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Tunisia Braces for the Backlash
“SOUSSE, Tunisia—It is the middle of the afternoon, and a warm sun beats down along the Tunisian coast. A bright, blue Mediterranean Sea laps against the sand. But not a single foreigner is in sight. The recliners lie empty outside the Imperial Marhaba hotel, where a lone gunman shot and killed at least 39 beachgoers Friday morning. The attack site is fenced off now with black and yellow tape, the beach chairs and umbrellas fallen, flipped, and fanned out in disarray. Scattered groups of Tunisians mill about the scene, taking mobile phone pictures and asking each other what happened.
“C’est catastrophe,” murmurs one bystander, leaning against an overturned beach chair and facing out toward the sea.
Friday’s terror attack—in which a gunman posed as a hotel guest, hiding his assault rifle in an umbrella before opening fire on the beach, then continuing to massacre people at the pool and in the lobby of the hotel—is the worst in Tunisia’s modern history. It comes just months after two gunmen killed 22 victims, also all tourists, at Tunis’s Bardo Museum in March, and on the same morning as a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait and an assault in France in which a decapitated head was pinned at the entrance of a gas factory….”
Read the full story by Pulitzer Center grantee Alice Su for Foreign Policy.
