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Marzouki: US military considered intervention in 2012

July 26, 2017 at 1:42 pm

Tunisia’s former president, Moncef Marzouki has said US military intervention was avoided when Tunisia’s presidential guard managed to prevent protesters from attacking the US ambassador and staff in an attack in 2012.

Speaking in an interview with Al Jazeera, Marzouki explained how the embassy attack took place three days after the murder of the US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. Marzouki “did not imagine for a moment that such a danger would happen in Tunisia.”

On 14 September 2012 Islamists stormed the US Embassy in Tunisia and set fire to it in anger over a film denigrating the Prophet Mohammad. Two people were killed and dozens were injured in the embassy storming. A nearby American school was also attacked and equipment stolen.

According to Marzouki the embassy attack was “planned,” indicated by the fact that the telephone lines of senior security officials were shut down at this crucial time. “The great leaders closed their phones, which shows that it was planned,” he said.

He was contacted twice by Hilary Clinton, “who could not reach the head of the government” at the time, Hamadi Jebali, so Marzouki told her that he would take charge instead “because security had disappeared”.

Read: US military is using our military bases in Tunisia

As chief of the armed forces he said he decided to call then army chief of staff Rachid Ammar asking him to send a unit to protect the American embassy: “He began to procrastinate… I asked him where the army was, he told me that it took time… and then he asked for a written authorisation that I sent him and during that time things evolved quickly at the embassy.”

Faced with the lack of security forces and the refusal of Rachid Ammar to send the army, Marzouki then decided to send the presidential guard. “I ordered the presidential guard to go there and to protect the American ambassador so that he would not be killed and to settle this affair,” he explained before adding, “it was the presidential guard” who saved the embassy staff.

Asked by the presenter if it was “military disobedience,” the former president replied in the affirmative.

“What people do not know is that there was the idea of sending the US military to protect the embassy. The American minister of defence called me to probe the sending of experts and the US military. Luckily, the ambassador could be saved, the people inside too… without it, there could have been military intervention,” he concluded.

Marzouki was president from 2011 to 2014 after being replaced by Beji Caid Essebsi in elections.