Politicians and experts say that the social and economic crisis following Tunisia’s 2011 uprising has created an environment conducive to transforming young people searching for a decent living into easy prey for extremists and criminals of all kinds.
Nothing was to suggest that Brahim Aouissaoui, a 21-year old man from a large and poor family, would turn his fate from being an illegal immigrant looking to for a better life in France to a suspect in a terrorist attack. Politicians and experts in Islamic extremist groups say that the social and economic crisis following Tunisia’s 2011 uprising has created an environment conducive to transforming young people searching for a decent living into desperate people who can easily be recruited by extremists and criminals of all kinds.
Brahim Aouissaoui was just one of the many illegal migrants jumping on the adventure of crossing over to Italy. Sources said he had arrived about a month ago on the Italian island of Lampedusa coming from the governorate of Sfax in Tunisia. After quarantining, he was told to move on and that’s he ended up in the city of Nice on the eve of his heinous attack.
His family said that he had turned to religion about two years ago, but he did not display any extremist ideas or stances.
“Two and a half years ago, Brahim started praying. He became a loner moving only between work, mosque and home. He had no acquaintances,” his grief-stricken mother, Gamra, said.
“Before that, he used to drink and do drugs. I used to ask why he was wasting his money when we are in need, and he would answer ‘If God guides me, He will guide me for myself,” She added.
Brahim tried to immigrate illegally several times before until he succeeded about a month and a half ago. When he arrived in Lampedusa, he told his family he was working picking olives, according to his brother.
Brahim told his family he had arrived in France on Wednesday to look for work.
According to his sister Afef, her brother went to a building opposite Notre Dame Basilica upon his arrival in Nice on Thursday morning to sleep, and that he showed them the area.
Brahim’s mother and sister were in shock from the horror of what he did, while they were answering questions from the press in their modest home in Tunisia.
“When he dropped out of school, he worked in a motorcycle repair shop,” his mother related. “he was able to save between 1100 and 1200 dinars (about 400 euros) and has set up a booth to sell (bootlegged) gasoline,” like many young people in the region who were earning a living from such an illegal project.
The Nice attack perpetrator was born in a family of seven girls and three boys, living in a poor neighbourhood, with practically no existing infrastructure, near an industrial zone in the Sfax governorate.
Analysts and sociologists say that social conditions such as those where Brahim Aouissaoui was living represent the perfect hunting ground for Islamist militant groups. A few years back, these groups would target the young men and women living in such conditions, brainwash them with their radical ideologies and send them to conflict zones in Syria and Libya. The groups were particularly active in the poor regions of the interior of the country, where they were able to recruit and train a sizeable number of desperate young men to carry out terrorist operations against the security forces and the army in Tunisia, while taking refuge in the mountains in the back-country.
Analysts point out that the difficult economic situation in the country is pushing many young people to despair and making them resort to suicide, illegal migration or joining militant groups. They say that the incessant politicians’ squabbles and disagreements while riding on the bandwagon of decrying these desperate conditions, have done nothing but exacerbate these conditions. Tunisian youth had high hopes of the 2011 uprising, but the dismal results of the last ten years led to more than disillusionment.
The Tunisian judiciary began investigating the family of the suspect in the Nice attack. The public prosecutor at the lower court of Tunis, Mohsen Daly, said that the suspect “was not classified as a terrorist with the Tunisian authorities and left the country illegally on September 14, and has judicial precedents in acts of violence and drugs.”
Mazen Cherif, a Tunisian specialist of terrorist groups, highlighted the role of terrorist groups that always exploit to their advantage situations of deteriorating social and economic conditions and insecurity in the country, as well as the role of inciting discourse coming from some religious clerics.
Cherif told The Arab Weekly that the bad situation has not resulted from just radical discourse, but also from the existence of a moral and religious vacuum, coupled with frustration, trauma, poverty and despair. All of these factors transformed the country into something like a prison in the eyes of these desperate young men and created false alternatives for them.
For his part, Zouheir Maghzaoui, Secretary-General of the People’s Movement (pan-Arabist party), said, “The causes are many, including the state of general frustration that the takfirist groups exploit in their activities.” He also admitted that “violent and anger-charged political discourse serves the interests of terrorists.”
Talking to The Arab Weekly, Maghzaoui said, “The political crisis has also cast its shadow—in terms of rhetoric, social media, demonisation and hatred—on the climate of justifying terrorism and creating a political cover for it.”
Successive governments since 2011 have been accused of having focused on the process of political transition by ensuring the success of three major electoral episodes, but failed to address the economic and social issues, which prompted thousands of people to venture into illegal immigration, leading to the death by drowning of some, while the fate of many others is still unknown. Those who had made it to Europe continue to live under the threat of deportation because of their illegal status.
The so-called “death boats” of illegal migration continue to plough the waters of the Mediterranean between the Tunisian coast and Europe, and the local authorities continue to arrest candidates for illegal migration almost daily.
Statistics of the Tunisian Ministry of the Interior show that since the beginning of this year until mid-September, 8581 people tried to cross Tunisian waters towards European coasts, including 2104 foreign nationals.