Tunisian forces killed nine militants during a raid in the Gafsa Governorate as part of crackdown following the attack on the Tunis Bardo National Museum that targeted foreign tourists, a Tunisian Ministry of the Interior official said yesterday.
The operations late on Saturday in Gafsa came hours before thousands of Tunisians were expected to join world leaders, including French President Francois Hollande, in a march of solidarity in Tunis.
“Our forces killed nine terrorists in a large operation in Sidi Aich in Gafsa. They also captured arms and explosives,” ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui said.
Two assailants killed 21 tourists at the museum about two weeks ago in one of the worst attacks in the North African country, which has mostly avoided widespread violence since its 2011 uprising against former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
A fourth French national died of her wounds following the March 18 attack, the French president’s office said in a statement on Saturday.
Japanese, Polish, Spanish and Colombian tourists were among those killed in the assault, which the government said was aimed at destroying Tunisia’s vital tourism industry.
The Islamic State group has claimed the Bardo attack, but the Tunisian government has said fighters from a local group — Okba Ibn Nafaa, based mostly in mountains bordering Algeria — were involved.
The Bardo attack underscored how extremist loyalties are blurring as they seek a new North African front, especially in Libya, where factional fighting has allowed the group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to gain an outpost.
Yesterday, thousands of Tunisians were expected to take part in a solidarity march with French leader Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi among the foreign dignitaries expected to attend.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of