News / North Africa

Tunisia forces kill 3 militants in southeastern border town

Thursday, 10 March 2016 9:24 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 10 March 2016 9:45 PM ]

Members of the Tunisian military patrol a road near the Libyan border on March 10, 2016. ©AFP

Tunisian forces have raided a southeastern town close to the country’s border with Libya, killing three militants and detaining another.

The army said in a statement that the assault by its forces and security units hit the town of Ben Guerdane on Thursday.

Tunisian forces have killed 49 militants and detained eight others since Monday, when militants targeted army and police posts in the town and killed more than 55 people.

Tunisian authorities have blamed the Monday militant attack on the Takfiri terrorist group of Daesh.

Libya, where the Western military alliance of NATO helped overthrow longtime dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011, has been experiencing a power vacuum and is considered by many to have withered into a failed state. Daesh, which is mainly active in Syria and Iraq, has seized upon the chaos to fan out through Libya and seize control of its northern city of Sirte.

Tunisia has, meanwhile, intensified security and placed a nighttime curfew in Ben Guerdane as a means of protecting its roughly 60,000 residents.

The country has also set up a 200-kilometer (125-mile)-long barrier on its border with Libya.

Last November, a bomb attack by Daesh on a bus carrying presidential guards left over a dozen people dead in the capital city of Tunis.

A Tunisian girl places flowers during a candle vigil on November 25, 2015 at the site of an attack on a bus in the central part of the Tunisian capital, Tunis, which killed a dozen people the previous day. ©AFP

In June of the same year, an assailant armed with a rifle killed about 40 people, mostly foreign tourists, on a beach in the northeastern Tunisian resort town of Sousse. The attack came more than a month after militants stormed the Bardo Museum in the capital and shot dead 22 people, mainly foreign tourists. These attacks were likewise claimed by the Daesh terror group.

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