Tunisian jihadis were always going to bring the fight back home

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/21/tunisia-bardo-museum-attack-jihadis-return-home

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When two gunmen who had trained in Libya opened fire on tourists and staff at one of Tunisia’s top museums last week, it shocked the country but perhaps not the Tunisian security forces, who had been working for years to try to stave off this kind of attack.

They had long feared that returnees from the region’s spiralling conflicts in Iraq, Syria and, more recently, neighbouring Libya would bring the fight home and choose a soft target to do it.

Nearly 3,000 young Tunisians are known to have travelled abroad to fight, the largest number from any Arab country, and thousands more were stopped from making the journey. Around 500 have returned, and although some are in jail for fighting abroad, others were released by judges, who decided they were not a danger.

The number of returnees, and the cost and manpower involved in following someone 24 hours a day, makes it almost impossible for the government to follow even those they know have spent time with extremist groups overseas. There may be other jihadis who manage to stay off their radar, slipping over the border to Libya in a flow of traders who are often young men of fighting age.

“I know of several people from Ben Guerdane [a Tunisian coastal town] who are now with Daesh [Isis] in Subrata,” on the Libyan coast, a young man who works as a hotel receptionist told the Observer recently.

The first jihadis drawn to extremist groups in Syria mostly travelled by air to Turkey, and then crossed the border on foot. After government concerns and tighter airport checks more or less shut down that route, and fighting escalated in Libya, land crossings became much more popular.

Tunisians and Libyans can cross freely between each others’ countries, simply paying an exit fee of around £10, double if they are in a car. Even some Tunisian smugglers are starting to worry that controls are too lax, one source told the Observer, as chaos in Libya spirals, especially after a group of Egyptian Christians were beheaded by militants claiming allegiance to Isis.

There are only two crossing points: Ras Ajdir, just outside the busy town of Ben Guerdane, which relies on informal cross border trade, and controls the direct route to Tripoli, although checks have increased; and further south is the much less busy crossing point of Dehiba, on the edges of a very small town, on the road that leads to Nalut and Zintan in Libya.

Between those two points there are only informal desert pistes, used by smugglers. They, too, are likely to find increasing favour with young Tunisian men who are dreaming of jihad, as the government steps up border controls elsewhere.