Western policymakers suffer from historical amnesia when addressing jihadi threats. Jihadi actors, in contrast, invoke historical memory as a weapon of propaganda. The recent mass entry of Moroccan illegal migrants into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on July 30, 2026, is a case in point.
For two decades, Spain’s government has ignored alerts from leading terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, calling for the reconquest of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
Muslim illegals are now marching through Ceuta’s streets and camping on its beaches while shouting “Takbir” and “Allahu Akbar” [“God is Great”]. Migrant mobs now clash with the police; vigilantes and security guards protect neighborhoods from migrants.
For two decades, Spain’s government has ignored alerts from leading terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, calling for the reconquest of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
Spanish police have identified jihadis, whom they earlier investigated and deported from the country, among the mass influx of migrants. Officials believe the jihadis are among the approximately 5,000 migrants resisting deportation. Spain’s left-wing government insists that it has repatriated most of the illegals, but residents say that the all-pervasive presence of young Muslim men now destabilizes Ceuta.
Jihadi propaganda cites Spanish control over Ceuta, Melilla, and Andalusia as principal grievances in jihadi propaganda and identifies these regions as targets for attacks, notes Baldvin Holbrook in his doctoral thesis, Understanding the Content and Framing of Al-Qaida Leadership Communiqués.
“Spain’s Islamic past emerges as a key factor in the prevalence of the country in jihadist discourse,” warns political scientist Manuel Ricardo Torres-Soriano in his article, “Jihadist Propaganda as a Threat Indicator: The Case of Spain.” He argues: “It would be logical to conclude that the accumulation of references to a given country in terrorist discourse constitutes a solid indicator of the position occupied by the country in the terrorists’ world view and, by extension, of the level of threat it faces.” The geographical location of Ceuta and Melilla “in northern Morocco, together with their sizeable Muslim populations, have led jihadists to place the cities on the same victimization footing as other enclaves such as Jerusalem and Grozny,” Torres-Soriano writes.
Jihadist messaging makes multiple mentions of Ceuta and Melilla. In a May 2007 video, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb leader Abu Musab Abd Al Wadoud attacked Morocco for being “more concerned with the Western Sahara than liberating Ceuta and Melilla and cleansing them of the impurity of Spain.” The Al-Andalus Institute for Media Production, the media wing of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, continues to focus on Ceuta and Melilla to criticize Morocco’s monarchy.
In a 2009 Arabic audio recording, titled “From Kabul to Mogadishu,” Al Qaeda’s then-second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri attacked the United Nations charter for forcing the recognition of Spain’s occupation of Ceuta and Melilla. Zawahiri also identified Al Andalus as an Islamic waqf for Muslims to reinstate to the caliphate on 18 occasions, and on six occasions named Spain’s occupation of the Muslim cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Zawahiri’s September 2010 communique details the plight of Muslims at the hands of Western secularism and their lackeys from “east Turkistan to Ceuta and Melilla.” The Islamic State of Iraq similarly declared its “defense of all causes of the Muslims from Grozny to Ceuta and Melilla.”
“Muhammad himself made it clear that ‘migration is a duty that needs to be upheld forever or until the earth has submitted to Islamic hegemony.’”
While the mass entry of Muslim migrants, even if orchestrated by social media or Islamist actors, may not be an act of holy war, it would be dishonest to set aside such migrant entries as being without Islamic imperatives.
Sam Solomon, an Egyptian Islamic jurist who converted to Christianity, argues that Islamic theology anchored in Muhammad’s hijra—his migration from Mecca to Medina—lays the foundation for immigration to Islamize the West. “Muhammad’s own migration is the model for Muslims to emulate by migrating to non-Muslim lands and engaging in Islamic mission (dawa) until its host citizens submit to Allah,” Solomon writes in his book, Modern Day Trojan Horse: Al-Hijra, the Islamic Doctrine of Immigration, Accepting Freedom or Imposing Islam? “Muhammad himself made it clear that ‘migration is a duty that needs to be upheld forever or until the earth has submitted to Islamic hegemony,’” Solomon argued, citing a hadith: “O people, immigrate, holding on to Islam, for Hijra or migration is to continue as long as jihad continues.”
Several reports have established links between jihadi organizations and migrant movements into Europe. The Counter-Terrorism Centre of Excellence’s 2022 report states that the Islamic State may have generated significant funding in 2015 by smuggling migrants into Europe.
To ignore the Islamist invocation of historical memory is no longer an option.
