[Combating Terrorism Center] Since bombs rocked Casablanca in 2003 and Marrakesh in 2011, Morocco has continually made concerted efforts to tighten its anti-terrorism laws, improve its intelligence capabilities, and address the root causes of radicalization. While Morocco has yet to see a terrorist attack by the Islamic State on its soil, future challenges loom for the government: returned foreign fighters, burgeoning jihadi cells, and increasingly complicated relationships with its counterterrorism partners in Europe and the Maghreb.Such challenges have been highlighted in the course of recent events. In November 2015, a Belgian man of Berber-Moroccan origin was unveiled as the alleged mastermind behind the bombings that shook Paris that month, in addition to being a key member of an Islamic State cell in Brussels.
This year, catastrophic attacks in Barcelona, Spain, grabbed global headlines, and once again, it was revealed that many of the perpetrators were of Moroccan descent. Given the re-emergence of pre-existing jihadi networks in the region, the Maghreb will be simultaneously of key interest to the Islamic State and a critical piece of the puzzle for policymakers as they attempt to combat extremism.
Although no Islamic State attacks have taken place in Morocco at the time of this writing, there has been a sizable amount of activity. The following analysis employs an open source dataset of directly linked and conceptually inspired Islamic State plots and arrests in Morocco from June 2014 through June 2017.2 Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) researchers coded events as being linked to or inspired by the Islamic State only if government and/or credible media sources asserted that the Islamic State was responsible for or had inspired the event.3