Breeding grounds of extremism

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Breeding grounds of extremism
For the young and uneducated, there are very few positive options


By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI
Associated Press

SIDI MOUMEN, MOROCCO - Every morning just before 7, Abdelhaq Ainane pulls on his jeans, a loose shirt and a navy blue cap and steps out the door of his tin-roofed shack.

He follows a winding alley lined with hanging laundry, passes women lugging jugs of water from a communal tap and trudges through a wasteland where cows, donkeys, dogs and goats feast on piles of rotting trash.

The stink is overpowering, but Ainane, 27, has something else on his mind. He's focused on his search for work as he makes his daily seven-mile trek down a dirt road to a cluster of factories where workers weave cotton into cloth, machines weld metal and greasy repairmen fix automobiles.

Ainane knows in his heart that he will return empty-handed to the two-bedroom shack in Carriere Thomas — the name given to his part of the Sidi Moumen shantytown — that he shares with his five siblings, mother, uncle, aunt and cousin.

Ainane's desperate search is mirrored all over Morocco in the slums and shantytowns where millions of undereducated and unemployed young men live on the fringes of big cities.

A third of Morocco's 31 million population is under 15, and half of those over 15 are illiterate.

With little hope of finding jobs, poor young Moroccans have but three choices: turn to drugs to forget their misery, climb into rickety boats to make a dangerous, clandestine journey to Europe, or embrace Islamic extremism that promises a better life in heaven.

The Sidi Moumen shantytown lies a stone's throw from the opulent villas outside Casablanca, Morocco's legendary commercial capital.

Three years ago, 13 men blew up explosive-laden backpacks at five targets in the city, killing themselves and 32 bystanders. Eleven of those suicide bombers called Carriere Thomas home.

The bombings on the night of May 16, 2003, targeted a Jewish community center and cemetery, a hotel, a restaurant and a Spanish social club.

Officials blamed a group called Salafiya Jihadiya, with links to al-Qaida, but no claim of responsibility was ever made.

Moroccan security forces have been a heavy-handed presence among Sidi Moumen's 50,000 people ever since, but there's no certainty that a government crackdown and 3,000 arrests nationwide have immunized the slums against Islamic violence.

"The extremists are still there but are silent," says Boucheib Mhamka, a Sidi Moumen resident and social worker. "However, the slightest thing can provoke them."