European Concerns Rise Over Potential Jihadist Return to North Africa

A report that has just been published by European analysts has detailed the danger of the radicalization of these fighters and their return to the Maghreb and some European countries, some of whom hold dual nationality.

At the height of the so-called Islamic State organization, more than 50,000 foreign fighters were part of it, including 7,000 from the Maghreb, of whom 5,000 were in Iraq and Syria and 2,000 in Libya, and some, certainly a few thousand, hold dual nationality, according to the report published by the Belgian think tank Egmont and the German foundation Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.

The report estimates that these former fighters could endanger the security of the Maghreb countries but also of the European Union, as was already the case with the return of fighters from Afghanistan in the 1980s.

According to Kenza Berrada, from the Arab Center for Scientific Research and Human Studies based in Rabat and quoted by the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial, the terrorist attacks that took place in 2003 in Casablanca were attributed to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM) created in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

This fear is therefore real in Morocco as in Europe and the security services are on the alert to ward off any threat, and current events remind us that this threat is constant in the kingdom since almost every month the services of the Central Bureau of Judicial Investigation (BCIJ) dismantle a terrorist cell across Morocco. The latest one dates back to just a few days ago in Tangier and before that in the Salé region. Several people had been arrested and some were even ready to act.