Tens of thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta several days ago. DW interviewed two experts to understand what may have caused the incident.

For a long time, the Moroccan government chose not to comment on the Ceuta border crisis that saw tens of thousands of migrants cross into the Spanish exclave.

It was not until Sunday that Moroccan Interior Ministry spokesperson Rachid El Khalfi said "the malicious exploitation of the digital space," "misleading information" and misinterpretations of a Spanish Supreme Court ruling were to blame for the incident.

Morocco has since said it never intended for the border surge to happen and has promised full cooperation with Spain.

Spain, however, was quick to suspect Moroccan involvement, with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez calling the border breach an "attack on our territorial sovereignty." Videos have, after all, surfaced showing Moroccan security forces doing nothing to stop the crowd surging forward.

Efforts have been made to try and explain what caused the migrant crisis. Some have said Spain's recent rapprochement with Algeria may have angered Morocco, while others have speculated US influence may have played a role, although there is no reliable evidence to support the latter theory.

A complex situation

DW spoke with two analysts who caution against simplistic explanations. They do, however, ascribe different degrees of responsibility to Morocco for causing the crisis.

"I think the situation today is significantly different from what it was in 2021," says Isabelle Werenfels, a Maghreb regional expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).

Back then, Morocco was interested in exerting foreign policy pressure on Spain over the Western Sahara dispute, she says. Today, Morocco would have "a great deal to lose, above all, international credibility and investment" if found to have deliberately orchestrated the Ceuta migrant surge.

Jochen Oltmer, a migration researcher at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, also warns against jumping to conclusions, telling DW, "You have to keep in mind the many different interests at play."

He points to Ceuta's unique status as a European exclave on the African continent, decades of migration flows, the impact of social networks and the hopes of many migrants to build better lives abroad.

Oltmer says Moroccan authorities carry considerable responsibility for the Ceuta crisis, as "such a border crossing could never have taken place if the Moroccan side hadn't looked the other way." It was this inaction that made possible a border breach of this magnitude in the first place, he told DW.

Werenfels does not dispute this assessment. Yet she also believes Morocco may have wanted to send a political signal to Spain, perhaps over its recent rapprochement with Algeria and its decision to grant Spanish citizenship to individuals born in Western Sahara before September 1977.

"But there is a significant difference between making a political statement and orchestrating a migration surge on this scale," Werenfels says. The expert thinks it is "unlikely" that Morocco had planned the latter, even though it cannot be ruled out, while stressing a lot of information remains extremely unclear.

Who bears responsibility?

There is some evidence to suggest that Morocco played a part in the border chaos to push its own political agenda, says Oltmer. For years, the country has viewed itself as an indispensable partner to the European Union in the context of migration policy, he says, adding that Morocco has repeatedly emphasized how much the bloc depends on its cooperation.

Yet the conflict over Western Sahara and Morocco's rivalry with Algeria also plays an important role, Oltmer explains. That is why he "ultimately cannot imagine that the recent events would have been possible without Morocco."

Werenfels advocates for a more nuanced analysis. She suspects it's possible that Morocco wanted to send a message but that matters got out of control. Werenfels says it is hard to imagine that Morocco would want to risk a lasting rift with Spain and the European Union.

Read on, leftards...

https://www.dw.com/en/ceuta-border-crisis-morocco-spain-migrants-eu-migration-po...

70,000 people don't just make the joint decision to swim into a Spanish city, a hundred of them drowning on the way, only to turn back, say oh well, it never would have worked anyway.

Join the dots, leftards...

“I think there’s enough evidence to hypothesise or claim that Morocco is behind this,” said Riccardo Fabiani, the north Africa project director for the International Crisis Group. “But there was no clear trigger for this, and this is what is puzzling for everyone.”

Observers have suggested Spain’s recent rapprochement with Rabat’s archrival, Algeria, could have set off Morocco. But another, perhaps more plausible explanation pointed towards the US, said Fabiani.

“It’s obviously impossible to demonstrate,” he said. “But in terms of plausibility, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine that Morocco might have done something to earn brownie points with its allies, given that Morocco and this particular administration in Washington do have a very close, excellent relationship.”

While Morocco had probably not “masterminded” the surge into Ceuta, he said, its relationship with the Trump administration – along with the Moroccan king’s desire to keep its claim to Ceuta in the spotlight – may have affected how it responded to fast-spreading online rumours about the Spanish border being thrown open.

“For sure the Moroccan security forces were monitoring those conversations,” said Fabiani. “They saw that and there was probably some conversation where they decided to do nothing and see where this goes.”

What followed made headlines across the globe as tens of thousands of people swam or waded across one of the EU’s two land borders with Africa. As Spain scrambled to cope, far-right voices seized on the images.

In the US, the vice-president, JD Vance, and the state department blamed the influx on the Socialist-led government of Spain, while Trump warned that electing Democrats would make what happened in Spain “look small-time”. At no point did any of them mention Morocco or the potential role it might have played.

Trump and his administration have long been open about the deep antipathy they feel for Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, whose refusal to allow the US to use its airbases during the Iran war, rejection of the 5% defence spending target and vociferous criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza have arguably made Spain the administration’s least favourite EU country.

The American response seemed to be a triumph for Rabat, whose relationship with the US president traces back to his first term, when Morocco agreed to normalise ties with Israel in exchange for Trump’s recognition of its sovereignty claim over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

Since then, Morocco’s all-powerful monarch had doubled down on outreach efforts, said Fabiani. “The Moroccans have really made extra efforts to cultivate every single major decision-maker within the administration, including the president himself, to make sure that this administration will support, until the end, the Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara.”

