Spain:
Kebab Shops Financing Global Jihad
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
At least 2,000 European jihadists
-- many from Spain -- have now travelled to Syria in the hopes of
replacing the Assad regime with an Islamic state governed by Sharia law.
"Clearly Spain forms part of
the strategic objectives of global jihad. We are not the only ones, but
we are in their sights." — Jorge Fernández Díaz, Minister of the
Interior, Spain.
Police in Spain and Morocco have dismantled
a jihadist network suspected of recruiting Islamic radicals in Europe
and dispatching them to "hotbeds of tension" in Syria and other
conflict zones.
Spanish officials say the cell, based in southern Spain, was one of
the largest of its kind in Europe and responsible for recruiting more
jihadists than any other network discovered in Spain so far.
The sting operation—in which seven suspected jihadists were
arrested—was conducted on March 14, just three days after Spain marked
the 10th anniversary of the 2004
Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people and wounded nearly
2,000.
Officials say the latest arrests demonstrate that Spain continues to
be central to the ambitions of the global jihadist movement, which says
it is committed to establishing a worldwide Caliphate.
Four of the suspects were arrested in Spain and the other three in
Morocco. Of the suspects arrested in Spain, one was detained in the
southern city of Málaga and the other three in Melilla, a Spanish exclave
in North Africa. The three suspects arrested in Morocco had all recently
returned from combat in Syria.
The suspected ringleader of the cell is a wheelchair-bound Spanish
convert to Islam named Mustafa Maya Amaya. Maya, 51, was born in Brussels
after his Spanish parents moved to Belgium in the 1960s to look for work
there. After converting to Islam, he changed his given name from Rafael
to Mustafa.
|
From left to
right: Mustafa Maya Amaya, Paul Cadic and Farik Cheikh, three of the
jihadists arrested by Spanish police. (Image source: Spanish Ministry
of the Interior)
|
Maya eventually married a woman from Morocco, where he lived until
December 2012, when he was arrested by Moroccan police for conspiring to
overthrow the Moroccan monarchy and replace it with an Islamic
government.
After escaping from prison in Morocco, Maya took refuge across the
border in Melilla and became a naturalized Spanish citizen. Spanish
counter-terrorism officials say Maya is well known for his advocacy of
extremist Islam—he once told the Málaga-based newspaper Diario
Sur that he supported the way the Taliban in Afghanistan treated
women there—but that until now he had not been directly linked to
terrorist activities.
Investigators say Maya—who maintained close ties to jihadist cells in
Belgium, France, Indonesia, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey and
Syria—is suspected of recruiting dozens of volunteer jihadists on the
Internet and, after a careful selection process, sending them to join
terrorist organizations in the Middle East and North Africa.
Groups benefiting from Maya's recruitment services include the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an al-Qaeda splinter group
active in Iraq and Syria, Al-Qaeda
in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a Sunni Muslim jihadist group
committed to establishing an Islamic government in North Africa and parts
of Spain, and the Al-Nusra
Front, a branch of Al-Qaeda operating in Lebanon and Syria, where it
is fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Spanish police also arrested Chafik Jalel Ben Amara Elmedjeri, a
Tunisian immigrant previously arrested in February 2006 for recruiting
jihadists to fight American troops in Iraq.
Elmedjeri, a specialist in forging documents, is also known for
operating one of the best kebab
shops in Málaga. Terrorism analysts say this points to another
problem: many of the tens of thousands of kebab and shawarma shops
operating in Spain and other parts of Europe may be using their business
proceeds actively to finance global jihad in Syria and elsewhere.
The other two Islamists
arrested in Spain are Paul Cadic and Farik Cheikh, French jihadists
who were about to depart for Syria.
Spanish security officials say that battle-hardened Islamist fighters
returning to Spain from Syria under the influence of Al-Qaeda-inspired
groups pose a significant threat to national security.
At least 2,000
European jihadists—including many from Spain—have now traveled to
Syria in the hopes of replacing the Assad regime with an Islamic state
governed by Sharia law.
Although exact numbers are unknown, intelligence
sources interviewed by the Madrid-based El Mundo newspaper say
that Spanish jihadists are travelling to Syria (via Morocco and Turkey)
at the rate of about 30 per month. In many instances, the jihadists are
travelling to Syria with their wives and children.
Other intelligence
sources interviewed by the online newspaper El Confidencial
say they believe that more than 250 Spanish jihadists are currently
fighting in Syria, and that around 100 of these were recruited by the
cell that has now been neutralized.
"It has been a very big operation that has dismantled an
international cell, without doubt the biggest and most active in Spain
and one of the biggest and most active currently in Europe," Spanish
Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz said at a news conference in
Madrid on March 14.
Fernández Díaz—who revealed that a total of 472 suspected Islamic
extremists have been arrested in Spain since the Madrid train bombings in
March 2004—also said Spain remains an important target for global
jihadists, who frequently use the term "Al-Andalus" when
referring to the Iberian Peninsula.
Al-Andalus is the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal
and France that were occupied by Muslim conquerors from 711 to 1492. Many
Muslims believe—based on the Islamic doctrine that all territories once
occupied by Muslims must forever remain under Muslim domination—that
Spain still belongs to them, and that they have every right to return and
establish Islamic rule there.
"Clearly Spain forms part of the strategic objectives of global
jihad," Fernández Díaz said. "We are not the only ones, but we
are in their sights."
Soeren Kern is a
Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.
He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo
de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on
Twitter
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment