A mother’s scream cuts through the sirens and the roar of police vans in the Moroccan town of Fnideq, also known as Castillejos. The woman, who prefers to hide her name, holds her mobile phone and raises it high. A photo of a young woman. It’s your daughter. Hajar is 16 and one of dozens of young people who took part in the attempted entry into Ceuta in the early hours of September 15. “My daughter’s dream is to go to Europe, but I never imagined she would try it this way,” her mother says. They both live in Tetouan, where their daughter moved from, and shortly after, her mother went looking for her: “I came home at 4 p.m. and she was gone,” she says.
Around the anguish of Hajar’s mother, the migratory frenzy continues. On the way to the border post, the taxi driver glimpses a reality that, in this corner of the continent, does not exist: “I dream of a world without borders with qualified and educated young people. I wish this would not happen,” he says. In front of the border post that separates Morocco from Spain, a line of soldiers, police and security forces brandish riot shields. Every five minutes, a platoon of white vans, as well as other police vehicles, enter a cordoned-off area. Inside, the young people detained in different neighborhoods of the city and its surroundings are transferred to a bus with which they are transferred to other regions of the country. Some local sources say that the young people are transferred to Tangier or Casablanca, while others speak of cities closer to the Sahara.
At one o’clock in the morning, police sources claim to have arrested around 1,500 people, while various local sources estimate that the number does not exceed a thousand. At three o’clock in the morning, the deployment intensifies and the police forces climb part of the hill adjacent to the pass between Castillejos and Ceuta. At four o’clock in the afternoon, a helicopter from the Moroccan gendarmerie flies over the area, while a group of young people, aged between 15 and 17, descend the hill, intercepted by several guards.
The images of intense police deployments in Castillejos are not new. Moroccan authorities have claimed to have intercepted, in August alone, 14,648 migrants who were trying to cross, by swimming and jumping over fences, to the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa. During the same period, 37 people died crossing between Ceuta and Castillejos.
A call on social networks
For several weeks, Moroccan social networks have been flooded with messages promoting an attempt at collective migration to the autonomous city of Ceuta. Under the banner “15-9 (which refers to the date of the attempted jump) Fnideq-Ceuta”, the campaign threatened to overwhelm police controls.
Over the past week, the Moroccan National Security Directorate announced on the social network massive illegal immigration operations. The official source claimed that the security operations were framed by the interests of national security and territorial control. Some of the participants were arrested in several Moroccan cities, while the others were intercepted upon arrival in Tangier by train or bus.
In addition, the internal intelligence service, General Directorate of Territorial Security, highlights the multiplication of messages on social networks that encourage people to enter Ceuta and Melilla through “fake news.”
Intermittent closures at the Ceuta border
On Sunday, at 11 am, at the top of the road that connects the last roundabout of Castillejos to the border post towards Ceuta, a group of young people appears over the hill. There is no respite and the attempts continue in Castillejos. The line of gendarmerie in front of the entry and exit of vehicles between the two borders continues in an incredible way and a new one sets off all the alarms: around 200 people of sub-Saharan and Moroccan origin have tried to cross the border fence from Ceuta to the Berrocal Farm, according to EFE.
In addition to the containment measures taken by Morocco, members of the National Police and the Civil Guard have been deployed on the Spanish side of the border. Faced with migratory pressure, Moroccan security forces have decided to close the border, while Spain has also carried out intermittent closures, as confirmed by sources from the government delegation in El Faro de Ceuta.
The same source confirms that this Sunday, the only death recorded was a young man who was trying to swim across the pass leading to Ceuta. No information is yet available on the identity of the young man until his transfer to the morgue of the regional hospital of Tetouan, where he will be identified.
