"The threat in Catalonia is clear." With these unflinching words in 2010, made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, the US State Department was already voicing concern over the potential for radicalization among young Muslim men in Barcelona.
The city was a "crossroads of worrisome activities," according to the leaked document, with a large Muslim community of which a small portion was vulnerable to being recruited by jihadi groups. Migrants from North Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh had turned the region into a "magnet for terrorist recruiters," it said.
The day after this week's attacks, Spanish newspapers published numbers illustrating that danger in the form of statistics. Barcelona, along with Madrid and the autonomous Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, has an exceptional number of jihadis. Around a third of Spain's Muslim population lives in these cities. Between 2012 and 2016, 178 jihadis were apprehended in the entire country; almost four-fifths of them came from one of these four cities. [Deutsche Welle] Read more
