Barcelona attack: How the Iraq war is linked to Spain’s outbreak of Islamist terror

‘The secrecy and subterfuge behind the Iraq war links Spain to Islamist terror. Jose Maria Aznar, the Prime Minister at the time, and his government misled the country by claiming that a devastating massacre in Madrid, a direct retaliation for the invasion, was the work of Basque separatists rather than al-Qaeda.
Mr Aznar had backed George W Bush and Tony Blair in the conflict which is now recognised as a catalyst for the upsurge in jihad which continues to this day. The coordinated attack on commuter trains at the Spanish capital in March 2004, killing 192 people and wounding 1,800, remains the deadliest terrorist attack on Europe this century and was among the first of the murderous backlash.
Spain had escaped the worst of the Islamist terror attacks suffered by other European states since then. Some government ministers had claimed that this was due to the experience in confronting the Basque militants of ETA over decades and also because the country’s Muslim population was relatively assimilated.’
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