Décoder les dynamiques du phénomène terroriste

The document we propose to analyze for the purposes of this paper is the report drawn up by a Tunisian mission to Libya charged with repatriating the children of Tunisian terrorists currently living in the neighboring country. The five-page report, intended for the Tunisian Minister of Foreign Affairs, is initialed by Mr. Tawfik Gasmi, Consul General of the Republic of Tunisia in Libya.

The first years following the revolution witnessed an unprecedented spread of terrorism in Tunisia. Indeed,terrorism has demonstrated an exceptional capacity for resilience, adaptation and evolution, getting its hands on several spaces: places of worship, smuggling, crime, social exclusion and the online world73. In consequence, in 2015 the Presidency of the Government set up a working group to try to understand and counter the phenomenon. 

The announcement of the establishment of the Ansar al-Sharia group in Tunisia in April 2011 by Seif Allah Ben Hassine54 was no accident. Rather, it was the crowning of the journey of a group of Tunisians who, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, migrated to different European countries including northern Italy, with many of them settling in Milan.

The attack on the home of Lotfi Ben Jeddou, the Minister of the Interior speaks volumes about the organic and structural dysfunctions of the State institutions in the face of terrorism, a core issue at the national, regional and international levels. Underlying the narrative of the tragic events reported here based on the documents, minutes, telegrams, recordings and reports prepared by the various National Security departments, is the profile of a man, the Minister of the Interior, Lotfi Ben Jeddou, a judge well established in Kasserine, his native city located on the Algerian border and notorious for all forms of trafficking. A city that has over the last two decades turned into a stronghold of Tunisian terrorism. The upheaval wrought by the January 14, 2020 Tunisian Revolution propelled Lotfi Ben Jeddou to greater prominence on the political scene, a career promotion that is typical of the personalities close to Nahdha, the Islamist ruling party. Did this party have the intention, as some argued, to appoint him as head of government to take back control of the executive, then run by a government of technocrats, thus offering him a martyr’s halo? This assumption cannot be overlooked in the context of the heavy atmosphere dominated by the political assassinations of 2013. Except that if, as this account of the attack on the home of the Minister of the Interior shows, it ispossible to manipulate with impunityand ad infinitum the scale of command of services as sensitive as those dedicated to fight terrorism, the price to be paid then would grow increasingly higher. If tampering with services as crucial as those dedicated to state security aimed to serve the political ambition of some political parties, the ensuing malfunctioning has clearedthe way, as this story shows, for terrorism, a new player in town, to achieve remarkable successes and to establish itself as an inescapable fact in today’s Tunisia. 

This study seeks to draw the portrait of Fatma Zouaghi, a Tunisian terrorist indicted for membership in the Ansar Sharia organization and accused of plotting the assassination of an ambassador to Tunisia.This portrait is based on information drawn from Fatma Zouaghi’s judicial file1 as well as from interviews she had with representatives of the Tunisian League for Human Rights in the civil prison for women in the city of Sfax where she isserving her sentence. 

· Who is Slah Bargaoui? Could you tell us more about Slah, the lawyer?I was born in 1959 in the village of Ain Boussaadia in Bargou, Siliana. I went to school in the city of Siliana and I graduated from high school there in 1978. In1983, I got a degree from the School of Law and Political and Economic Sciences in Tunis. The reafter, I was appointed a judge in October 1983 before I started practicing as a lawyer in 1995 in Siliana.In 2011, the Siliana electoral constituency elected me to the Constituent Assembly and I served as a member of the Tunisian parliament until 2019.