Tag: Tunisia

‘Our hearts are black’: Tunisians in shock after gunmen target tourists in capital

Tourists are evacuated by special forces from the site of an attack carried out by two gunmen at the famed Bardo Museum. (Pic: AFP)
Tourists are evacuated by special forces from the site of an attack carried out by two gunmen at the famed Bardo Museum. (Pic: AFP)

Crouched against a wall in the Bardo museum, Fabienne, a French tourist, hid with her guide and 40 French holidaymakers, fearing they would be discovered by the gunmen who had burst in to take the Tunis museum of ancient treasures and its tourists hostage. Whispering, she told French TV station BFMTV by phone: “We’re all terrified … we’re afraid they’ll appear and suddenly kill us all.”

Tunisia, the small north African country which lit the first spark of the Arab spring when its popular uprising toppled the dictatorship four years ago, has been plunged into shock after gunmen killed at least 20 people, including at least 17 foreign tourists, in the worst terrorist attack in more than a decade.

The targeting of tourists by terrorists is a new phenomenon in Tunisia and a massive blow to a country whose struggling post-revolution economy depends largely on its beach resorts and foreign visitors. Tunisia, which peacefully elected a new Parliament in December, has prided itself as a model of political transition since the overthrow of the brutal authoritarian Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, in contrast to the post-revolutionary difficulties of its troubled neighbours.

But it has also been struggling to tackle the growing terrorist threat in the region and thousands of Tunisians have left to fight foreign jihad. The attack immediately raised questions about the Islamist terrorist threat to Tunisia amid mounting anxiety that jihadi violence is spilling over the border from neighbouring Libya, as well as Algeria.

Three Italians as well as visitors from Germany, Poland and Spain were among the dead, as well as a Tunisian cleaner and a security officer. Around 22 other foreigners were wounded.

Bardo museum
The attack began just after midday as gunmen armed with kalashnikovs opened fire in front of the Bardo museum, the country’s largest and a major tourist attraction, which houses one of the world’s biggest collections of Roman mosaics and is built in a 19th century palace adjacent to parliament.

As the gunmen struck, tourists were getting out of coaches to visit the museum on a spring day that had seen scores of visitors, many from cruise ships docked in the port for the day.

Wafel Bouzi, a guide with a Spanish-speaking group, told journalists that on exiting the museum with his group, he saw in the car park “a young 25-year-old man, dressed normally, without a beard” who was holding a kalashnikov. “I thought he was playing with it. Then he opened fire.”

The gunmen began shooting near the coaches then entered the museum where hundreds of panicked visitors had taken refuge. Josep Lluís Cusidó, mayor of the small Catalan town of Vallmoll, was at the museum as part of a wedding anniversary trip with his wife. “A few men walked in and started shooting, we’re alive thanks to a miracle,” he told the Spanish news agency Efe. “These men suddenly started shooting and people started falling to the ground dead and things started falling from the ceiling … Everything happened so fast. Right now we’re with the police. It’s total chaos.”

Tunisian security forces entered the museum and shot dead two gunmen at about 3pm local time (1400 GMT). MPs had been in parliament nearby debating new laws which were to include an anti-terrorism bill. After the shots began, the parliament session was suspended and MPs were evacuated. The tourists were also later ushered out of the museum as security officials warned at least two or three accomplices of the gunmen might be at large.

More than 100 European tourists freed at the end of the siege were driven out of the museum gates, their faces showing a mixture of anxiety and relief. The mixture of men and women, young and old, stared out into space, some giving smiles at crowds still packed outside the gates.

One young blonde woman inside the first bus grinned and waved her hand. Dozens of armed police and troops remained inside the museum complex sealed off from the city. One Italian couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary on a cruise ship told the Italian newspaper La Stampa how fellow holidaymakers had been rushed from the museum back to the ship. “All of a sudden we saw them all rushing back on board. There was panic among those who had managed to get away from the terrorists,” the newspaper quoted them as telling a friend.

Several hundred Tunisians gathered around the museum gates. Relief that the ordeal was over was mixed with dismay among those watching. “This is a black day for Tunisia,” said Karim Ben Sa’a, a manager in the tourism industry. “We are very sad for these tourists. They visit our country and it is so, so sad to see them die. Our hearts are black.”

There was shock that terrorists had managed to launch an attack at the very heart of the capital. Police set up checkpoints and a policeman with a machine gun was posted outside the office of the UK’s British Council.

“There is a possibility, but it is not certain, that [the two gunmen] could have been helped … and we are currently conducting extensive search operations to identify the two or three terrorists who possibly participated in the operation,” the prime minister, Habib Essid, said.

