The murderous attack on foreign tourists visiting the Bardo museum in Tunis on 16 March 2015 has made clear in the worst possible way how crucial is the fate of Tunisia to the wider region. Both the death-toll, twenty cruise-ship visitors from six nations and a local policeman, and the location - the museum is part of a historical palace complex lying on the outskirts of Tunis, which also houses the national assembly - underline the symbolic and political as well as human impact of the operation. The assault on tourism, a vital part of an economy in great need of reform, makes this moment even more challenging.
It would be churlish to argue that the incident is solely the result of the chaos into which neighbouring Libya has descended since the Nato-backed intervention in 2011 ("a huge mistake on the part of the international community and the Libyans", one of the alliance's most senior officials told a delegation of senior Algerians in Brussels in February). But violence of this kind can be counted as in great part a spillover effect of Libya's turmoil. In the wake of the Libyan conflict, tens of thousands of weapons and military vehicles belonging to the former dictatorship were seized by local tribesmen and different militias, and from there fell into the hands of hardline salafi groups. The same process allowed jihadi groups to overrun northern Mali, thus forcing a French military intervention. Up to 1.6m refugees fled into Tunisia, 1m of whom were Libyan; over 500,000 of them remain in Tunisia today.
Tunisia has lost control of its south-eastern border to ever more violent groups of smugglers. Its army, though woefully under-equipped, is working closely with its Algerian counterpart to contain small groups of terrorists who are well entrenched in the Chaâmbi mountains and further south on the border between the two countries (between the Tunisian town of Kasserine and the Algerian town of Tebessa). Tunisian forces often rely on the Algerian airforce to bomb jihadi positions and on Algerian sappers to get rid of mines.
