A NETWORK of close to half a million anonymous social media accounts organised last week’s mass migrant crossing into Ceuta, a new intelligence report has found.
The report, from Golden Owl, an intelligence firm based at the Alicante, found that the campaign had no recognisable hierarchy.
Its investigators cross-referenced more than 5,000 posts across open Facebook groups to trace how the crossing was organised, and who was behind it.
There was no single leader whose arrest would’ve stop the campaign, the report concludes.
Instead, a network of administrators and recruiters spread the load, so no one node is essential to the whole.
It comes as Spain’s Interior Ministry upgraded the number of migrants who crossed into Ceuta illegally to 72,000 – with 70,000 already returned.
The report’s most immediate warning concerns 15 August.
A call for a repeat crossing on that date was posted on 1 August in a Facebook group with 108,000 members, and remained live and active when Golden Owl’s researchers checked.
The 108,000-member Facebook group calling for the 15 August repeat was still active as this piece was published.
Golden Owl flags one further, separate risk.
Investigators found escalating posts tagging 15 named neighbourhoods in northern Ceuta, some ending with the line ‘revenge is a duty that must be collected’ — content the report treats as a distinct threat to public order, apart from the organised-crossing campaign itself.
The campaign behind the crisis even had its own name: ‘Asalto Karyaj a Ceuta‘ – assault Karyaj on Ceuta.
Karyaj is everyday Darija slang for a window grille or metal railing, harmless in the classified-ads and household groups where it is normally used.
Repurposed, it became shorthand for storming the border fence separating Fnideq, on Morocco’s northern coast, from Ceuta.
But the code word did not last long before it mutated in order to stay ahead of moderators searching for banned terms.
As Golden Owl’s investigators tracked it, ‘kriaj’ shifted to ‘the assault’, then to ‘the winds’ — a rolling vocabulary change designed specifically to beat the social media authorities.
Golden Owl counts 478,000 declared memberships across the recruitment, coordination and market-style Facebook groups that formed the campaign’s operational core.
Its own report notes the same accounts turn up in more than one group, so the figure measures the network’s reach, not a confirmed headcount of unique people.
Beyond that core, the report identifies a further 1.03 million members in more loosely connected public groups the campaign fed into, and more than 500,000 additional followers of pages that amplified the messaging without directly organising it.
Two figures stand out among the administrators Golden Owl was able to trace.
One is a recruiter, born in Casablanca and now based in Istanbul, who the report says assembled a cell of ‘two girls and six boys’ and posted a Turkey-based WhatsApp number as an entry point for new recruits.
The other ran what the report calls the network’s largest single node, from neighbouring – but hostile – Algeria.
Morocco is described as the campaign’s base, with active groups registered in Fnideq, Tangier, Larache, Casablanca and Azla, a town on Morocco’s northern coast.
External nodes reached beyond Morocco’s borders, into Istanbul, Madrid — where a group named ‘Nas al-Ghorba Spain’ has 78,000 members — Annaba in Algeria, and Rome.
A handful of larger Facebook pages amplified the campaign, among them one with 213,000 followers whose biography reads “#europe #ceutaspain,” and two Moroccan news pages, Tanjanews and Nador Days.
The report’s most immediate warning concerns 15 August.
A call for a repeat crossing on that date was posted on 1 August in a Facebook group with 108,000 members, and remained live and active when Golden Owl’s researchers checked.
Golden Owl flags one further, separate risk.
Investigators found escalating posts tagging 15 named neighbourhoods in northern Ceuta, some ending with the line ‘revenge is a duty that must be collected’ — content the report treats as a distinct threat to public order, apart from the organised-crossing campaign itself.
The 108,000-member group calling for the 15 August repeat was still active as this piece was published.
Golden Owl specialises in OSINT, or open-source intelligence — analysis built entirely from what is publicly visible online, rather than from leaked, hacked or classified material.
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