A young man was beheaded on Sunday in the Kasserine region in central Tunisia. “It is likely that a terrorist group is behind the attack,” said the deputy attorney general at the Tunis court of first instance, Mohsen Dali.
According to local radio stations, the victim is a shepherd who was grazing his sheep during the attack. “The body belonged to a 20-year-old man named Oqba al-Dhibi,” said Mohsen Dali, adding that justice had taken up the case. The Ministry of the Interior, contacted by AFP, did not give details. The attack was not immediately claimed.
In a brief statement on Sunday, Tunisian Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi denounced a “terrorist operation”, stressing that the war against this phenomenon “must continue unabated and with the same firm determination”. The Prime Minister also called on the Ministers of Defense and the Interior to step up efforts to “arrest the perpetrators and planners of these operations and punish them”.
Two brothers murdered recently in this region by Daesh
This is not the first time that a Tunisian has been beheaded by jihadists in these mountainous areas of central Tunisia. In 2015, Mabrouk Soltani, 17, was beheaded by an extremist group, an assassination that shook public opinion. His killers had ordered his cousin, who witnessed the scene, to bring the head wrapped in plastic to the family, according to relatives and the Interior Ministry.
Two years later, his older brother, Khalifa Soltani, was found dead during a search operation launched after the announcement of his kidnapping by a “terrorist” group, in the same region. These two assassinations had been claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State (EI, or Daesh).
Tunisia was confronted after its revolution in 2011 with a rise of the jihadist movement, responsible for the deaths of several dozen soldiers and police, but also civilians and foreign tourists. Even if the security situation has clearly improved, the country remains under a state of emergency since the suicide attack committed in the middle of Tunis against the presidential security (12 agents killed), in November 2015.
The mountainous areas in central Tunisia are also a lair for the local jihadist branch of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqmi), the Phalanx Okba Ibn Nafaa, which claimed responsibility for the deaths of several soldiers. The Tunisian authorities have estimated the number of active combatants in this group at 100 or 150.
