It has been more than a week since Abdallah Ben Yahia last saw his brothers Ahmed, 35, and Khalifa, 27.
After sharing the nightly iftar to end the Ramadan fast, Ahmed, an employee of the Tunisian air force, headed out of the home in Remada. His family assumed he had gone for a coffee and cigarette in the cafe, as usual.
Khalifa would sometimes join his own friends, the more conservatively minded Salafists with their loose gowns and square-cut beards. According to his family, Khalifa, who worked as a watchman for an oil services company, adopted a more conservative appearance a few months ago.
By 3am, when the brothers usually shared a snack, neither had returned. The following evening, on 7 July, the family received a text message saying simply: “We are in Libya and everything’s fine.”
By then it was clear that the two missing brothers were not alone. News travels fast in this sleepy desert town and locals soon realised that 33 people, including one woman, had simply disappeared.
They are all believed to have crossed the border into Libya, just half an hour’s drive away across an arid semi-desert landscape. The police have reported six arrests in connection with the exodus.
The episode has underlined fears in Tunisia that extremist propaganda has encouraged growing numbers of disenchanted young people to cross the border into Libya.
Tunisia is already the largest single source of foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria, but analysts have warned of an increasing flow of volunteers for jihad closer to home. Last week, UN representatives in Tunisia reported that 4,000 Tunisians had travelled to Syria and as many as 1,500 had joined jihadigroups in Libya.
Official concern has mounted sharply since the attacks at the Bardo museum in March and the Imperial Marhaba hotel in Sousse on 26 June. According to Tunisian investigators, the three gunmen involved in the attacks, which claimed the lives of 58 foreign tourists and one Tunisian policemen, had all received basic weapons training in Libya.
Candidates for jihad may come from various backgrounds, but the neglected interior regions are inevitably fertile recruiting grounds for the Islamists.
The group that left Remada included two serving members of the armed forces and one army deserter, according to the authorities. They were aged between 16 and 35. Three of the men had appeared in court just a few days earlier on terrorism-related charges but were released.
Another member of the group, Hachemi Hsiss, 26 and unemployed since leaving school, had been questioned on 24 June by police, not for the first time, about his conservative Islamist lifestyle. His brother Farhat said he saw Hachemi mistreated in police custody before being accused of assaulting a police officer. A magistrate had fixed a date for a court hearing in October.
Abdallah Ben Yahia said he was worried about his two brothers. The older of the two, Ahmed, had once dreamed of going to work abroad, in the gulf or Europe. Instead, he found himself stuck in a dead-end job and, at 35, still had not saved enough money to get married. Over the past few months, he had grown increasingly withdrawn, his brother said.
“I interpret his decision to leave as something like a suicide attempt,” Abdallah said.
The Tunisian defence ministry is reinforcing its border with a sand embankment and trench, running inland from the Mediterranean in order to discourage traffic along the desert tracks that are also used by smugglers. On Tuesday, the ministry announced that the line would extend for 135 miles (220km) in total, taking it 40km beyond the Dehiba crossing.
“What you need to understand is that people decide to leave for all kinds of reasons,” said Mokhtar Lasoued, whose 18-year-old brother Hamza disappeared last week. “Some are just fed up with the poverty and unemployment here; the arrogance of the north [of Tunisia] towards the south.
“My brother had no religious tendency at all. We need to see concrete results here, in terms of jobs. Digging a ditch between the two countries isn’t going to do it.”
