In January, Moroccan officials arrested a Lebanese man, affiliated with Hizballah, carrying what appeared to be stolen identification papers. Emanuele Ottolenghi explains why the incident is cause for concern:
What was a Hizballah operative with forged documents doing in Morocco? . . . To answer this question, look no further than a decade of simmering tensions between the North African kingdom and Iran, which controls Hizballah as a proxy. Twice in a decade, Morocco broke relations with Iran—the first time, in 2009, officially over an Iranian clerical official’s statement that Bahrain, the tiny Gulf kingdom, really belonged to Iran.
In 2018, barely a year after Tehran had reopened its embassy, Morocco’s foreign minister, Nasser Bourita, publicly accused Iran of dispatching senior Hizballah operatives and supplying weapons and training to the Polisario Front, a group Morocco is fighting over sovereignty in the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara. Algeria, Morocco’s neighbor, backs Polisario.
Beyond these spats, Morocco has accused Iran of efforts to spread its revolutionary brand of Shiism among Morocco’s predominantly Sunni population, something Iran has certainly done zealously across Western Africa and among Moroccan immigrants in northern Europe. There is little evidence these attempts have won significant backing in Morocco, but not for want of trying.
The arrival of a Hizballah operative in January, less than a month after Jerusalem and Rabat normalized relations, may not be a coincidence, especially given that, barely two months earlier, Polisario leaders ended a three-decade-long truce with Morocco, potentially reigniting a conflict that has known little respite since 1975 and that could ignite an already unstable region. What better way to turn the screw against a more powerful adversary than relying on asymmetrical warfare like terror attacks through a proxy?
Read more on FDD: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2021/04/02/irans-mischief-in-morocco-is-a-problem/