeda's influence spreading to Morocco?

Islamists are charged with plotting to attack the US Embassy in Rabat.

By Jill Carroll | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 6, 2007 edition

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RABAT, MOROCCO - Troubling signs are emerging that Morocco is becoming fertile ground for more sophisticated militant groups.

The latest evidence: A trial of 50 Islamists who allegedly planned to attack the US Embassy in Rabat, a military base, and tourist destinations. And unlike the groups behind previous terrorist bombings in this moderate Muslim monarchy, this group was drawn not from the slums of Casablanca, but from the society's upper echelons.

There is also evidence of NorthAfricans working with Al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq and Pakistan – raising concerns that they will return home with their newfound skills.

"We're at a tipping point now," says Evan Kohlmann, an counterterrorism consultant in New York who tracks militant Islamic groups. "If you look at the demographics of who joins terrorist groups, a lot are educated, a lot are prosperous."

The group on trial, called Ansar al Mehdi, includes middle-class Moroccans, some drawn from the Army, and four women, two of whom are married to Royal Air Maroc pilots, according to statements government officials have made to Moroccan media. That's a significant shift.

Before now, the bombers who killed 33 people in Casablanca in 2003, another young man who blew himself up March 11, as well as those who Spanish police say participated in the Madrid train bombings in 2004 were all drawn from the slums outside Casablanca and Tetouan in the north.

"The stereotype [about suicide bombers] is that everyone is stupid and poor," says Mr. Kohlmann. Until now, that's been true in Morocco, he says. But Kohlmann notes that isn't the right approach to stopping terrorism, "hoping your adversaries are making small bombs and are incapable."

Security services in Morocco, as well as neighboring Algeria, have aggressively cracked down on militant Islamist groups seen as a threat to the regimes. That has produced short-term results, but human rights groups say that innocent people are being arrested and tortured in the pursuit of terrorists, possibly creating more militants.

"The North African [militant] groups have suffered significantly in the past four to five years because of law enforcement and military action and intelligence action by the North African countries and the US," says Rohan Gunaratna an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and author of a book on Al Qaeda. But, "These groups have proved very resilient. That means despite sustained action against them, they have survived."

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