Tunisia may be a democracy now, but its jihadist problem is not going away

KASSERINE, Tunisia — Tunisia has had a pretty good run lately. It just held its second successful election since the overthrow of repressive autocrat Zine Abedine Ben Ali. It recently passed into law a new constitution. Compared to other countries in the region, it has a large middle class.

All of these indicators suggest that the country is heading in the right direction, despite many of its neighbors sliding into chaos.

So why then is Tunisia's problem with homegrown jihadism getting worse? And why are so many young Tunisians traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State?

An estimated 3,000 Tunisians have made the journey to Syria — more than from any other country. Saudi Arabia trails behind with 2,500 foreign fighters in Syria, despite a population nearly double the size, while Jordanians make up an estimated 2,089. 

For much of the world, and even to those living in the capital Tunis, the figures may come as a surprise. After all, Tunisia is a historically peaceful and moderate country — the birthplace of the Arab Spring.

But many residents in the town of Kasserine, some 200 miles away from the capital on the border with Algeria, aren't surprised at all.

Ali Gassoumi — a 33-year-old sporting the long beard and cropped moustache characteristic of conservative Muslims, a white prayer cap and an Adidas tracksuit — has an idea of what causes young men here to become jihadists. 

“Poverty, unemployment and marginalization,” he says. “A person has qualifications, is educated, but doesn’t find work.”

It’s a familiar story. In Tunisia there has long been a divide between the rich coastal cities that welcome tourists from wealthy European countries, and the economically underdeveloped interior.

In 2013 unemployment in Tunisia stood at 16.7 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. That number rises to 30 percent among young people with university degrees.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Many hoped that a new era of democracy in Tunisia would improve the prospects for people in places like Kasserine. Few here can say that's the case. One thing that did change, however, was the granting of new religious freedoms after three decades of state-imposed secularism. 

Ben Ali's government arrested and tortured thousands believed to hold Islamist views and maintained restrictive policies regarding religious attire and practice in public places. Tunisia's first democratically elected government, led by the moderate Islamist Ennahdha party, changed that after taking power in 2011. 

Extremist Islamists took advantage of those new freedoms and began to preach radical sermons from mosques across the country, some of them inciting Tunisians to violence and jihad. 

But the introduction of democracy in Tunisia did little to change how the security forces reacted to the threat of jihadism. 

Mount Chaambi, which casts a shadow over the town of Kasserine, was until recently a place where young people would camp and picnic and go hiking to see animals. Now it is the site of regular clashes between jihadists and Tunisian security forces. At least 30 members of Tunisian security forces have been killed since June 2013.

Since the clashes began conservative Muslims like Gassoumi have come under increased pressure, bringing back memories of Ben Ali’s regime.

“The government suspects anyone who is religious,” says Gassoumi. The police have detained friends of his, he says, simply for having beards and dressing like conservative Salafi Muslims.

In 2007 Gassoumi tried to flee to Italy but was deported after a month. “I wanted to work, I wanted to breathe, I wanted to feel happy,” he says of the attempt. Back in Kasserine he is unable to find steady work.

A history of violence

Kasserine was the site of much of the violence during the 2011 uprising and has a history of entrenched police brutality that continues unabated.

In advance of the elections security forces detained a large number of people to try to ensure that they didn't interrupt the voting. But a crackdown led by unreformed security forces known for their brutality can have disastrous results.

The story of a young man named Mahmoud, a resident of the town, is one example. Late last year, his brother Tarek heard from his friends that Mahmoud was talking more about jihad and traveling to Syria to fight.

“He was young, uneducated, anyone would have been able to influence him. If it wasn’t jihad it would have been something else,” Tarek says. 

In February, the police arrested Mahmoud from downtown Kasserine where he was selling apples from a cart. They took him for a few days to a large prison complex in the capital where they asked him about going to Syria. He was arrested a further two times in the coming months, before being released.

Then one day Mahmoud disappeared. He was taken by police to be questioned over an attack on police by Salafi extremists in Kasserine. Mahmoud was in another town at the time of the attack, according to his brother.

Tarek says police beat Mahmoud, delivered electric shocks to different parts of his body, hung him upside down by his ankles and kept him awake for five consecutive days. According to his brother, one policeman told Mahmoud as he tortured him, “tell your mother to go to a human rights organization, it won’t do any good.”

Though Mahmoud confessed to participation in the incident under torture, a month and a half later, a judge threw out his case. Now he’s back at home, afraid to leave the house, with the marks of his ordeal still visible on his body. 

Many of the young men in Kasserine have similar stories. 

Foreigners in their own country 

Since the violence on Mount Chaambi began the government has ratcheted up its security rhetoric. Anecdotal evidence suggests support for the police across the country is growing. 

Bassem Bougerra, former director of an NGO that works on security sector reform and a candidate in last month’s parliamentary elections, says many have come to see police violence as a necessary evil in the fight against terrorism.

He likens fighting extremism in Tunisia to taking the unpleasant medicine needed to cure a disease. “[A patient] hates the chemo, but at the same time he needs the chemo to fight his cancer.”

It’s the same with security forces, he says: “In one way [people] hate them, but they feel that they really need them to fight terrorism.”

But it is the arbitrary use of force and repression by authorities that some young people say drives them to support extremists to begin with.

The repression of Islamists under Ben Ali led to “an absence of religious education [for] those young men yearning to develop a Tunisian Islamic identity,” says Mokhtar Awad, an analyst with the progressive Center for American Progress in Washington. This allowed more extremist voices within Tunisia and elsewhere in the region to fill that void, Awad says.

Compared to other countries in the region, such as neighboring Libya and Syria further afield, the threat of extremism in Tunisia may seem overstated.

But, Awad says, while “Tunisia is a small and peaceful country and has largely had a non-violent political culture, Salafists have managed to challenge this considerably in just a few years.”

What's more, the new and democratic government seems intent on following the hardline policies of the past.

“There is no security solution to young men believing they're foreign to their own country,” he says.