Tunisia: former prime minister jailed for ‘smuggling citizens’ to Syria

A former prime minister has been imprisoned by the authorities in Tunisia on suspicion of helping to smuggle citizens to Syria to join militant groups. Ali Laarayedh is also a senior official in the main opposition party, Ennahda. According to his lawyer Ines Harrath, he has now been detained “indefinitely”.

Following his arrest this week, Laarayedh was reportedly questioned for eight hours by an investigative judge on behalf of the Counter-Terrorism Judicial Pole, a body that brings together different branches of the justice system to combat terrorism. “The investigative judge issued a prison decision against Laarayedh in what is known as the deportation jihadists file,” said Harrath.

This is the second time that the former prime minister has been detained in the same case. The first time was in September, following the allegations that he assisted in the smuggling of Tunisians into Syria to join militant and terror groups such as Daesh.

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It is estimated that around 6,000 Tunisians travelled to Syria and Iraq over the past decade to join such groups. A parliamentary commission was formed in 2017 to investigate the networks involved in recruitment and smuggling of the so-called jihadists.

While he was serving as Interior Minister, Laarayedh was initially accused by that commission of having too relaxed a view regarding the risk that Tunisians travelling to Turkiye – the main route to Syria at the time – could pose.

Ennahda this week denied any accusations of aiding terrorism. The movement described the judge’s decision as a political attack on an opponent of Tunisian President Kais Saied and an effort to hide “the catastrophic failure of the election”.

This was a reference to Saturday’s parliamentary election, in which just nine per cent of Tunisian voters cast their ballots, representing a historic low in the country’s democratic process since the Arab Spring protests ousted former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. Many saw the election as a charade to further shore-up Saied’s position, and most credible political parties boycotted the poll.

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