Islam versus Europe

El País had an article yesterday about "Spanish" Muslims who had been killed fighting against the Assad government in Syria. The Muslims were from Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in Africa, adjacent to Moroccan territory and inhabited by large numbers of ethnic Moroccan Muslims who are outbreeding the Europeans resident there. For more on Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish exclaves in Africa, see here.

The article recounts the story of some Muslims from Ceuta who travelled to Syria and got killed there. (Nice one, Assad!) It's full of the usual stuff from family and acquaintances about how he "seemed so normal, he wasn't a fanatic". They came from the neighbourhood of El Príncipe, next to the Moroccan border, and travelled in the company of known Moroccan jihadists, flying from Madrid to Turkey and hooking up with jihad groups there who helped them cross the border into Syria.

Ceuta, with around 80,000 inhabitants, has the highest youth unemployment rate in Europe at 60%. There are also record-breaking educational failure rates. 38.8% do not finish the period of compulsory schooling, but El Príncipe beats even these records.

..."We knew this was going to happen. No one is surprised by it. Young men have already travelled from Ceuta to Afghanistan and Iraq, so why wouldn't they go to Syria now? This problem is not just one of security. There is a very large element of social uprooting and marginality”, according to an official of the intelligence services.

...The mosque of Las Caracolas is controlled by the Unión de Comunidades Islámicas de España (UCIDE), which is represented in Ceuta by Laarbi Mateeis, director of the movement Jamaat Tablighl. ...Thirty of the 32 mosques in the city are controlled by this hardline group which preaches peace but which has occasionally produced terrorists like Mohamed Atta, who directed the suicide attackers of 9/11. All the mosques in Ceuta have Moroccan imams and the majority are paid by the Moroccan Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Source: El País

No doubt it won't be long before the Muslims in Ceuta don't need to travel to do their jihad. I expect a Kosovo-style insurgency to break out there within a few decades.