Tunisia overwhelmed, divided over returning extremists
KELIBIA: Tunisia’s unhappy distinction as one of the world’s primary extremism exporters is coming home to haunt the country, where trained by Daesh have killed tourists, soldiers and even an unfortunate shepherd.
As the extremists suffer one battlefield defeat after another, Tunisia is being torn apart by a furious debate over what to do with returnees from among the 3,000 to 6,000 who left — and how to determine what threat they pose.
“These are people who were indoctrinated. These are people who left and who destroyed their Tunisian passports and who announced that they belonged to the nation of Daesh,” protest movement leader Boutheina Chihi Ezzine said.
Tunisian prisons are full, its courts are backlogged with terrorism cases, and its desert borders are porous. It was also the only country to emerge from the 2011 Arab Spring with a functioning democracy and is not on the Trump administration’s banned travel list.
That democracy allowed Ezzine and others to start organizing when President Beji Caid Essebsi said the jails were too crowded to house every returning militant, and that most posed no danger.
The first protest, held after a Tunisian follower of Daesh attacked the Berlin Christmas market, drew just a few hundred; the second a thousand. Ezzine fears the government is too willing to downplay the danger in exchange for social peace.
“Frankly,” she said, “we do not know how these people can come back and have the same values as we do, the sense of belonging to Tunisia, to the Tunisian nation.”
By official count, around 3,000 Tunisians traveled to the war zone in Libya, Syria and Iraq — most of them to join Daesh and other extremist groups. Many analysts believe the real number is at least double that . Another 1,250 young people were blocked from leaving, and it is believed that thousands of others are sympathizers.
In 2015, a Tunisian trained in a Daesh camp in Libya opened fire on a beach, picking off tourists as they sunbathed. Two others stormed the galleries of Tunis’ Bardo Museum, a popular destination for foreign visitors. In March this year, Daesh fighters attacked the border garrison of Ben Gardane, and 55 people died in the ensuing fight. A teenage shepherd who refused to hand his flock over to the militants was beheaded.
Ezzine is among many who believe the government can’t handle the influx, and for her the last straw was hearing the president downplay the threat in an early December interview. She tracked down Facebook groups of Tunisians with the same concerns and persuaded them to pull together into a collective.
“Even if we have begun to have some political stability, we remain a country that has lived through attacks, through political assassination,” she said.
The group’s slogan — “No to the return of terrorists” — touched a nerve. Her group is now meeting with political leaders, ministry by ministry, to press for a plan.
The government is careful to say that any Tunisian who wants to return can do so.
“We deal with this subject according to the constitu-
“We know that these people left in small groups of two or three people and they are returning the same way,” said Ridha Raddaoui of the Tunisian Center of Research and Study of Terrorism.
Raddaoui and Ezzine say the government has no real way to evaluate those who return. They are questioned, and anyone who acknowledges having committed crimes in the war zone is jailed for trial. But the evidence needed for conviction, if it exists at all, is in Syria or Libya. And, Raddaoui said, most end up being freed after a brief stint behind bars.
For months, Raddaoui has been examining more than 500 legal cases involving Tunisians accused of terrorism. The result was an in-depth, statistical look at why the Arab Spring’s only democracy is also a major exporter of armed extremists. A significant find, Raddaoui said, was a handwritten letter captured during a firefight with extremists near the Libyan border.
“In the text, these terrorists say ‘We are the people who benefited most from the Tunisian revolution,’” he said. “Because first they were able to get out of prison, they were able to organize on a national level, with recruits and everything. They trained, they armed themselves, they created their own camps in the mountains of the northwest.”
They found easy prey in the young people of Tunisia, who expected little from the pre-2011 authoritarian government but had high hopes after its fall. It turned out to be no easier to find good work under democracy than under an autocratic government. Things have only deteriorated further for the nation of 11 million. Tourism dried up, and the unemployment rate, officially around 15 percent, soared among the young, who began to leave for Europe — and for the war zones of Syria and Libya, which shares a 400-kilometer border with Tunisia.
The situation of the travelers can be murky. Mohammed Bel Hadj Amor crossed into Syria aged 19 in 2012, among the first of successive waves of young Tunisians headed for the war zone. Whatever his plans — he says he only wanted to help the Syrian people — he was thwarted almost immediately. He was intercepted first by Daesh extremists, who killed four of his friends, and then detained by Syrian government forces.