A hint that the relationship could help Morocco lay claim to more than Western Sahara came in a recent US congressional report that appeared to be sympathetic to Morocco’s refusal to recognise Ceuta as Spanish territory, describing it as “Spanish-administered” rather than a part of Spain, as it has been since 1580.

Days after the influx, interest in Ceuta remained heightened among those close to both Trump and the Israeli government, said Haizam Amirah-Fernández, the director of the Madrid-based Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies. “They haven’t stopped talking about Ceuta for several days in a row, which is quite striking.”

What had been laid bare was Rabat’s willingness to use “hybrid tactics to achieve political objectives”, said Amirah-Fernández, drawing a parallel with May 2021 when Rabat loosened border controls to allow more than 8,000 people to cross into Ceuta in a show of anger over Madrid’s decision to allow a Western Sahara pro-independence leader to travel to Spain to be treated for Covid-19.

This time around, as nearly 10 times more people crossed into Ceuta, it set off a bout of finger-pointing across the EU rather than any kind of concerted effort to push back using the bloc’s status as Morocco’s largest trading partner and largest foreign investor. “The reaction of several governments in the EU was, in the end, what the White House was looking for – the erosion of solidarity between European partners,” said Amirah-Fernández.

Senior officials in Morocco have pushed back against accusations it was in any way complicit.

At the Rabat-based Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis, there was little doubt that relations between Morocco and the US were in their “golden era”. Even so, the country’s approach to the Trump administration remained pragmatic, said Said Saddiki, a senior fellow at the institute.

“Moroccan policymakers are well aware of President Trump’s transactional style and have sought to preserve Morocco’s strategic autonomy,” Saddiki said in an email, citing efforts to maintain partnerships with the EU, China and the Gulf states, among others.

“The relationship with the Trump administration has strengthened Morocco’s international position, but so far it has not come at the expense of its relations with Spain or the European Union.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/06/trump-influence-morocco-spotlight-...

Paki gob on a stick wrote on Aug 8^th, 2026 at 7:30pm:


The illegal migrants.
If they were not migrating illegally and taking any route they can, no-one could use them. They are the cause and they started it.

The Moroccan government doesn’t seem to be doing much to protect its young people from the Israeli dog-rapists and mind-rapists. It notoriously engages in various forms of “security cooperation” with the Genocidal Zionist Entity, and is rumored to have purchased Pegasus break-into-your-phone-and-own-you software. So if Israel ever decided it wanted to mount a color-revolution-style social media driven invasion of Ceuta by Moroccan youth, it seems unlikely that anyone, except perhaps the Spanish intelligence services, would stand in its way. And the Spanish services, unlike Israel, aren’t world leaders in criminal hacking software, nor do they own Instagram and TikTok.

Why suspect Israel? Start by asking the usual question: cui bono. The effect of the crazy mass-psychosis Ceuta event, like earlier crazy mass-psychosis events including 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo, massively benefits the Zionists far more than anyone else:

*It punishes Spain's anti-genocide government, and its courageous anti-genocide leader Pedro Sanchez, for having the temerity to cut off military shipments to Israel.

*It punishes Spain’s anti-Iran-war government for what Gemini terms its

“strict anti-war stance against the U.S.–led military operation in Iran, enacting total base bans, complete airspace closures, and comprehensive cargo blocks, its expulsion of American military aircraft includug fifteen U.S. Air Force refueling tankers, the closure of its entire airspace to all U.S. military aircraft, denying transit access to U.S. warplanes or refueling tankers traveling from third countries, such as the UK, forcing U.S. logistics to entirely bypass Spanish territory, denies docking rights to any international vessel or transit cargo plane carrying military equipment, weapons, or ammunition destinados for Israel or U.S. forces fighting in the Middle East…”


In the past, whenever there was this kind of crazy mediagenic event that supposedly “just happened”—19 Muslims who couldn’t fly planes and could barely tie their shoes “just happened” to get lucky and cause the entire World Trade Center complex to explosively commit suicide; the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly “just happened” to create the Charlie Hebdo mass psychosis on the same day that Michel Houellebecq published his Great Islamophobic Novel; Lee Harvey Oswald “just happened” to get lucky by unleashing a magic bullet that removed the only obstacle to Israel’s nuclear weapons program…it has always emerged later that ISRAEL DID IT.

I submit that the same is probably the case with the 2026 migrant rush on Ceuta.

Kevin Barrett



https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/did-israel-send-60000-migrants-from-morocco-into-ce...

Setanta wrote on Aug 8^th, 2026 at 7:34pm:


Redeculous. If they planned to migrate, they wouldn't have just had a giggle, followed Spanish police directions and walked straight back to Morocco.

70,000 people don't just wake up one day and spontaneously decide to illegally "migrate". Where were their backpacks? Where was the gold carefully sewn into their clothes? Where were the families?

The kingdom is playing geopolitics, the shifting sands of Moroccan political brinkmanship, the cunning of the Berber bazaar merchant. This has all been tried before.

Quote:

Paki gob on a stick wrote on Aug 8^th, 2026 at 7:53pm:


If there were no illegal migrants, it could not have happened. You know this and it's not redeculous, not even ridiculous.

P.S. I see another thread by Peccar in films about the redeculous ways people spell ridiculous... Peccar! New thread please, teach this old illiterate English teacher from Lahore how to spell.

Setanta wrote on Aug 8^th, 2026 at 8:03pm:


These weren't migrants, the majority were bored, unemployed youth. Some are poor and desperate, others were simply thrill-seekers.

A clutch are still hanging on, a waiting game. None will get into Europe.



But that's not the point. You were asked who started this.

Don't want to say?

Barbary corsairs by other (but similar) means.