The president, Beji Caid Essebsi – the 88-year-old secularist elected in December after serving in previous Tunisian regimes – visited survivors in hospital, saying: “The authorities have taken all measures to ensure that such things don’t happen.”

Worst attack since 2002
The museum assault was the worst attack involving foreigners in Tunisia since an al-Qaeda suicide bombing on a synagogue killed 21 people on the island of Djerba in 2002.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said: “It is not by chance that today’s terrorism affects a country that represents hope for the Arab world. The hope for peace, the hope for stability, the hope for democracy. This hope must live on.”

The attack came the day after Tunisia announced arrests of a jihadi group trying to infiltrate the country, and in the week a key Tunisian militant was killed in Sirte. Troops are deployed on the Libyan border to stop suspected terrorist groups bringing in men and equipment.

There have also been concerns about the Mount Chaambi area on the border with Algeria where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has reportedly been helping a Tunisian group that has killed numerous soldiers.

Although the country has been more stable than others in the region, a disproportionately large number of Tunisian recruits – some 3 000, according to government estimates – have joined Islamic State (Isis) fighters in Syria and Iraq, triggering fears some will return to mount attacks back home.

The American embassy in Tunis was attacked in September 2012, seriously damaging the embassy grounds and an adjoining American school. Four assailants were killed. Overall, though, the violence that Tunisia has seen in recent years has been largely focused on security forces, not foreigners or tourist sites.

In 2013, two opposition figures were assassinated in Tunis and, in what is believed to be the first suicide bombing in Tunisia , a man walked off the beach in the resort town of Sousse and blew himself up in front of a seaside hotel. He was the only fatality.

Philip Stack, of British risk analyst Maplecroft, said of the Tunis events: “This attack is certain to have an effect on the tourism industry, which the authorities have worked hard to rebuild after the 2011 revolution. The principal targets of terrorism in Tunisia in the last couple of years have been the security forces. By targeting foreign tourists at a prestigious city centre site, the terrorists have changed their tactics and raised the stakes.”

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, said Washington condemned the attack and continued “to support the Tunisian government’s efforts to advance a secure, prosperous, and democratic Tunisia”.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, blamed Isis, saying in a statement: “With the attack that has struck Tunis today, the Daesh [Isis’s Arabic acronym] terrorist organisation is once again targeting the countries and peoples of the Mediterranean region.

“This strengthens our determination to cooperate more closely with our partners to confront the terrorist threat. The EU is determined to mobilise all the tools it has to fully support Tunisia in the fight against terrorism and reforming the security sector.”

Additional reporting by Ashifa Kassam

Tunisia’s desert dunes lure amateur astronomers and Star Wars aficionados

Deep in Tunisia’s Sahara desert is an otherworldly planet familiar to Star Wars fans: Tatooine, the twin-mooned childhood home of Darth Vader.

Once a pilgrimage site for aficionados of the cult sci-fi film, the dune-swept landscape that provided the backdrop for almost every Star Wars movie, among many others, has been out of reach since the Tunisian uprising, which kickstarted the Arab Spring three years ago. Now, as the North African country inches towards a successful transition to democracy, many hope that will change.

The set of Star Wars Episode 1 in the Sahara desert in Tunisia. (Pic: Flickr / Pondspider)
The set of Star Wars Episode 1 in the desert in Tunisia. (Pic: Flickr / Pondspider)

“We have a new government and we’re full of hope,” said Taieb Jallouli, the set director who oversaw the Star Wars shoots in the country, speaking as Tunisia’s Parliament passed a long-awaited new Constitution. Seen as the final step towards establishing a democracy after an uprising that toppled the autocratic ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, it could be help lure back film fans and desert adventure tourists, whose numbers plummeted during the turbulence of the uprising.

“[Star Wars director] George Lucas always said he loved the light in Tunisia’s southern desert. We hope old directors and a wave of young, new ones will come back now there’s stability,” said Jallouli, who was also artistic director for The English Patient and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which were both partially filmed in Tunisia.

The creators of imaginary galaxies like Star Wars aside, peace in Tunisia’s deserts also stands to benefit a small group of people more interested in real extraterrestrial objects: meteorite-hunters. Star Wars‘ Tatooine is named after the Tunisian town of Tataouine, the site of a famous meteorite landing in 1931. A small group of meteorite-hunters are keen to resume a hobby that has been largely impossible since the revolution.

