Tunisia

Terrorism
In December 2010, a democratic uprising ousted the autocrat Zine Abidine Ben Ali a month later. Hailed as a blueprint for change, Tunisia held free elections and operated under a new constitution, as well as a broad political consensus, for which secular and Islamic parties managed to overcome deep disagreements. Howevr, several thousand Tunisians left to fight in Syria, Iraq, and Libya after 2011 with militant groups, and some threatened to carry out attacks at home. The influence of Islamic terrorism became more prevalent in the mountains around the porous Algerian border after early 2013. Indeed, on July 16, 2014, militants in the Chaambi Mountains attacked military checkpoints, killing 15 soldiers.

Tunisia was a particular focal point for the Islamic State, in part because the country had made more progress toward democratic political overhauls than other nations in the Middle East and North Africa swept up in the Arab Spring in 2011. On June 26, 2015, just days after an Islamic State spokesman urged followers to launch attacks during the month-long Muslim holiday Ramadan, a gunman killed 38 people at a tourist resort north of Sousse. This came only months after the Bardo National Museum attack, in which three Islamist gunmen killed over 20 tourists on March 18, 2015.

On November 24, 2015, a suicide bomb exploded on a bus packed with Tunisian presidential guards, killing 12 people. In response, the President declared a curfew in Tunis and imposed a state of emergency nationwide.