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: سكوت ماكلويد –القاهرة
مجلة
التايم الامريكية - 10/1/2007
Is
Tunisa Next?
By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
Tunisia
is a lovely country with a kind, well-educated people,
gorgeous art nouveau architecture and sandy
Mediterranean beaches. It's been something of a miracle
in the
Middle
East
--lots of tourism, virtually
no terrorism. But is that about to change?
Diplomats and counter-terrorism officials are becoming alarmed about a
steady resurgence of Al Qaeda in north Africa, including
in
Tunisia
. Sources tell me that Tunisian police have been involved
in deadly clashes with suspected Islamic extremists
south of the capital Tunis twice in the past couple
weeks. They killed two militants in the town of
Hammam Chott
on December 24 and 12 more in another clash on January 3
in the town of
Soliman
.
The gun battles are noteworthy given that
Tunisia
, under the iron rule of President Zine el Abidine Ben
Ali--known as "Zinochet" to some critics-- has
largely escaped the extremist violence seen in other
Maghreb
countries. In contrast with neighboring
Algeria
, where a civil war killed as many as 200,000 people in the '90s,
Tunisia
has spent the last decade becoming a major tourist
destination for Europeans, with six million visitors a
year.
The worrying developments in
Tunisia
come against a backdrop of Al Qaeda's drive to unify
various North African salafist groups under its banner.
A few months ago, Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman El Zawahiri and
Abu Musab Abdul Wadoud, leader of the Algerian Salafist
Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC, after its French
acronym), affirmed a merger between the groups. GSPC is
the only noteworthy civil war faction still fighting
inside
Algeria
. The merger follows the pattern established when Abu
Musab al Zarqawi swore allegience to Al Qaeda in
Iraq
. In fact, it was Zarqawi, with his links to
Maghreb
extremists dating back to
Afghanistan
, who first tied Al Qaeda and the GSPC together. Sources
in
France
as well as the
Middle East
confirm to TIME that Wadoud's GSPC is engineering
partnerships with like-minded jihadist factions in
Morocco
and
Libya
as well as
Tunisia
.
In some respects, the notion of merging
Maghreb
extremist groups is a sign of their disintegration and
weakness. All the authoritarian regimes across the
region have ruthlessly suppressed terrorist
organizations. The GSPC, for example, is a breakaway
faction from
Algeria
's Armed Islamic Group, itself a splinter faction. But
extremist groups are dangerous when under pressure. They
have carried out atrocities throughout the region
already, notably in
Algeria
during the civil war, and also pose the threat of
extending their attacks across the
Mediterranean Sea
into
Europe
.
Some of the 2004
Madrid
train bombers had links with Moroccan extremists involved
in the suicide bombings against Western and Jewish
targets in
Casablanca
a year earlier.
Besides the latest clashes in Tunisia, signs of a re-emergence of extremist
violence include recent police swoops in Morocco and a
bombing in Algeria that targeted employees of Brown and
Root Condor Spa, an oil and gas services unit of the
U.S.-based Halliburton company. Experts on Al Qaeda
believe that Al Zawahiri's merger announcement and the
subsequent attack on the Halliburton-linked workers
indicate that the GSPC is clearly taking its battle
beyond
Algeria
to an international level.
Until now,
Tunisia
has largely been spared, although Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the
only major act of terrorism in
Tunisia
in the last decade, a truck bombing of a synagogue on the
island
of
Djerba
in 2002 that killed 19 people, mostly German tourists.
Given the current climate, one wonders about the wisdom
of Ben Ali's move to antagonize Islamists by vigorously
enforcing a decree dating back to 1981 that bans the
Islamic headscarf from public places. It's hard to know
whether it is a hoax or not, but a group calling itself
Youth of Tawhid and Jihad in Tunisia posted a web
statement vowing to fight the headscarf ban and
indicating that its members had been involved in the
January 3 shootout. Whatever becomes of Al Qaeda's
resurgence in
North Africa
, it's clear that the countries of the region, including
picturesque
Tunisia
, still have a long way to go before extremism is under control.
By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
http://time-blog.com/middle_east/
 
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