“Two months ago the Central Intelligence Agency warned Catalan police of a threat to Las Ramblas.”
Details have emerged since the August 17 jihadist attack in Barcelona that conclude the attack could have been preventable, were it not for a sequence of security warnings and “red flags” either ignored or missed.
The existing tensions between the central government and the leaders of the independence movement in Catalonia, the autonomous region of which Barcelona is the capital, is but one factor.
According to El Periódico de Catalunya, a Barcelona daily newspaper, Catalan authorities ignored and failed to heed Spanish intelligence warnings to enhance physical security on Las Ramblas, the city’s main tourist thoroughfare.
One day after a Tunisian jihadist drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 56, Spanish National Police issued an order to all central, regional, and municipal police departments in Spain to “implement physical security measures to protect public spaces” to prevent jihadist attacks “in places with high numbers of people.”
The circular from December 20, 2016,read: “Municipalities should protect these public spaces by temporarily installing large planters or bollards at access points to hinder or prevent the entry of vehicles.”
The measures were never implemented in Barcelona because the leaders of the Catalan independence movement did not want to be seen as taking orders from the central government in Madrid. Had municipal officials complied with an order from Madrid to install bollards—planters designed to prevent car ramming attacks—on Las Ramblas, this attack may not have happened.
Instead, the Catalan autonomous police, known as the Mossos d’Esquadra, accused Madrid of “alarmism” and said municipalities in Catalonia would ignore this “indiscriminate measure.” Ada Colau, Barcelona’s left-wing mayor, has also repeatedly refused to “fill Barcelona with barriers,” insisting that it must remain “a city of liberty.”
“The total absence of police collaboration between the Mossos d’Esquadra, which is the police force deployed on the ground, and the National Police and the Civil Guard translates into huge security deficiencies. The relationship between police forces—influenced by the political situation—is terrible and, in the case of the Mossos and the National Police, it is open war.
“The result is that the information services of the Mossos, on the one hand, and those of the National Police and the Civil Guard, on the other, do not exchange information. The cooperation is reduced to the personal relationships of individual agents who, without the knowledge of their superiors, exchange information and put safety first,” El Periódico de Catalunya reported.
Just hours after the jihadist attack in Barcelona, Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido repeated that it would be “appropriate” for all municipalities to comply with the December circular. His ministry issued a new letter calling on municipalities to install safety measures. It remains to be seen if Catalan officials will now implement the recommendations.
Red Flags Ignored
The Catalan police force claim to have the jihadist threat under control, that local police were trained to “detect symptoms or radicalization,” and that there were “no concrete threats.”
Yet, according to El Periódico, in June, the CIA reportedly warned Catalan police that Barcelona was being targeted by jihadists: “Two months ago the Central Intelligence Agency warned Catalan police of a threat to Las Ramblas.”
Additionally, on June 30, a Twitter account associated with the Islamic State warned of an impending attack against al-Ándalus, the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal, and France occupied by Muslim conquerors from 711 to 1492. Many jihadists believe that territories Muslims lost during the Christian Reconquest of Spain still belong to the realm of Islam and that Islamic law gives them the right to re-establish Muslim rule there.
Es-Satti, a Moroccan national who lived in the Catalan town of Ripoll, served in a local mosque. He was a convicted drug trafficker who had spent four years at a prison in Valencia, where he is believed to have met Rachid Aglif, known as “The Rabbit,” one of the main plotters of the 2004 Madrid bomb attacks that killed 192 people and wounded 2,000. Police are now looking into whether Es-Satti was involved in the ISIS attacks on the Brussels airport and metro in 2016.
Ali Yassine, the director of the mosque in Ripoll, said that he had reported Es-Satti to local police more than a year ago as part of a security protocol to monitor Muslim preachers. Authorities did not place him on a watch list, however, even though he had been convicted of trafficking drugs and violating Spanish immigration laws.
It remains unclear why Catalan authorities failed to increase security in light of the warnings and threats.
Radicalization in Catalonia
Catalonia has been the central hub of jihadist recruitment in Spain for more than a decade, and radical Islamists consider it to be occupied land that should be part of a future Islamic caliphate.
Catalonia not only has the highest Muslim population in Spain, but it is also one of the most Islamized regions of the country. Catalonia has 7.5 million inhabitants, including an estimated 510,000 Muslims, who account for around 7% of the total Catalan population. In some Catalan towns, however, the Muslim population is above 40%.
At least 10,000 Catalans with links to the separatist movement have actually converted to Islam in recent years.
“The Catalan province, especially the area surrounding Tarragona [a port city in northeastern Catalonia], have been a Salafi hotbed for years, and one of the reasons is that it houses the highest numbers of Salafist mosques in Europe,” said Lorenzo Vidino, director of a program on extremism at George Washington University and author of a study on Salafism in Catalonia.
With this current wave of attacks on soft targets, which only need a rented van and a resolute driver to succeed, prevention has become an unmanageable challenge.
Many of Catalonia’s problems with radical Islam are self-inflicted. To promote Catalan nationalism and the Catalan language, Catalonian pro-independence parties have deliberately encouraged immigration from Arabic-speaking Muslim countries for more than three decades in the belief that these immigrants (unlike those from Latin America) would learn the Catalan language rather than speak Spanish.
The region welcomed millions of workers following an economic boom in the 1990s, but the 2008 financial crisis put a sudden end to its labor shortage.
There is little doubt that the autonomous region of Catalonia has become a prime base of operations for terrorist activity. Spanish authorities fear the threat from immigrant communities prone to radicalism, but they have very little intelligence or ability to penetrate these groups.
Tourism and Soft Targets
After the Madrid attacks in 2004, it became clear that Spain was firmly on the jihadist terrorists’ map.
Barcelona is a dynamic city—modern, attractive, cosmopolitan, and increasingly global. I was in Barcelona just after the Summer Olympic Games in 1992, and it was evident that Barcelona authorities invested in its infrastructure and facilities.
Today, Barcelona has become the 5th most popular European city destination after London, Paris, Istanbul, and Rome, and it attracts 7.4 million visitors annually. The most visited monument in Spain is La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which attracts more than three million visitors a year.
In the eyes of the jihadists, that makes it a priority objective, as they seek to attack sites that generate a great impact at the international level. With this current wave of attacks on soft targets, which only need a rented van and a resolute driver to succeed, prevention has become an unmanageable challenge.
This devastating attack comes at a very delicate political moment, but it has united Barcelonans, Catalans, and other Spaniards in revulsion and sorrow. In these times of uncertainty and the blurring of borders, if there is one thing that can feed the spirit of a nation and the solidarity of its people, it’s a deadly terrorist attack.
The worry now is that “parallel societies” could develop in parts of the country like El Raval, a largely Muslim neighborhood. The district has been dubbed by some as the Molenbeek of Barcelona—a reference to the suburb of Brussels that has been tied to Islamic extremism.
Barcelona will proudly rise stronger from this day of horror, but this will only be possible if the local political leaders recognize what has happened and how their current political stance has aided in the radicalization in their own backyard.
