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Bomb Blast Kills Tunisia Officer near Algeria Border
[An Nahar] A landmine killed a Tunisian army officer on Monday in the Mount Chaambi border region, where security forces have for months been hunting al-Qaeda linked hard boys, the defense ministry said.Captain Youssef Dridi, a military engineer, died in the blast, which occurred at the end of an "operational mission" and which lightly injured another soldier, the official TAP news agency quoted the ministry front man as saying. Since last December, the security forces have been tracking jihadists holed up in the remote Mount Chaambi region that straddles the Algerian border. The area has been mined with homemade bombs, which are thought to have killed more than 15 soldiers and police so far this year, while a number of bully boyz have also been killed by the Tunisian forces. But the defense ministry has admitted it lacks the resources to comprehensively defeat the group. Since the 2011 revolution that toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and ignited the Arab Spring, Tunisia has been rocked by violence blamed on radical Islamist groups who had been suppressed under the former dictator, with the attacks multiplying in recent months. The authorities blame Ansar al-Sharia ...a Salafist militia which claims it is not part of al-Qaeda, even though it works about the same and for the same ends. There are groups of the same name in Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, with the Libyan and Tunisian versions currently most active... , Tunisia's main Salafist movement, which they have branded a "terrorist organization" with ties to al-Qaeda. They have also implicated the group in the killing of two opposition politicians this year. Posted by: Fred 2013-12-03 |
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