Spanish Islamic State Arrests Illustrate Continuing Recruitment

Spanish police on April 8 arrested 11 men suspected of links to the Islamic State in a series of raids in Barcelona, Spain's second largest city, and in other locations in Catalonia (El País, April 9). The group reportedly included five Moroccans, five ethnic Spanish converts to Islam and one 17-year-old Paraguayan who had recently converted (El País, April 8). A Spanish prosecutor was quoted as saying that the group was "directly linked" to the Islamic State. The group had allegedly already sent four other individuals to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but three-all from Barcelona-were arrested in December in Bulgaria while en route (El País, December 19). The police reportedly said that the group had the potential to carry out attacks in Catalonia, but that the group posed no threat as it was under constant surveillance. However, according to other reports, the group's plans were well advanced and involved a plot to attack Jewish targets and to kidnap and behead a member of the public (Times of Israel, April 10). The leader of the group was Antonio Saez Martinez, a 40-year-old ethnic Spanish hairdresser, who converted to Islam in an attempt to conquer his alcoholism, leading to him to growing a beard and reinventing himself as a hardline Salafist (El Mundo, April 12).

The location of the arrests in and around Barcelona underlines the strong Salafist presence in some parts of Catalonia. For instance, following the arrests, Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said that of the 98 mosques in the country known to promote a strict form of Salafism, 50 are in Catalonia (Catalunya Radio, April 8). This enduring correlation between jihadism and Salafist activism underlines the role of hardline Salafism in creating sectarian and intolerant "mood music" in Muslim communities that jihadists can easily exploit. In addition, in Terrassa, the city north of Barcelona where Antonio Saez Martinez lived, the immigrant population is estimated at over 40 percent and the local Muslim population at 20,000, creating a potentially fertile recruiting ground for Salafi and jihadist activists, particularly given Spain's high levels of unemployment (El Mundo, April 12).

Women from the Barcelona area have also been drawn to the Islamic State. For instance, on March 7, police arrested Samira Yerou, a Moroccan citizen living in Barcelona, as she arrived at the city's airport from Turkey, where she had been detained on suspicion of seeking to help Islamic State recruits cross into Syria (Ministry of Interior, March 7). In April, she was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison (RTVE, April 10). Six others were arrested in the Catalonia region in mid-March for recruiting for the Islamic State, allegedly creating "complex virtual framework" for online radicalization through Twitter and Facebook (El Mundo, March 15). Likewise, in December 2014, a 25-year-old Chilean woman living in Barcelona, Peña Orellana, was one of seven people arrested for allegedly recruiting individuals to the Islamic State, primarily through social media (La Cuarta, December 17, 2014).

Although there have been no attacks by Islamic State supporters so far in Spain, future attacks cannot be discounted. For instance, a June 2014 Spanish-language video released online by Islamic State members, apparently in Iraq or Syria, directly threatened Spain, with the speaker saying: "We are living under the Islamic flag, the Islamic caliphate. We will die for it until we liberate those occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I declare: Spain is the land of our forefathers and we are going to take it back with the power of Allah" (El Mundo, July 1, 2014). This reflects that although Spain is a lesser member of the international coalition against the Islamic State, the country occupies a central and disproportionately prominent position in the imaginations of a wide range of Islamists, from al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood, on account of its former role as a Muslim colony, whose medieval Christian reconquest is regarded as a lasting affront (El País, October 8, 2014). As a result, while Islamic State activity seems to be currently focused on recruiting fighters to Iraq and Syria, it is entirely possible that in time the group may shift toward attacking Spain itself.

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