| Submit your comments on this article |
| North Africa |
| From local gang in Morocco to suicide bombers? |
| 2003-05-18 |
| EFL A Moroccan Islamist group suspected of links with 13 suicide bombers who killed 28 people in Casablanca had until now been regarded as little more than a neighbourhood gang. The Assirat al Moustaquim group hit local headlines in February 2002, when some of its members stoned to death a man in the low-income Casablanca neighbourhood of Sidi Moumen. Moroccan Justice Minister Mohamed Bouzoubaa suggested on Sunday this group may have helped with the Casablanca suicide bombings on Friday night. Worshipping in makeshift mosques, the group's members sought to impose strict Islamic law on Sidi Moumen, harassing women as well as mixed-sex couples seen in public. The man stoned to death, Fouad al Kardoudi, had attracted the hostility of a dozen local young men and had had earlier confrontations with them. Members of such small grassroots groups, presented in the Moroccan media as part of a Taliban-influenced Salafi Jihad movement, have declared their ideological support for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Some of them are returnees from the Afghan Jihad — the holy struggle first against the Russian invader and then to establish a strict Islamic state under the now ousted Taliban. Information given to the Moroccan public about such groups has been piecemeal and often confusing. Last July then-Islamic Affairs Minister Abdelkbir Mdaghri Alaoui said that even the most conservative of Moroccan Islamists "refuse violence and terrorism." However, in the weeks leading up to the September general election in which Islamists of the Justice and Development Party (PJD) surged to become the third largest party in parliament, the Jihad Salafists were portrayed as a threat to stability. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |