On 24 June 2022, around 1,700 people, most of them asylum seekers from Sudan and South Sudan, filed down the wooded slopes of Mount Gurugu in north-eastern Morocco. They were headed to the enclave of Melilla, a Spanish city of some 85,000 people, perched on the coast of mainland Africa.
At first, the migrants met no resistance. That was strange. In the months leading up to that day, Moroccan police had repeatedly raided settlements on the mountain, where thousands of people had taken refuge. The authorities had also prevented local shopkeepers from selling food to the migrants and stopped taxi drivers from transporting them to the Spanish consulate in the nearby city of Nador.
