TUNIS, Tunisia -- Tunisia has sent more fighters abroad to join the ranks of the Islamic State extremist group than any other country. And now, as the Islamic State takes a battering on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, the country is at odds over what to do when they return home.
Tunisian secularists in recent weeks have raised fears that a returning wave of fighters will cause further mayhem in the state.
"How can we accept those people who are professionals in war, in the use of arms and have a culture of being terrorists?" asked Badra Gaaloul, a civil-military analyst who heads the International Center of Strategic, Security and Military Studies. "We in Tunisia are in crisis, and we cannot accept these people."
"It is a nightmare for Tunisia," she added. "We are not ready for that."
Gaaloul, among others, points to the experience of Algeria, which suffered a decadelong insurgency in the 1990s when jihadis returned from Afghanistan set on establishing Islamic law, and the army led a war to crush them.
Already there are signs that some of the 5,500 Tunisians who have gone abroad, according to United Nations estimates, are seeking new targets at home and in Europe, where Tunisians have been implicated in several recent terrorist cases in France and Germany.
For Tunisia, there is no easy solution. The new constitution does not allow the government to bar them. They can be locked up for joining a terrorist group, or for committing crimes abroad, but cases are hard to build and charges difficult to prove. The president proposed amnesty, only to be vigorously opposed.
So the country has settled into a harsh system of monitoring. Domestic opponents and international rights groups, including Human Rights Watch last year and Amnesty International in a report issued in February, are protesting it as counterproductive.
The threat of imprisonment and torture is deterring many from returning home, in effect rendering them stateless. Some are hiding in Turkey and Europe.
There is no government program to de-radicalize returning fighters or reintegrate them into society, said Ridha Raddaoui, a lawyer and co-author of a new report on terrorism in Tunisia by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights. Families of suspects and fighters who have returned are persecuted rather than supported, he said.
"The methods are pushing people to terrorism," Raddaoui said. "We think the victims of terrorism are also the families."
Tunisian fighters in Syria still hold prominent positions in the Islamic State and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, the militant group formerly known as the Nusra Front. But of greater threat to Tunisia are those in Libya affiliated with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is active in a half-dozen countries across North Africa and vows to impose Islamic rule on Tunisia and all of North Africa.
"Their aim is still to destabilize the state," said Col. Mokhtar Ben Nasr, who heads military analysis at the Tunisian Center for Global Security Studies. "They want to make people rise up over poverty and injustice, and they do propaganda to that effect."
More than 70 people were killed in mass shootings in 2015, many of them foreign tourists at the national Bardo Museum in Tunis and at a beach resort in Sousse. A suicide attacker killed 12 members of the presidential guard in central Tunis in November the same year.
In their most ambitious attack to date, hundreds of Tunisian fighters tried to seize control of the Tunisian border town of Ben Gardane in March last year and fought Tunisian security forces in the streets for several hours.
Tunisian officials insist that their security forces are getting a grip on terrorism inside the country. Indeed, the rate of attacks has fallen off in recent months.
"There has been a lot of work by the police and army," Ben Nasr said. "They have dismantled the logistics and recruitment networks, and there is no longer this support system that there was in 2012 and 2013."
The government will not be able to stop fighters from returning, Raddaoui said, adding that it may well find it difficult to pin crimes on them for lack of evidence.
A Section on 02/26/2017