Morocco’s relatively reformist leadership is, by virtue of its reformist tendencies, not sufficiently Islamic. And so it must be fought. From Reuters, with thanks to DFS:
RABAT: Moroccan authorities are holding 14 people suspected of belonging to a regional radical Islamist group linked to Al Qaeda, government officials said yesterday.
The 14 suspects had planned to carry out an unspecified “terrorist plot” on Morocco, with the help of Al Qaeda-linked foreign fighters who would travel from the Sahel-Sahara region, they said.
Morocco, a staunch US ally in the global fight on terror, has been on alert since 2003 when suicide bombings killed 45 people in Casablanca, the country”s commercial capital.
It has arrested more than 3,000 people since then and broken up more than 50 radical Islamist cells.
But it is the first time that the authorities have announced the arrest of people with suspected links to foreign cells.
“The 14 persons are suspected of being linked to a global terrorist movement which has connections with small groups operating in the Sahel-Sahara region and links with members of a group based on the Algeria-Mali border,” an official statement said.
The statement did not name the groups but government officials said the small groups were Islamist cells linked to the main Algerian Islamic rebel Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) faction.
Anti-terrorism police officials in North Africa and Europe have voiced concerns that the GSPC might turn itself into a magnet for radical Islamists in the region, providing them with weapons and military training in lawless areas of the Sahara desert.
The GSPC said in September it had joined Al Qaeda, whose leader Ayman al-Zawhiri urged the Algerian rebel group to become a “bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders”.