Is Tunisa Next?

Tunisia is a lovely country with a kind, well-educated people, gorgeous art nouveau architecture and sandy Mediterranean beaches. It's been something of a miracle in the Middle East--lots of tourism, virtually no terrorism. But is that about to change?

Diplomats and counter-terrorism officials are becoming alarmed about a steady resurgence of Al Qaeda in north Africa, including in Tunisia. Sources tell me that Tunisian police have been involved in deadly clashes with suspected Islamic extremists south of the capital Tunis twice in the past couple weeks. They killed two militants in the town of Hammam Chott on December 24 and 12 more in another clash on January 3 in the town of Soliman.

The gun battles are noteworthy given that Tunisia, under the iron rule of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali--known as "Zinochet" to some critics-- has largely escaped the extremist violence seen in other Maghreb countries. In contrast with neighboring Algeria, where a civil war killed as many as 200,000 people in the '90s, Tunisia has spent the last decade becoming a major tourist destination for Europeans, with six million visitors a year.

The worrying developments in Tunisia come against a backdrop of Al Qaeda's drive to unify various North African salafist groups under its banner. A few months ago, Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman El Zawahiri and Abu Musab Abdul Wadoud, leader of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC, after its French acronym), affirmed a merger between the groups. GSPC is the only noteworthy civil war faction still fighting inside Algeria. The merger follows the pattern established when Abu Musab al Zarqawi swore allegience to Al Qaeda in Iraq. In fact, it was Zarqawi, with his links to Maghreb extremists dating back to Afghanistan, who first tied Al Qaeda and the GSPC together. Sources in France as well as the Middle East confirm to TIME that Wadoud's GSPC is engineering partnerships with like-minded jihadist factions in Morocco and Libya as well as Tunisia.

In some respects, the notion of merging Maghreb extremist groups is a sign of their disintegration and weakness. All the authoritarian regimes across the region have ruthlessly suppressed terrorist organizations. The GSPC, for example, is a breakaway faction from Algeria's Armed Islamic Group, itself a splinter faction. But extremist groups are dangerous when under pressure. They have carried out atrocities throughout the region already, notably in Algeria during the civil war, and also pose the threat of extending their attacks across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. Some of the 2004 Madrid train bombers had links with Moroccan extremists involved in the suicide bombings against Western and Jewish targets in Casablanca a year earlier.

Besides the latest clashes in Tunisia, signs of a re-emergence of extremist violence include recent police swoops in Morocco and a bombing in Algeria that targeted employees of Brown and Root Condor Spa, an oil and gas services unit of the U.S.-based Halliburton company. Experts on Al Qaeda believe that Al Zawahiri's merger announcement and the subsequent attack on the Halliburton-linked workers indicate that the GSPC is clearly taking its battle beyond Algeria to an international level.

Until now, Tunisia has largely been spared, although Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the only major act of terrorism in Tunisia in the last decade, a truck bombing of a synagogue on the island of Djerba in 2002 that killed 19 people, mostly German tourists. Given the current climate, one wonders about the wisdom of Ben Ali's move to antagonize Islamists by vigorously enforcing a decree dating back to 1981 that bans the Islamic headscarf from public places. It's hard to know whether it is a hoax or not, but a group calling itself Youth of Tawhid and Jihad in Tunisia posted a web statement vowing to fight the headscarf ban and indicating that its members had been involved in the January 3 shootout. Whatever becomes of Al Qaeda's resurgence in North Africa, it's clear that the countries of the region, including picturesque Tunisia, still have a long way to go before extremism is under control.

By Scott MacLeod/Cairo