Tunisia’s Prime Minister Ali Larayedh yesterday said Islamist militants are exploiting anarchy in neighbouring Libya to get training and smuggle weapons across North Africa’s porous borders.
His coalition government is grappling with an Islamist militant group known as Ansar al-Sharia, which is one of the most radical to emerge since Tunisia’s 2011 uprising against autocratic President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali Ben Ali.
Security is a sensitive matter for Larayedh’s ruling moderate Islamist party, Ennahda, which has agreed to step down in three weeks to end months of unrest set off by the assassination of two secular leaders by Islamist militants.
As well as Ansar al-Sharia, North Africa is home to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other Islamist militants such as those led by veteran commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who claimed responsibility for the attack on Algeria’s Amenas gas plant in January, in which nearly 40 foreign workers were killed.
France’s military campaign to oust al-Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters from Mali this year prompted some to enter southern Libya, where the government in Tripoli exerts scant control.
“There is a relation between leaders of Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar al-Sharia in Libya. We are coordinating with our neighbours over that,” Larayedh, who was interior minister before becoming premier, said.
“Extremists in Tunisia have profited from the situation in Libya and they get their weapons from Libya.
“They have benefited and they have gotten training in Libya.”
Disorder in Libya allows militants to train, gain arms
Larayedh, who spent more than a decade in prison for being a member of a banned Islamist party before the uprising, was speaking shortly after Tunisian forces killed 10 members of Ansar al-Sharia near Goubellat close to the Algerian border.
Tunisian authorities said gunmen had attacked two police patrols in the north of the country and had been planning assaults on security force buildings and the military.
It was the worst violence in Tunisia since Larayedh’s government declared Ansar al-Sharia a terrorist organisation two months ago, accusing it of assassinating Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, two secular opposition leaders.
Ansar al-Sharia’s leader in Tunisia is a former al-Qaeda fighter in Afghanistan, who is accused of inciting his followers to attack the US embassy compound in Tunis a year ago.