Perejil

On July 11, 2002, a group of Moroccan gendarmes landed and raised their country’s flag on Perejil, a previously unknown and uninhabited islet, with an area barely larger than a soccer football field, whose sovereignty was shared by Spain and Morocco.
A few days later, the President of the Spanish Government, José María Aznar, sent all the three branches of the military to expel the soldiers occupying the islet.
In popular imagination, the Perejil crisis has remained a humorous anecdote. A Spanish military overreaction to the occupation of an uninhabited rocky islet. But that anecdote was actually just the tip of the iceberg: beneath the islet of Perejil lay a major international crisis involving the European Union, the UN, the Arab League, France, NATO and the United States.
Why did a seemingly insignificant piece of land provoke a conflict of such magnitude? What did Perejil mean that caused the Spanish army, navy, and air force to mobilize for the first time in a democracy? What was the scope of the crisis? Was the sovereignty of Ceuta and Melilla at risk? What do we know about the Perejil incident 23 years later?