MADRID — On August 23, less than a week after the double terrorist strike in Catalonia that killed 16 people and injured at least 100, Islamic State issued a new threat against Spain.
“Spanish Christians, don’t forget the Muslim blood that has been shed [and] the Spanish Inquisition,” a young, bearded man, later identified as Muhammad Yasin Ahram Pérez, said in a video posted online by the terrorist group. “We will avenge the massacres you have carried out and those you are carrying out now against Islamic State.”
Pérez, who grew up in Spain, spoke in fluent Spanish. “Al Andalus will once again be what it was, the land of the Caliphate.”
Spain’s NATO membership, its military presence in Afghanistan and police action against jihadists have made it — like a number of other European nations — a key target for terrorists. But Spain’s geography and history also mean it has a unique relationship with the Muslim world, which arguably makes it more susceptible to jihadist attacks than many of its neighbors.
In the eighth century, Muslims from North Africa controlled what is now Spain and Portugal. Under Muslim rule, the southern city of Córdoba was an influential seat of learning and the site of one of the most important mosques in the Muslim world.
When Christians reconquered the peninsula in 1492, Muslims and Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or face expulsion from Spain.
A border fence limits Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Melilla | David Ramos/Getty Images
For jihadists, the events of five centuries ago remain an open wound, said Manuel Torres Soriano, author of “Al Andalus 2.0″ and a political scientist at Seville’s Universidad Pablo de Olavide. “[Al Andalus] has an enormous symbolism among these kinds of groups.”
Younes Abouyaaqoub’s rampage in Barcelona — the first terror attack in Spain since the 2004 train bombings in Madrid that left 191 people dead — highlights the Islamic State’s renewed focus on the territory’s semi-mythical status.
The country is firmly in Europe’s anti-terrorism vanguard. Spanish nationals or residents have joined ISIS in Iraq and Syria in far smaller numbers than citizens of France, Belgium or the U.K.
But the intense counterterrorism activity has inevitably had drawbacks too, especially when it comes to preventing combatants from going abroad to join ISIS.
“They’ve been a victim of their own success, if you like,” said one Spain-based diplomatic source. “Because [jihadists] are thinking ‘okay, you won’t let us go to Syria or Iraq, so we’ll do it here instead.’”
From Madrid to Barcelona
After more than three decades of violence waged by Basque group ETA, Spanish security and intelligence forces are well-versed in combatting terror. But by the beginning of the last decade, ETA was floundering. To counter jihadism seemed to require different resources and methods.
“We want to start doing something fundamental: have a top-level, professional coordination structure as a means to fight the biggest problem this country faces,” Interior Minister José Antonio Alonso said shortly after the 2004 attacks.
The government has since created a new anti-terrorist coordination agency (CNCA) and reallocated hundreds of security officials to anti-jihadist departments. The justice system responded with a series of legal reforms that made it easier to bring suspected jihadists to court.
Spain has arrested nearly 800 people suspected of jihadist activity since the Madrid attacks. And since June 2015 — when it raised the terror alert from three to four (out of a maximum of five) in response to an attack at a Tunisian resort — authorities have made 150 arrests.
A visitor at the Alhambra palace in Granada | Jose Luis Roca/AFP via Getty Images
This year, Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría announced an extra €20 million for the National Intelligence Agency (CNI) specifically for anti-terrorism purposes, and 600 new staff in the next five years.
Spanish security forces have “more than 1,000 suspects on their radar,” the courts are investigating 259 people and 500 phones are being tapped, El País newspaper reported in June, citing government sources.
Still, the recent attack in Catalonia shed light on gaps in coordination between Spain’s different police forces and state institutions. In the aftermath of August’s attacks, Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido called for improved coordination between Spain’s local and national security forces.
Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra, for example, handles anti-terrorism activities under the authority of the government of Catalonia, not the national government. Critics say the Mossos failed to heed a warning in May from U.S. intelligence services about a potential attack in Barcelona, while the force itself has complained of being excluded from top-level Spanish anti-terror briefings.
‘Christian occupation’
Two areas that are of particular concern for Spain’s security forces are the cities of Ceuta and Melilla.
Geographical oddities, they are perched on the North African coast, bordering Morocco, yet they belong to Spain. Entering either city from Morocco means leaving Africa and legally arriving in Europe. A six-meter-high security fence surrounds both enclaves to stop migrants and refugees from entering and attempting to claim asylum.
