CASABLANCA—For almost a year, diplomats, experts and journalists have been telling investors not to worry about the new Islamist governments emerging in the wake of the Arab Spring. They are wrong.
Relatives and friends of the 17 people killed in a Marrakech cafe bombing a year ago on Saturday marked the first anniversary of their death by releasing a dove in memory of each of them. ....
Adventurer Bertrand Piccard told The Associated Press on Friday that the 2,500-kilometer trip from Switzerland to Morocco will take two days and see stopovers in Madrid and Rabat.
Morocco has become one of the leaders of the African film production, said Michel Ouedraogo, General delegate of the 22nd Pan-African Film and Television Festival (FESPACO) slated on February 26 to March 5 in Ouagadougou.
Morocco is a country shaded with a variety of colors yet cloaked with the blanket of mystery. It is this charm, the fact that that tourists desire to know more and more about Morocco is what makes this country so attractive. ...
Just getting there can be an adventure in itself. The city is still home to artisans who practice their art in the old ways, and can be found at every twist and turn in the ancient medina.
The Moroccan bleach market grew 4% between 2009 and 2010, reach Dh263 million in 2010. Rising income levels in Morocco have fuelled growth in the market, while the current value unit price remained steady in 2010
Morocco Today National
But the rising decibel level is deepening fault lines between a government drive to modernize and a wave of rigorous political Islam.
Morocco, a country of 33 million people, gets more than 7 million tourists a year. And there are worries that some may be put off by the five heavily amplified calls a day, each lasting five minutes, to "hasten to the prayer, hasten to the prayer."
The three teenage girls sniffing glue in the back of the bus must have thought the fumes had melted their brains. Here they were in the North African kingdom of Morocco, riding into a slum in the town of Salé. Yet as they peered through the window of the bus, they could see a giant poster on the side of a house, featuring a leering Saddam Hussein holding a rifle. Stranger sights lay ahead: as the bus rounded a corner, the street was full of Iraqis and American soldiers in Humvees.
"They're filming a movie. We're supposed to be Baghdad," one passenger explained, and the girls returned to their glue. Sure enough, director Ridley Scott was shooting a political thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, and Morocco — with its deserts, craggy peaks and labyrinthine bazaars — was his tame cinematic stand-in for Iraq.
Hollywood isn't alone in wanting to turn Morocco into Iraq. Al-Qaeda, and a small but virulent band of loosely associated jihadis, would also love to make their mark in this nation of 34 million. They see corruption, spreading slums and 15% unemployment as fertile ground to sow their extremism. Similar conditions in neighboring Algeria gave rise to an ongoing civil war between security forces and armed Islamists that has left 150,000 dead. Morocco is next in the jihadis' crosshairs.
