Tunisian police investigate Bardo museum attack. Demoted/Chedly ben Ibrahim. All rights reserved.The jihadi attack at the museum of Bardo on March 18 marks a new stage in the developing turmoil in the MENA region. In particular, concerns have been expressed on the evolving impact of Islamic State through the region up to the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The situation is far from clear, the impression being that the local political deadlock which is evident in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia may be a propitious context for the further penetration of extremist jihadi cells espousing the caliphate of al-Baghdadi.
As for the situation in Tunisia, several violent events marked the post-revolutionary period, notably the political assassination of the two leftist leaders, Mohamed Brahami and Choukri Bel Aid. The ideological polarization of the political scene made these events appear more like a polemical intervention than a comprehensive frame for real threats but this made the dynamic even more confusing. Some new elements, however, have emerged in these recent days that help to clarify some of the mysteries of the Tunisian transition, with special regard to the emergence of a jihadi threat. I will try to make sense of the general situation arising from the latest jihadi statements.
The first source is from the Ifriqiyya website, considered close to the AQMI-linked Okba Ibn nefaa, responsible for attacks against the Tunisian army over the last two years. In a long document of twenty pages released on March 29, they seem to challenge the declaration by the Tunisian security services that they had eliminated the leadership of the group in a recent operation in Sidi Aicha (Gafsa) during which 9 armed jihadi were said to have been killed. What is most important in this document is that they claim to be part of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and at one and the same time to be supporting the cause of the caliphate and stressing the will to create a new wilaya (region) of the caliphate in Tunisia.
