U.S. study on why Tunisians are joining terrorist organizations
The Washington Institute for Near
East Policy published a study on Nov. 30, 2018 on Tunisian foreign fighters in
Iraq and Syria and the rising interest in foreign fighting as a general
phenomenon and in fighters joining jihadist groups in particular.
Through his study, research scholar Aaron Y. Zelin sought to track and monitor what motivated these individuals to leave Tunisia and join Daesh. It also endeavors to reconcile estimated numbers of Tunisians who actually traveled, who were killed in theater, and who returned home.
The findings are based on a wide range of sources in multiple languages as well as data sets created by the author since 2011.
He focused on Tunisians who participated in the jihad following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the roles, actions, and leadership positions held by Tunisians in various groups including Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State, among others.
Finally, the study sheds the light on the returnees to Tunisia and the reasons they decided to come home.
Although Tunisian foreign fighters at first joined Jabhat al-Nusra (JN), most ended up joining Deash once it openly announced its presence in Syria in April 2013.
He mentioned that Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia helped incubate and sanction foreign fighting abroad, but even with this, the Tunisian government did not proactively seek to prevent individuals from traveling abroad to fight until 2014.
As the conflict in Iraq simmered, more and more Tunisians signed up for roles within Zarqawi’s network. Some analysts began to quantify casualties: Evan Kohlmann found that between March 2003 and June 2005, 1.7 percent of the foreign fighters killed in Iraq were Tunisian, while Reuven Paz calculated that Tunisians constituted 1.3 percent of foreign fighters killed between January and March 2005.
Furthermore, in June 2005, the U.S. military disclosed that Tunisians were among the top ten foreign nationalities fighting in what was then AQI.6 And Tunisians were the eighth most (or 3.2%) detained foreign national group by coalition forces between April and October 2005.
As of April 7, 2008, Tunisians likewise made up 3.2 percent of foreign fighters held at the infamous Camp Bucca, a U.S. military detention facility in southern Iraq.
Most notably, Tunisians showed up in large numbers in the so-called Sinjar Records, which the U.S. military recovered in an October 2007 raid on an ISI compound.
The records documented foreign fighters who joined MSM/ISI between August 2006 and August 2007. Tunisians were the seventh highest foreign fighter group to have passed through Syria on the way to Iraq.
In 2011, before jihadist groups officially announced their presence in Syria, foreign fighters began mobilizing to Syria with the non-jihadist Free Syrian Army. But after Jabhat al-Nusra formally released its first video in January 2012, reports of jihadist involvement by foreign fighters rose dramatically both in the press and within the jihadist movement.
As for the announcement of foreign fighter martyrs, this began in February 2012, with the posting of the first recorded martyrdom notice on the jihadist forum Shamukh al-Islam. This announcement was long delayed, with the fighter in question, a Kuwaiti named Hussam al-Mutayri, having died Aug. 29, 2011, while fighting with the FSA in Damascus.
On April 19, 2012, the death of two Tunisians from Ben Gardane, Hussein Mars and Bulababah Buklash, was announced as having occurred in Idlib and Homs, respectively, marking the first known cases of Tunisians dying in the Syrian war.
Around 2,900 made it to their desired destination, from the start of the mobilization until about April 2017, however, the Tunisian government prevented another 27,000 from going.
