MADRID: It will go down in history as the first military invasion of western European soil since the second world war. In a secret operation, Moroccan soldiers took the Spanish-owned Isla del Perejil late on Thursday, hoisted their flag from its highest point, set up camp and waited for the Spaniards to try to take the land back.

They had successfully invaded a patch of land that, formally, belongs to an area protected by Nato. What would happen next?

The invasion of Perejil, literally “the parsley island”, created an international incident that reverberated through Europe and North Africa, but its farcical nature meant it was unlikely to spark anything more than a war of words.

The invasion force consisted of a dozen poorly armed Moroccan frontier guards, equipped with a radio, two flags and a couple of tents.

The island they invaded, which lies 200 metres off the coast of northern Morocco, is populated solely by lizards, bugs and sprigs of wild parsley.

Even the Spanish government, which maintains that its last occupants 40 years ago were Spanish legionnaires, concedes that the islet has no strategic value.

Nobody knows for sure how the invasion force got there, but the Moroccans, however, claim they mean business. The farce over an island they have renamed Leila is not without real threats and danger. When officers from Spain’s civil guard police force arrived on a small patrol boat from the nearby Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta three miles away and to which the islet nominally belongs, they were reportedly persuaded to get back on their boat at gunpoint.

The invasion was greeted with amazement by Moroccans, who were readying themselves for three days of celebrations to mark King Mohammed VI’s recent marriage. Most had not even realised that the island, so close to the popular beaches north of Tangiers, was meant to be Spanish.

Spain yesterday admitted that although it had held control over Perejil for several hundred years, the rock had not been legally documented as Spanish in recent decades. “There is a certain vagueness in this aspect,” said a Spanish foreign ministry spokesman.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.