People and Power - Tunisia"s Dirty Secret
A Frenchman of Tunisian origin helped organise the attack on the Paris offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Boubaker al-Hakim, born in Paris in 1983, held French and Tunisian nationality. He fought in Iraq in 2003-4 and was jailed in France for trying to recruit other Europeans to join him. After the Arab Spring in 2011 he returned to Tunisia and from there went to fight in Syria.
Tunisia used to be mistaken for an oasis of secularism. In fact, Salafist radicals began to emerge within Tunisia in the 2000s, fuelled by religious programmes on newly-available satellite television channels and by the suffocation of an authoritarian state which imposed an official "tolerant"vision of Islam. Many were jailed, only to be released in 2011 in an amnesty after the fall of the Ben Ali regime.
Rather than dampening radicalism, the transition to democracy has instead propelled it. Radical Salafists took advantage of the power vacuum and widespread social and economic inequality to press ahead with recruitment.
Personal ties explain why large groups of young people have emptied particular neighbourhoods, in Ettadhamen, near Tunis, Bizerte, in the north, or Ben Gardane, near the Libyan border, in order to fight abroad.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/15/why-is-tunisia-success-story-of-the-arab-spring-home-to-so-many/
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