Casablanca youth fight radicalism with rap

By Mark Trevelyan

CASABLANCA, Morocco (Reuters) - Six suicide blasts in Morocco's biggest city have sparked fears of more al Qaeda-linked bombings to come, but they provided an unlikely inspiration for a streetwise young rap musician.

Sitting in the cramped back room of a Casablanca apartment, his friends beating out the rhythm on their hands and chests, Younes Samih launches into his latest song, "Today's War".

"What do you want -- to make blood and tears flow? Have you found no other way out except to blow yourself up?" the 23-year-old pours out in a quickfire torrent of Arabic.

"Come with us and think about it. Don't let yourself be poisoned. If you die by blowing yourself up, where will you leave your heart?"

Since March 11, six bombers have died after detonating suicide belts in incidents that wounded more than 20 people in Casablanca but killed only one other person, a police officer. In the latest and most spectacular, two brothers blew themselves up on April 14 outside the U.S. consulate.

Despite the low death toll, the events have rattled locals and revived memories of al Qaeda-linked attacks in the city in 2003 when a dozen suicide bombers struck simultaneously, killing 45 people including themselves. The government said last week it was pouring an extra 2,000 police into the city.

"This isn't over. This is a new beginning," says Mohamed Darif, a Moroccan analyst on Islamist movements who sees the recent blasts as part of a wider al Qaeda resurgence in North Africa.

CITY OF CONTRASTS

Why has the violence here focused on Casablanca?

"Casablanca is a little Morocco. All the contradictions of Moroccan society, you find in Casablanca -- political left and right, Islamists of all colors, poverty and wealth," Darif says of the city of 4-5 million, one of the largest in Africa.

Driving out from the centre of Morocco's economic capital, with its wide boulevards and squares shaded by palm trees, a visitor quickly starts to notice those contrasts.

Large tower blocks loom at the side of the highway, then the first shantytowns come into view. At first sight, the vast slum of Sidi Moumen looks like an earthquake zone, a chaotic jumble of brick and corrugated iron, low-slung walls and roofs.

Perhaps a third of a million people live, sometimes 10 to a room, in the now notorious neighborhoods where several of the latest suicide bombers, as well as those of 2003, had their homes. Incongruously, many of the shacks have satellite dishes.

Curious to meet a visitor, children wave and local men crowd round. They are friendly but the prevailing mood is despair. "Miseria (misery)," one man says over and over in Spanish.

"There are no jobs, there's no money," says a 22-year-old man named Youssef. "That's the bathroom," he adds, laughing, pointing to a communal tap in a dusty open space strewn with rubbish and frequented by the odd cow, sheep or hen.