Militants attack Tunisian forces near Libyan border, 50 killed
Source: Reuters
Dozens of Islamist fighters stormed through the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdan near the Libyan border on Monday attacking army and police posts in a raid that killed at least 50 people, including civilians, the government and residents said.
Local television broadcast images of soldiers and police crouched in doorways and on rooftops as gunshots echoed in the center of the town. Bodies of dead militants lay in the streets near the military barracks after the army regained control.
Authorities sealed off the nearby beach resort town of Djerba, a popular destination for foreign and local tourists, imposed a curfew on Ben Guerdan and closed two border crossings with Libya after the attack.
"I saw a lot of militants at dawn, they were running with their Kalashnikovs," Hussein, a resident, told Reuters by telephone. "They said they were Islamic State and they came to target the army and the police."
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tunisia-security-idUSKCN0W90J6
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We talk about the litany of US failure in Iraq under George W. Bush as a lost decade of catastrophe, with good reason.
But more and more it looks like the US adventure in Libya was a disaster with even more dire global consequences. It not only ruined that country; it turned Islamist fighters into a metastasizing transnational problem that will destabilize Africa and torment the world for at least another decade.
I don’t know how actively the United States supported the export of Libyan fighters to Syria, and if and how much it wrung its hands as the GCC and Turkey ran the ratline. It appears that the Obama administration did not share Turkey and the GCC’s enthusiasm for inflating the number of local and foreign forces inside Syria and Iraq as a recipe for victory. Judging by news reports, ISIS came up with the idea of mass recruiting of low quality jihadi wannabes in bulk on its own.
But as the movement of transnational Islamist fighters enters its fifth generation stage in North Africa, it looks like the key mistake was destroying the Libyan state, putting nothing in its place, and allowing it to be colonized by a growing number of Islamist fighters.
http://chinamatters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/libya-worse-than-iraq-sorry-hillary.html
