Tunisia is often described as the only success story of the Arab spring. Its “Jasmine revolution” in 2011 unseated a corrupt dictator relatively peacefully and ushered in a transition to democratic elections and habits. But the small north African country also has a serious jihadi problem – as was grimly illustrated by Wednesday’s bloody Tunis museum attack.
Mounting mayhem in neighbouring Libya is part of the problem as hardline Islamist militants have managed to cross porous borders or have smuggled weapons to like-minded extremists such as Ansar al-Sharia, which has branches in Tunisia and elsewhere across the Maghreb region.
Al-Qaida has been around for a more than a decade, using different names. Its most notorious exploit was a 2002 attack on a synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, which killed 14 German tourists. In recent months it has been supplanted by Salafi organisations that have pledged support to the Islamic State (Isis) in its distant Iraqi and Syrian heartlands.
Earlier this week, the Tunisian authorities announced the breakup of a cell said to be recruiting jihadis to fight in Libya. Ahmed Rouissi, a senior member of Ansar al-Sharia and one of the country’s most wanted men, was killed fighting near Sirte, Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown.
Ansar al-Sharia was proscribed in Tunisia in 2013 after the killings of two secular politicians, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, and an attack on the US embassy that killed four people in the capital, Tunis. But Tunisians have also flocked to the front lines in Syria, providing up to 3,000 fighters – more than any other Arab country – in the war against Bashar al-Assad. Many have ended up in the ranks of Isis, but others have joined the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra. Up to 2,000 have been killed and an estimated 500 are said to have returned home, some to face torture and arrest
Several thousand more have been prevented from travelling, according to the Tunisian interior ministry, and there has been an effort to shut down recruitment networks. The well-worn routes led through Tunis airport, especially flights to Istanbul, or across the southern land border, via Libyan training camps. In Douar Hicher, a poor district at the edge of Tunis, it is common knowledge that 40 or 50 young men have left to fight, of whom perhaps a dozen have been killed.
Studies have shown that Tunisian jihadis are not necessarily poor or from deprived inland areas. They are often university graduates from the wealthier coastal strip who moved from liberal and secular lifestyles to devout religiosity before leaving for Syria. Few were supporters of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist movement that has done much to make Tunisia’s transition a relative success. Online self-radicalisation has been widely reported.
The precise affiliation of Wednesday’s attackers was unclear, but Twitter users employed language from the Isis lexicon such as the Arabic word ghazwa, a reference to armed raids in the early Islamic era. Another comment, under the hashtag “sworn to avenge”, said: “Shedding the blood of Crusaders to avenge Muslim blood.” Isis – described by the pejorative term “Daesh” – was widely blamed and abused.
It seems no accident that western tourists were the target of the latest atrocity. In October 2013, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives on a beach in the resort of Sousse. The bomber had attempted to enter a nearby hotel but was refused entry. He ran on to the beach and blew himself up, but no one else was hurt.
“These people struck at the right moment and in exactly the right place,” Frances Ghiles, a north Africa analyst, told the Guardian. “It’s the eve of the tourist season. Last year tourism started to pick up again and the elections went well. With this attack they hit tourism and democracy at the same time. There are plenty of people who would like to derail the Tunisian experiment and the authorities take this threat very seriously. This proves yet again that this cancer is going to be with us for some time to come. But in the end I am sure the spirit of the Tunisian people will prevail.”
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