{"id":4891,"date":"2026-08-23T13:25:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/?p=4891"},"modified":"2026-08-23T13:25:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:25:20","slug":"ceuta-melilla-and-layla-islands-of-morocco-by-salem-sirrieh-translated-to-english-by-ibrahim-ebeid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/?p=4891","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0Ceuta, Melilla, and Layla Islands of MOROCCO BY SALEM SIRRIEH – TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH BY IBRAHIM EBEID"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/u>Ceuta, Melilla, and Layla Islands of MOROCCO<\/strong><\/p>\n

BY SALEM SIRRIEH<\/strong><\/p>\n

TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH BY IBRAHIM EBEID<\/strong><\/p>\n


\n<\/strong>First of all, let’s get to know the location of the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, which some may think are neighboring cities, but they are not; the autonomous city of Ceuta is located on the Moroccan coast at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea on the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean Sea. Its area is estimated at about 20 square kilometers, and it has a population of 82 thousand people, according to 2011 statistics. The autonomous city of Melilla is also in eastern Morocco, near the Algerian border, off the southern coast of Spain. It covers about 12 square kilometers and has a population of about 70,000.
\nJust as our people in Palestine suffer from the policy of Judaization and the apartheid wall, our people in the occupied Moroccan territories of Ceuta, Melilla, and the island of Leila also suffer from the policy of Spain and the apartheid fence practiced by Spain to obliterate the Arabism of its people and attach it to the Kingdom of Spain.
\nThe beginning of the fall of the two cities under European occupation dates back to the weakening of the Emirate of Bani al-Ahmar in Granada in the fifteenth century, when the dispute began between the princes of Andalusia “and shouted above every branch of the rooster” in the expression of Lisan al-Din bin al-Khatib in describing the state of this recklessness and fighting between the princes. Hence, the leaders of Castile (Spain) and Portugal took the opportunity to eliminate the Arab presence in these places during the Reconquista wars. Granada was the last of these castles, which fell in 1492 AD. While Ceuta fell to the Portuguese in 1410 AD, Melilla continued resisting Spanish armies until it fell in 1497 AD, as part of a broader plan for the Spanish and Portuguese to besiege Morocco and occupy its lands. In the following centuries, Moroccans tried to retake the two cities and free them from foreign occupation. The most prominent of these attempts was the attempt of Mawla Ismail in the sixteenth century AD, where the Arabs in this period besieged the city of Ceuta and could not open it, as well as the attempt of Mawla Muhammad bin Abdullah in 1774 AD to besiege the city of Melilla, and failed in ridding it from the hands of the Spaniards. Residents of both towns made great efforts to rebel against the reality of occupation at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 1921 and 1926 AD, the Moroccan hero Mohammed bin Abdul Karim Al-Khattabi’s revolution against the Spanish in northern Morocco succeeded in liberating the region. Still, France supported Spain and thwarted his victory. General Franco tried to tickle the nationalist feelings of the inhabitants of Ceuta and Melilla to help him in his war against the Popular Front government, as he promised them independence if he took power in Spain, and thus was able to recruit thousands of them in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 without fulfilling his promise to them.
\nThus, these two gaps continued to pay the price each time, once for their geographical location on the front between Europe and Africa, once for standing with General Franco, and third for the march of the Arabs from Ceuta towards Andalusia. Spain developed several legal measures to limit the immigration of Arabs towards the two cities, to gradually erase its Arabism, and in return, encouraged Spanish immigration and the immigration of Jews, whose number increased in the sixties and seventies, especially in the city of Ceuta, and also restricted the population there and prevented them from obtaining building permits and restricted their religious and cultural activities.
\nTo limit the number of Arabs in the city of Ceuta, the Madrid authorities issued a law that states that everyone born in the city of Ceuta is considered Spanish. During the years of occupation, Spain did not stop the policy of “Spain” the two cities permanently to swallow them and change their urban and demographic identity, determined to perpetuate the occupation and put the cover of legitimacy on it, anticipating any Moroccan demand to restore the two cities, and imposing a fait accompli that will be on its side in any negotiations with Morocco in this regard. In 1983, Spain expelled 1,500 Moroccans and banned their entry again. In October 1985, Spain began to apply the law of foreigners residing in the two cities, which considers Moroccans there foreigners on Spanish territory, and this led to an uprising among Moroccans led by a young man from Melilla named Omar Dahdouh in 1987 and left many martyrs in their ranks. Since Spain entered into the European Union in the second half of the eighties and with the new arrangements in the early nineties and the signing of the “Schengen” agreement on borders between European countries, the two cities have turned into an element in the European security doctrine towards the southern region, as the Schengen Treaty explicitly stipulated that the two cities are the southern border of Europe and Spain found that the field available to it to add an apartheid wall around each city from their legitimate original homeland, i.e., Morocco, after the psychological and emotional wall that it erected throughout the stages. Previously, in 1998, the work of fencing the area between Melilla and the Moroccan city of Nador in the north was launched with a double strip of barbed wire up to four meters high and six kilometers long, equipped with the latest technological surveillance means that include seventy-four video cameras and sensitive electronic mechanisms for surveillance. European funding for these works accounts for 75 percent, compared with 25 percent from Spain, which is the second fence after the double wall erected on the border between Ceuta and Morocco, she said. The Spanish newspaper La Rath\u00f3n in May 1999: “Any attack on the two cities” would force the Spanish army to intervene immediately by constitutional order, and the government would have the support of NATO. Since the mid-seventies, the Sahara issue has been the main pressure card in the hands of Spain, as the latter has worked to support the Polisario Front, which demands an independent state in the Sahara, due to Madrid’s desire to distract Morocco from demanding its legitimate rights in Ceuta and Melilla, believing that resolving this issue will make Morocco devote itself to recovering its occupied northern outposts.
\nSurprisingly, the United Nations does not recognize Spain’s occupation of Moroccan territory. How much I was struck by what was written in Arabic Wikipedia about Ceuta and Melilla, which are Spanish cities that Morocco claims to be its territory!!<\/p>\n

References:
\n1 – <\/strong>https:\/\/ar.wikipedia.org\/wiki<\/strong><\/a>
\n2- Ceuta and Melilla: the roots of the conflict and future prospects – Driss Al-Kanburi
\n<\/strong>https:\/\/www.islamweb.net<\/strong><\/a>
\n3. The Tale of Ceuta and Melilla.- <\/strong>https:\/\/arabicpost.net<\/strong><\/a>
\n-4alltoo to retrieve Saba and Melilla- Facebook page
\n5 – The history of Ceuta by Muhammad ibn Tawit can be downloaded from Noor-Book.com
\n6- Al Jazeera Documentary Channel
\n<\/strong>https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=FBP_nFpcNmM&t=1804s<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Ceuta, Melilla, and Layla Islands of MOROCCO BY SALEM SIRRIEH TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH BY IBRAHIM EBEID First of all, let’s get to know the location of the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, which some may think are neighboring cities, but they are not; the autonomous city of Ceuta is located on the Moroccan coast at …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4893,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4891\/revisions\/4893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sawtoroba.com\/Eng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}