Spain is losing its grip on Ceuta to a sustained Moroccan hybrid-warfare campaign while the United States supplies Morocco with advanced weapons because Madrid has become an enemy of Donald Trump, columnist Eduardo Inda argues.
Inda contends that Morocco has spent years channelling Moroccan nationals into Ceuta as part of a social engineering project aimed at slowly remaking the enclave’s demographics. He adds that King Mohamed VI has also been facilitating the flow of sub-Saharan migrants in order to overwhelm local social services and make the city unlivable for its Spanish residents.
The columnist draws a parallel with November 6, 1975, when King Hassan II sent 350,000 people into Western Sahara, of whom only a tenth were soldiers in the strict sense. Eight days later, Inda writes, the territory was Moroccan. He argues that what is now unfolding in Ceuta, and to a lesser degree in Melilla, follows the same template, and also resembles the 2021 border crisis triggered after Spain gave medical treatment in Zaragoza to Brahim Gali, leader of the Polisario Front.
Inda describes Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as a double agent serving Morocco rather than Spain, and states that Moroccan intelligence services hacked Sánchez’s mobile phone.
On Washington’s role, Inda argues that the United States backed Morocco in 1975 to prevent Western Sahara from falling to Soviet-aligned Algeria, and is doing so again today because Sánchez’s Spain is hostile to Trump. Morocco, he writes, already holds some of the best American military hardware available, including F-16 fighters, Apache helicopters, Predator drones, and the latest-generation missiles, and is set to receive F-35 fighter jets that Spain does not possess.
Inda concludes that the eventual loss of both Ceuta and Melilla is unavoidable, though he allows for an intermediate period in which the two cities operate as a kind of Hong Kong before passing definitively to Moroccan control.
