by  Pamela Engel – Business insider

The prime suspect in the German Christmas market attack
was from a north African country that has become a breeding
ground for extremism and is one of the top exporters of
jihadists. Tunisia was once thought to be an Arab Spring success story — it
was called
the “sole democratic success” of the uprisings that swept the
Middle East starting in 2010.

But the country has been struggling with an extremism
problem that was exacerbated with the arrival of the terrorist
group ISIS, which has attracted thousands of Tunisian recruits. A

2015 study by The Soufan Group, a strategic security firm,
found that Tunisia supplied more foreign fighters to
ISIS than any other country, between 6,000 and 7,000 as of
October of that year.

One Tunisian ISIS supporter drove a truck through a
Christmas market in Berlin earlier this week, killing 12 people
and injuring dozens more, according to authorities. Tunisia
native Anis Amri, who was killed in a Friday shootout with
police, was German authorities’ prime suspect in the
attack. Officials had been investigating Amri, but after
surveilling him for months, they couldn’t find any evidence of a
specific plot.

ISIS
claimed credit for the attack.

Amri left Tunisia for Italy after the 2011 revolution. He arrived
in Germany in July 2015, but his application for asylum was
rejected this June.

He had a criminal history — he spent time in an Italian prison
for setting fire to a school and was known to be a small-time
drug dealer — and reportedly
tried to buy a gun from a German informant earlier this year.
He was also thought to have had contact with a suspected ISIS
recruiter who was arrested in November.

Amri’s story was similar to that of other Tunisians who have
joined jihadist groups.

George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker,
visited Tunisia earlier this year to investigate the spread
of extremism there.

He explained: “Before the revolution, Tunisia had been kept
rigidly secular. Now the black flag of radical Islam flew over
many buildings, and hard-liners known as Salafis — the word
refers to the original followers of the Prophet Muhammad — took
advantage of the new openness and tried to impose Sharia in their
neighborhoods.”

When Tunisia cracked down on these Salafis, they simply went
underground, according to Packer.

And with a nearby
ISIS outpost in neighboring Libya, young people with few
options for a prosperous future in Tunisia feel that traveling to
join the terrorist group could lead to a better life for
them.

An unemployed telecommunications engineer, Nabil Selliti,
said he joined ISIS because it offered him opportunities in his
career field, according to the New Yorker.

“I can’t build anything in this country,” he said. “But the
Islamic State gives us the chance to create, to build bombs, to
use technology.”

Some young people in Tunisia feel that the revolution did not
significantly improve their lives. One young person lamented to
Packer that “the rich in Tunisia get richer, and the poor get
poorer.”

And terrorist attacks inside the country have hurt
Tunisia’s tourism industry, which previously provided
thousands of jobs and accounted for 8% of the country’s GDP,

according to Reuters.

Henry Wismayer visited Tunisia earlier this year for Vice to look
into how a major terror attack on a beach and hotel had
affected the country.

He explained: ” The abrupt decline of Tunisia’s tourist
industry, many say, feels like a betrayal of the optimism that
accompanied the Arab Spring in 2011. … Tunisia’s new-found
pluralism has turned it into a target for extremists, hell-bent
on creating an Islamic world under the boot heel of Sharia law.”

Still, not every Tunisian ISIS supporter is compelled to join a
terrorist group because of poverty or lack of opportunity. ISIS’
core ideology seems to hold appeal for some, even those who have
means.

A 27-year-old architecture student, Ahmed Amine Jebri, told
Yaroslav Trofimov of The Wall Street Journal earlier this
year that “so many people have left from here, and quite a few of
them were rather well-off.”

“Some in the neighborhood believe these guys are fools who had
gone to Syria to get killed,” he said. “But many others say they
are now in paradise with the virgins.”

Moncef Marzouki, a human-rights activist who was democratic
Tunisia’s first president from 2011 to 2014, told the Journal
that popular disappointment is spreading in Tunisia.

“It’s not the matter of tackling socioeconomic roots,” he said.
“You have to go deeper and understand that these guys have a
dream — and we don’t. We had a dream — our dream was called the
Arab Spring. And our dream is now turning into a nightmare. But
the young people need a dream, and the only dream available to
them now is the caliphate.”

Jake Kanter contributed to this report.