Earlier this month, Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid was shot dead outside his home. Belaid’s death has shaken Tunisia, but it also illuminates larger trends in the post-revolution Arab world. Belaid was an intrepid critic of the authoritarian ancien regime of Zine Abidine Ben Ali, which ruled Tunisia for nearly a quarter century until it […]
Chokri Belaid knew that his life was at risk. The secretary general of Tunisia‘s Unified Democratic Nationalist Party, and a key member of the secular opposition front, had been receiving death threats for months. When he was killed yesterday outside his home in Tunis, however, the fear was that it was the country that was […]
The tragic assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was the latest in a series of attacks by the country’s increasingly active Salafists. In late August, armed Salafist groups demolished Sufi shrines, mosques and mausoleums in Tripoli, Misrata and Zliten. Earlier this year, Salafists desecrated British World War II graves, attacked the Tunisian consulate over […]
looking beyond borders 