TUNIS: Authorities have arrested 12 suspected members of Daesh and seized bomb making materials since a suicide attack last month, the interior ministry said Friday.
Authorities have also “dismantled four takfiri (Sunni extremist) sleeper cells in several parts of Tunisia,” the ministry said in a statement.
The announcement follows an attack by 30-year-old female suicide bomber Mna Guebla on October 29 that wounded 26 people on the capital’s busy upmarket Avenue Habib Gourguiba, in the first militant attack in the capital since November 2015.
The attack went unclaimed but the Tunisian authorities said the suicide bomber had sworn allegiance to Daesh.
Police have arrested 12 people suspected of supporting Daesh, an interior ministry spokesman told AFP, without specifying where and when the arrests were made, nor the suspects’ links to the perpetrator of October’s attack in Tunis.
The suicide bomber had contact with Daesh officials “inside and outside the country, and liaised with them over the Internet,” the ministry said in its statement.
The Daesh officials had taught the bomber how to make explosive devices, and she built the one used in the attack, the statement said.
A laboratory producing explosives and electronic components has also been uncovered in a Tunis suburb, the ministry said.
The four dismantled cells are suspected of having been in contact “with terrorist officials entrenched in the Tunisian mountains to organize a series of attacks... aimed at sensitive targets with weapons, a car, poison or remote explosives,” the statement said.
Investigators confiscated “a very large quantity of explosive and chemical products, along with a drone equipped for remote bombings,” the statement added, without specifying where the haul was found.
In a separate statement late on Thursday, the interior ministry said a police patrol had been targeted by an armed group in the middle of Kasserine, a marginalized city in western Tunisia.
A passerby was shot and wounded, the ministry said, adding that an investigation was underway to determine whether the attack was linked to extremist groups holed up in nearby mountains bordering Algeria.
Thousands of Tunisians have joined extremist groups fighting in Iraq, Syria and neighboring Libya.
In November 2015, a suicide bombing killed 12 security agents on a bus used by the presidential guard, in an attack claimed by Daesh.
In June 2015, a student went on a shooting rampage in the coastal resort of Sousse and killed 38 people, including 30 Britons and an attack in March that year on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis left 22 people dead, all but one of them foreign tourists.
Those attacks, also claimed by Daesh, devastated Tunisia’s crucial tourism sector.
Tunisia arrests 12 suspected Daesh members, dismantles cells: ministry
Tunisia arrests 12 suspected Daesh members, dismantles cells: ministry
- A laboratory producing explosives and electronic components has also been uncovered in a Tunis suburb
- Investigators confiscated “a very large quantity of explosive and chemical products, along with a drone equipped for remote bombings”
Syrian military tells civilians to evacuate contested area east of Aleppo amid rising tensions
- Syria’s military has announced it will open a “humanitarian corridor” for civilians to evacuate from an area in Aleppo province
- This follows several days of intense clashes between government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces
DAMASCUS: Syria’s military said it would open a corridor Thursday for civilians to evacuate an area of Aleppo province that has seen a military buildup following intense clashes between government and Kurdish-led forces in Aleppo city.
The army’s announcement late Wednesday — which said civilians would be able to evacuate through the “humanitarian corridor” from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday — appeared to signal plans for an offensive in the towns of Deir Hafer and Maskana and surrounding areas, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) east of Aleppo city.
The military called on the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and other armed groups to withdraw to the other side of the the Euphrates River, to the east of the contested zone.
Syrian government troops have already sent troop reinforcements to the area after accusing the SDF of building up its own forces there, which the SDF denied. There have been limited exchanges of fire between the two sides, and the SDF has said that Turkish drones carried out strikes there.
The government has accused the SDF of launching drone strikes in Aleppo city, including one that hit the Aleppo governorate building on Saturday shortly after two Cabinet ministers and a local official held a news conference there.
The tensions in the Deir Hafer area come after several days of intense clashes last week in Aleppo city that ended with the evacuation of Kurdish fighters and government forces taking control of three contested neighborhoods. The fighting killed at least 23 people, wounded dozens more, and displaced tens of thousands.
The fighting broke out as negotiations have stalled between Damascus and the SDF, which controls large swaths of northeast Syria, over an agreement to integrate their forces and for the central government to take control of institutions including border crossings and oil fields in the northeast.
Some of the factions that make up the new Syrian army, which was formed after the fall of former President Bashar Assad in a rebel offensive in December 2024, were previously Turkiye-backed insurgent groups that have a long history of clashing with Kurdish forces.
The SDF for years has been the main US partner in Syria in fighting against the Daesh group, but Turkiye considers the SDF a terrorist organization because of its association with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged a long-running insurgency in Turkiye. A peace process is now underway.
Despite the long-running US support for the SDF, the Trump administration has also developed close ties with the government of interim Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa and has pushed the Kurds to implement the integration deal. Washington has so far avoided publicly taking sides in the clashes in Aleppo.
The SDF in a statement warned of “dangerous repercussions on civilians, infrastructure, and vital facilities” in case of a further escalation and said Damascus bears “full responsibility for this escalation and all ensuing humanitarian and security repercussions in the region.”
Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, said in a statement Tuesday that the US is “closely monitoring” the situation and called for “all parties to exercise maximum restraint, avoid actions that could further escalate tensions, and prioritize the protection of civilians and critical infrastructure.” He called on the parties to “return to the negotiating table in good faith.”
Al-Sharaa blasts the SDF
In a televised interview aired Wednesday, Al-Sharaa praised the “courage of the Kurds” and said he would guarantee their rights and wants them to be part of the Syrian army, but he lashed out at the SDF.
He accused the group of not abiding by an agreement reached last year under which their forces were supposed to withdraw from neighborhoods they controlled in Aleppo city and of forcibly preventing civilians from leaving when the army opened a corridor for them to evacuate amid the recent clashes.
Al-Sharaa claimed that the SDF refused attempts by France and the US to mediate a ceasefire and withdrawal of Kurdish forces during the clashes due to an order from the PKK.
The interview was initially intended to air Tuesday on Shams TV, a broadcaster based in Irbil — the seat of northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region — but was canceled for what the station initially said were technical reasons.
Later the station’s manager said that the interview had been spiked out of fear of further inflaming tensions because of the hard line Al-Sharaa took against the SDF.
Syria’s state TV station instead aired clips from the interview on Wednesday. There was no immediate response from the SDF to Al-Sharaa’s comments.
