Thousands left Tunisia to join ISIS; now the worry is their return

TUNIS, Tunisia — Tunisia has sent more fighters abroad to join the ranks of the Islamic State than any other country. And now, as the Islamic State takes a battering on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, the country is at odds over what to do if and when they come home.

Tunisians have been dealing with a frenzied polemic in recent weeks, as secularists have raised fears that a returning wave will bring further mayhem to this fragile state and Islamists have been forced to condemn the jihadis.

“How can we accept those people who are professionals in war, in the use of arms and have a culture of being terrorists?” asked Badra Gaaloul, a civil-military analyst who heads the International Center of Strategic, Security and Military Studies. “We in Tunisia are in crisis, and we cannot accept these people.”

“It is a nightmare for Tunisia,” she added. “We are not ready for that.”

The concern is not academic. Gaaloul, among others, points to the experience of Algeria, which suffered through a decadelong insurgency in the 1990s when jihadis returned from Afghanistan set on establishing Islamic law, and the army led a brutal war to crush them.

Already there are signs that some of the 5,500 Tunisians who have gone abroad, according to United Nations estimates, are seeking new targets at home and in Europe, where Tunisians have been implicated in several recent terrorist cases in France and Germany.

For Tunisia, there is no easy solution. The new constitution does not allow the government to bar them. They can be locked up for joining a terrorist group, or for committing crimes abroad, but cases are hard to build and charges difficult to prove. The president proposed amnesty, only to be vigorously opposed.

So the country has settled into a harsh, and potentially illegal, system of monitoring. Domestic opponents and international rights groups, including Human Rights Watch last year and Amnesty International in a report issued in February, are protesting it as counterproductive.

The threat of imprisonment and torture is deterring many from returning home, in effect rendering them stateless. Some are hiding in Turkey and Europe, where they may be ticking time bombs.

There is no government program to de-radicalize returning fighters or reintegrate them into society, said Ridha Raddaoui, a lawyer and co-author of a new report on terrorism in Tunisia by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights. Families of suspects and fighters who have returned are persecuted rather than supported, he said.

“The methods are pushing people to terrorism,” Raddaoui said. “We think the victims of terrorism are also the families.”

Tunisian fighters still hold prominent positions in the Islamic State and the Nusra Front in Syria. But of greater threat to Tunisia are those in Libya affiliated with alQaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is active in a half-dozen countries across North Africa and vows to bring Islamic rule to Tunisia and all of North Africa.

“Their aim is still to destabilize the state,” said Col. Mokhtar Ben Nasr, who heads military analysis at the Tunisian Center for Global Security Studies. “They want to make people rise up over poverty and injustice, and they do propaganda to that effect.”