Architecture from southern Tunisia that inspired the Star Wars films. (Pic: Flickr / Henry Patton)
Buildings in Tataouine inspired George Lucas for his Star Wars films. (Pic: Flickr / Henry Patton)

Sofien Kanoun, president of Tunisia’s 40-strong amateur astronomy society, said: “We’ve asked the government for permission to undertake meteorite-hunting expeditions in the desert because some of those areas have become military zones during the last three years.

“In the desert, there’s a huge surface area of land that’s uninhabited, so it’s the best place for successfully recovering any fragments which don’t land in the sea. We need them to have a better idea of the birth of the solar system.”

For now, as news of jihadists training in remote regions has made large swathes of the Sahara too dangerous for travel, the group relies on a human chain of Berbers who live in the desert to pass on information.

“I personally count on citizens who call me up to say they have got bits of meteorite,” said Hichem Ben Yahyoui, the association’s treasurer, waving a page of complicated formulae that explain the supersonic path of a meteorite, which landed between Tunisia and Algeria last September. “We were the first to calculate the trajectory and pass on the information to [professional scientists] about exactly where in Algeria it fell,” he added proudly.

The amateur astronomers also battle a lack of funding, and hardline Islamists who have cracked down against everything from art shows to rap music. Government funding for Tunisian astronomy has dwindled to a trickle, though the country was once home to Muslim scholars such as Ibn Ishaq whose works still influence modern physics and astronomy. With a symbolic membership fee of 2 dinars (75p) a year, Tunisia’s amateur astronomers rely largely on pooling their own money together to fund trips, build experimental rockets or order sophisticated equipment only available from abroad.

Mundane earthly difficulties have not stopped them from reaching for the stars. Every few weeks Yahyoui, who also volunteers as a curator at Tunisia’s science museum in his spare time, journeys to meet other fellow space-lovers across the Arab world.

“It’s dangerous but I don’t mind taking the risks because it’s a labour of love,” he said, ahead of a recent trip to advise on the building of a space museum in Libya, where internal conflict has seen a spate of abductions and political assassinations by militia gangs this month alone.

“As amateurs we do it for ourselves, to pass on knowledge through each generation,” he said, standing beneath a staircase spiralling upwards to a blue planet encircled by red rings.

Tunisian women waging ‘sex jihad’ in Syria: minister

Tunisian women have travelled to Syria to wage “sex jihad” by comforting Islamist fighters battling the regime there, the country’s Interior Minister Lotfi ben Jeddou has told MPs. “They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100” militants, the minister told members of the National Constituent Assembly on Thursday.

Rebel fighters scouting in the Syrian city of Homs. (Pic: AFP)
Rebel fighters scouting in the Syrian city of Homs. (Pic: AFP)

“After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of ‘jihad al-nikah’ – (sexual holy war, in Arabic) – they come home pregnant,” Ben Jeddou told the MPs. He did not elaborate on how many Tunisian women had returned to the country pregnant with the children of jihadist fighters.

Jihad al-nikah, permitting extramarital sexual relations with multiple partners, is considered by some hardline Sunni Muslim Salafists as a legitimate form of holy war. The minister also did not say how many Tunisian women were thought to have gone to Syria for such a purpose, although media reports have said hundreds have done so.

Hundreds of Tunisian men have also gone to join the ranks of the jihadists fighting to bring down the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. However, Ben Jeddou also said that since he assumed office in March, “six thousand of our young people have been prevented from going there” to Syria.

He has said in the past that border controls have been boosted to intercept young Tunisians seeking to travel to Syria. Media reports say thousands of Tunisians have, over the past 15 years, joined jihadists across the world in Afghanistan Iraq and Syria, mainly travelling via Turkey or Libya.

Abu Iyadh, who leads the country’s main Salafist movement Ansar al-Sharia, is the suspected organiser of a deadly attack last year on the US embassy in Tunis and an Afghanistan veteran. He was joint leader of a group responsible for the September 9, 2001 assassination in Afghanistan of anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud by suicide bombers. That attack came just two days before the deadly Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington. — AFP

Tunisian youth and conservatives clash over the Harlem Shake

The internet’s latest viral video craze, the Harlem Shake, is just 30 seconds of gyrating fun – but in Tunisia, it has sparked outrage. Conservative Muslims have condemned students who’ve made their own copycat videos, and the education ministry is investigating the principal of a high school where one of many “indecent” videos was filmed.  Animosity between religious conservatives and secularists is growing – in the coastal city of Mahdia, one student received 12 stitches after being beaten for doing the Harlem Shake. Similar violent clashes have been reported in the city of Sfax and the town of Sousse.