NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania — Outside our tent on a beach about 100 miles north of the capital, the Atlantic Ocean was glittering under the midday sun and a fresh tuna was searing on a grill. Inside, the conversation with my Mauritanian friends turned to torture and detention. One described how he’d been chained up naked for weeks; another talked about his brother who had a pin inserted under his fingernails. Both victims had been arrested during a crackdown on political dissidents in 2003, in the twilight of the 21-year dictatorship of Maaouya Sid’Ahmed Ould Taya.

Recent statements by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, calling for the establishment of an Islamic state in Syria are drawing condemnation from the Syrian opposition.

In a recorded message posted online Saturday (April 6th), al-Zawahiri urged those fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to “establish an Islamic state [to prepare] for the return of the caliphate”.

The people of the Levant must fight in the name of God with the aim of establishing his Sharia law as the ruling system, he said.

Less than 48 hours later, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq announced his group had merged with Jabhat al-Nusra.

“It is now time to declare to the people of the Levant and the world that Jabhat al-Nusra is but an extension of the ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ and part of it,” al-Baghdadi said in an audio message posted on jihadist websites.

He announced the merging of the two groups under one name, the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”.

On Wednesday, Jabhat al-Nusra leader Abu Mohamed al-Joulani responded to the message, saying his group had received financial and military support from al-Qaeda in Iraq and pledging allegiance to al-Zawahiri.

He said he was not consulted prior to al-Baghdadi’s announcement about a merger, saying he did not want to “rush” matters that required “patience” and “consultation” with locals.

Radical imams and online salafists are pushing Tunisian young people to answer the call for jihad. Now they’re dying by the hundreds in Syria.

Young Tunisian Abdelkarim Jdirine is among the missing.

“One day, he went to the mosque but never returned,” his sister Izdihar says. “A few days later, we found a message under our house door telling us that he went to seek martyrdom in Syria.”

It is a growing phenomenon: Tunisian jihadists who embrace al-Qaeda ideology and travel abroad to Mali and Syria. And it is starting to kill off a generation.

“My brother doesn’t belong to any political parties or groups,” Izdihar tells Magharebia at the family’s Sayada home. “He got to know someone who convinced him of the idea of jihad.”

As many as 132 Tunisian nationals died in and around Aleppo on Thursday (February 14th). According to Express FM, most of those who died in the northern Syria city were from Sidi Bouzid, the birthplace of the Tunisian revolution.

“Tunisian youth leaving their country to fight is not a new phenomenon,” former Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali said last June. “Young people have gone to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia”. Jebali said.

Following the Arab Spring events, jihadists started going to Libya, Syria and Mali.

Maghreb fighters in Syria have linked up with groups seeking to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, including al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb fighters are reportedly among the latest arrivals to the Syria battle.

University student Omaya Ben Mohamed Noureddine, 25, is another young Tunisian who left home for jihad in Syria.

NOUAKCHOTT: Mauritanian news websites, the first to publish jihadist statements claiming a hostage attack in Algeria, death tolls and threats, have become a virtual mouthpiece for Islamist rebels in the Sahel.
Amid a vacuum of information as the staggering hostage siege played out over the weekend, it was the website of the Nouakchott news agency ANI and the Alakhbar and Sahara Media websites that provided a steady stream of statements from the jihadists.
A video of mastermind Mokhtar Belmokhtar claiming the deadly attack was the latest scoop for the sites, which for years have published ransom demand videos of Western hostages seized in the Sahel by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).