Morocco has a longstanding claim to both territories — where roughly half the population is of Moroccan descent — but it is a dispute that King Mohammed VI, who has mostly good relations with Spain, rarely raises.
“These two cities are seen by jihadists as colonies — colonies that Spain has in a Muslim country,” said Soriano, of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide. “If you read jihadist propaganda, it tries to present them as places similar to Jerusalem or Grozny — where a Christian army occupies the territory.”
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and other terrorist groups frequently criticize the Moroccan monarch for complacency, and extremists exploit the anger many ordinary Moroccans feel about Spain’s presence there. They present themselves “as the only ones who are serious about taking back these two cities,” said Soriano.
People ready to cross the El Tarajal border, separating Morocco and Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta | Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images
Large numbers of suspected jihadists have been arrested in recent years in Mellila’s La Cañada and Ceuta’s El Príncipe neighborhoods, both notoriously deprived majority-Muslim districts.
In El Príncipe, the words Estado Islámico (“Islamic State”) were scrawled on the walls of the district’s only church shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks of 2015. Muhammad Yasin Ahram Pérez, the jihadist featured in the Spanish-language ISIS video released in August, lived in the neighborhood before traveling to Syria to join the terror group.
The chaotic, porous borders at Ceuta and Melilla also make the cities a relatively easy route into Europe. Although its monarch preaches a moderate strain of Islam, Morocco has gained an unwelcome reputation as an exporter of extremists.
A question of integration
In Ceuta and Melilla, problems of integration and social deprivation are blatant. On the Spanish mainland, such issues are, for the most part, less visible.
The country counts approximately 2 million Muslims, around 70 percent of whom are North African or of North African descent. Some arrived in the late 1960s, shortly before Spain made the transition to democracy following the 1975 death of dictator Francisco Franco. But the majority have come since the 1990s, seeking economic opportunities.
The earlier wave of Muslim migrants integrated fully, but more recent arrivals from the Maghreb are more likely to “peacefully coexist” with the Catholic majority, said Ignacio Cembrero, a journalist who covers North Africa and the author of “La España de Alá” (“Allah’s Spain”). He points to a number of almost exclusively Muslim areas, particularly in Catalonia, such as Salt and Ca n’Anglada.
“When you’re in Ca n’Anglada you get the feeling that you’re not in Catalonia, or in Spain, or even in Europe,” Cembrero said. “You feel like you’re somewhere in Morocco or Algeria. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, but for me, that’s a ghetto, and the Catalan authorities deny that there are any ghettoes.”
A sign reading “Women exit” during the muslim celebration of “Eid al-Adha” in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta | Joaquín Sánchez/AFP via Getty Images
Along with Ceuta and Melilla, Catalonia is the greatest source of concern for authorities charged with combatting radical Islam, a fear that was borne out with the recent attacks. Both the CIA and FBI have offices in the region’s capital, Barcelona.
Yet, Ripoll, the small Catalan town where Abouyaaqoub and most other members of his cell came from, is not a ghetto. There is little suggestion that the terrorists were marginalized.
According to locals, these young men, all of Moroccan origin, spoke fluent Catalan and Spanish. They socialized, played soccer and were studying or working nearby.
Those testimonies may appear to contradict the notion that a lack of ground-level integration is to blame for extremism in Spain. But the fact remains that Abouyaaqoub and his peers were vulnerable to the influence of Abdelbaki Es Satty, the Moroccan imam who lived in Ripoll and radicalized him — and others are too.
A broader look at Islam’s presence in the country shows significant points of tension between the two communities.
The president of the muslim community of Ripoll Annour Ali Yassine talks to the press following the terror attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils | Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images
In four decades of democracy, there has never been a Muslim member of Congress and only one representative of the Islamic faith in a regional parliament — the Catalan Socialist Mohammed Chaib.
In Córdoba, meanwhile, a recent attempt by the Catholic Church to whitewash the Islamic heritage of the Great Mosque — which has a medieval cathedral built in the middle of it — in tourist literature sparked a heated debate.
The Church has since backtracked and restored the original literature. But the incident highlights an uncomfortable truth. To prevent further terrorist attacks on Spanish soil, amping up intelligence and policing won’t be enough. The country will have to reckon with its often uneasy relationship with its Muslim past and help its Muslim community forge a clear, modern identity.