Terrorist Networks Lure Young Moroccans to War in Far-Off Iraq

In Tunisia, a cell belonging to the same network engaged in a gun battle Jan. 3 with police outside Tunis, the capital, resulting in 12 deaths. According to European news media, the cell had drawn up plans to attack the U.S., Italian and British embassies.

Despite the surge in local strikes, North African intelligence officials and analysts said that al-Qaeda affiliates in the region remain focused on Iraq and rely on the faraway conflict as a recruiting tool.

"The big state for al-Qaeda is Iraq," said Mohamed Darif, a political science professor and terrorism expert at Hassan II-Mohammedia University in Morocco. "Al-Qaeda has the same strategy as the United States: It wants to win in Iraq so it can transform the whole region. They are fixated on Iraq."

In Tetouan, the local economy and culture lean more toward Europe than the Middle East. The narrow streets and whitewashed buildings appear to have changed little since the first half of the 20th century, when the city was the colonial capital of Spanish Morocco. Most storefronts feature signs in both Spanish and Arabic. Young men wear the jerseys of their favorite European soccer teams, particularly those from Barcelona and Madrid.

Although it is still not clear why so many men from Tetouan decided to abandon their lives and go to Iraq, there are some clues. Relatives and friends said several of the men were well-educated -- many took classes at local community colleges -- but struggled to make ends meet. They noted that the men's religious beliefs appeared to have deepened and that they had begun wearing long beards and loose-fitting Afghan-style clothes.

Moncef ben Masaoud, 21, died in a suicide attack in Baqubah last fall, according to neighbors and relatives. Skilled in computers and math, he had attended college classes in nearby Tangier. On July 27, 2006, he left home as usual for school, but never returned.

"He told me he'd be coming back the same day," his father, Haj Ahmed Masaoud, a tire dealer in a Tetouan market, told the Moroccan newsmagazine Le Journal Hebdomadaire. "In mid-August, he called me and told me he was doing fine. He said he was in Syria. That was the last contact we had with him."

Masaoud was a close friend of Amrani, the young father who also carried out a suicide bombing near Baqubah, as well as a third Tetouan man, Yones Achebbak, 23, who left for Iraq last fall. Achebbak's fate is unknown.

All three men attended the same mosque in Tetouan, a white-arched building perched on a slope in the slum district of Mezouak. The mosque's imam, Fatal Abdelillah, was arrested in November as part of the investigation into the Iraqi recruiting ring.

It was not the first time the mosque and the Mezouak slum had drawn the attention of counterterrorism investigators. Five men from the area are suspects in the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800.

Al-Qaeda recruiters have focused on Tetouan because it has several extremist mosques but also because of its proximity to Europe, Moroccan officials and analysts said. Spanish counterterrorism authorities have warned that recruiting networks are also active in the nearby Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, enclaves on the northern Moroccan coast that are a holdover from the days when the region was a Spanish colony.

"Al-Qaeda was working very hard to create coordination cells in Tetouan, because it's a close point of contact to Europe," said Darif, the Moroccan terrorism analyst. He said the Moroccan cells smuggle recruits and other operatives across the Mediterranean Sea to Spain, where they pick up false passports and move on to Turkey or Syria before slipping into Iraq.