 Thank you for coming. So today we have this event on ISIS in North Africa. I'm David Sturman, a senior policy analyst here at New America. And then to discuss this issue, we have Sarah Yerkes, who's a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, formerly worked on the State Department's policy planning staff regarding North Africa. And then we have Aaron Zelen, who's a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and works on Jadaism broadly, but also specifically North Africa and Tunisia. And he was writing a book on Jadaism and Tunisia. So what we're going to do is I'm going to present you a couple of findings from our report. We released recently here at New America all Jadaism local, ISIS in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Then we'll turn it over to our speakers for their thoughts on what's the future of Jadaism in this region and the future of the region more broadly is. And then we'll have a discussion with us and with you. So thanks. So as I mentioned, to give you a sense of our findings on ISIS in North Africa, these findings are drawn from the paper that I mentioned. What it works with is 961 ISIS personnel records of fighters who came from North Africa or reported coming from North Africa. Basically when ISIS fighter entered Syria, they'd be sat down with an ISIS official who had essentially a Google Sheets open and was filling out answers to a variety of demographic questions. You can see this sort of national breakdown there. We took those questions and scored the most relevant and useful ones one to five in an ordinal ranking for a very simple look at the socioeconomic status of these fighters. We scored questions like previous job, educational level, marital status, a couple of quick notes here. One of the key aspects of our report is that we took us down to the local levels to not just what country they're from, but what province they reported residing in. And there are, of course, a number of limits on what our data can say. Perhaps the most important is this data covers pretty much entirely 2013 to 2014. It's only people who went to Syria, only those who went to fight with ISIS. So it does not include al-Qaeda or other Syrian militant groups. Of course, the findings here can suggest a lot of things. And what we will present here has a lot more detail than what had previously been discussable about these local dynamics, which often relied on expert opinion and anecdote. But it's easy to get too focused in on the data just because there is data. And then finally, there's, of course, as with all terrorism study, a lot of flux. There are patterns, but those patterns are never fully explaining what's going on. So here we have a map of North Africa from our report. The lighter pink is where fighters came at a lower per capita rate, fighters per 100,000 Sunni residents. And the darker ones are where fighters came at a higher rate. What we found in our report is that there's three key patterns operating in North Africa at this time period regarding radicalization. The first is provinces with a high rate where provinces that were particularly hit by the Arab Spring and its aftermath. So 19 of the top 20 provinces in North Africa were in Libya and Tunisia. The two countries where the existing government fell during the Arab Spring. You have a high number of people coming from Morocco, but it has a high population. So you actually have a very low rate. In Morocco, they had fewer protests by the armed conflict and location event database, which we looked at for the Arab Spring period. And also, they had tighter controls of their borders. Similarly, in Algeria, we saw a similar dynamic. In Algeria, there were only 26 fighters, actually. Remarkably low. They're not in any particular hotspots. So that's also important. The second is the key hotspots had conditions of economic marginalization and political marginalization. So in Libya, we have hotspots in Eastern Libya, which was systematically marginalized by the Qaddafi government. And then in Tunisia, we saw hotspots in the rural south along the border with Libya, as well as in the poorer suburbs of the capital region. And I'll talk a bit more about that on the next slide. And the final one is these high-producing provinces were often sites of broader trends of high rates of protests per capita in the 2011 to 2014 period, and also add histories of jihadism. Perhaps most notably and most clear in Eastern Libya, which had Islamist organizing going back to the 70s and 80s, a full-blown insurgency led by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the 90s, followed by a similar mass mobilization of fighters to Iraq in the 2000s and then was where the Arab Spring really took off in Libya and then the ISIS fighters that we look at. So those are the key three patterns. Now we'll look at them sort of country by country or first a bit about economic marginalization. So on the left, your left, you have a scatter plot of the average prior employment score for fighters in the top 20 provinces of North Africa and then their rate on the y-axis. And what you can see here is there's a pretty clear pattern although there's a lot of flux where places where fighters reported less stable employment with one being the least, either unemployed agricultural work or day labor and five being the most advanced skills work. And you can see this clear pattern. We see that also when we look at the national level that Libyan Tunisia had fighters who reported worse off jobs as well as poor marital statuses, more of them were single, fewer of them had kids than Algeria and Morocco. So looking at Tunisia, Tunisia is often represented as a place that doesn't actually fit the set of patterns that drives, in my view, from a couple of dynamics. First, the Tunisian fighter mobilization was just so large that it was to be expected you'd get fighters from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Similarly, it was widespread throughout the country. On your left here, you have a map of the percent of the Tunisian contingent from each province. With the exception of Tunis itself, you have fewer than 10% of the fighters in each province. So you'll often hear in discussions of Tunisia that everyone you talk to knows someone who was a fighter or knows at least a family member of a fighter. What this produces is it's very easy to get atypical examples if you just go and interview people about the ISIS mobilization or ISIS support. But what we found when we looked at our particular sample here is that, well, there's widespread production across the provinces and absolute numbers. There's clear hotspots in per capita terms. And you can see that on the right. So moving to those hotspots, we divided Tunisia into four geographic sections. The place that produced the most fighters per capita was the Grand Tunis region or the metropolitan area of the capital. In Grand Tunis, you have a fighter rate of 8.1. So this is quite high, the highest of these four regions. They reported a prior job score of 2.4. That's the same as Tunisia overall. That's, however, a little surprising given this is the capital region and where many of the jobs are centralized. And then finally, fighter under-employment. So people reported being unemployed, day labor, agricultural work, being a student or unskilled labor was about 50% of the fighter contingent in this region. What we found and what is consistent with a bunch of more anecdotal looks at ISIS mobilization and jihadist mobilization in Grand Tunis is that there are peripheries within it and neighborhoods that are hotspots. So one of these that we looked at is Etihadman. It had a high rate of fighter production, three times that of the overall Grand Tunis region. When we looked at the job score, the fighters from that reported worse off prior employment than fighters from Grand Tunis overall. In fact, as you'll see in a moment, that job score is similar to what we found in the southern border areas. Fighter under-employment was at 65%. And it's also worth noting that there was a lack of services in this neighborhood. And it was also one of the hubs of the Arab Spring in Grand Tunis and Protoss. So if we move to the southern border, we found a hotspot in Kibili where you have 17.4 fighters per 100,000 Sunnis in our data. Again, we have a job score of 2.0, similar to what we found at Etihadman. Fighter under-employment is at 70%. And what we found is this is also by the census number, it's the fifth highest unemployment or unemployment in 2014. So you have both the fighters and the province itself having this poor employment situation. If you move to sort of the coast of the southern area, you have Medineen. Actually here we found people reporting better jobs than overall in Tunisia. And this is another example of why you need local analysis. What we found was, well, they reported better jobs. In our view, that's quite misleading. In fact, those better jobs were pretty much all a product of a high rate of trading jobs, likely to have been in the illicit economy or smuggling economy in this region, which plays a key role. In addition, we find this sort of localized peripheries within the broader province. So Ben-Gurdon had 40% of the fighters from this province, which is more than we'd expect based just on its population. In addition, it had, so that's 2.5 times the rate. And also Ben-Gurdon is one of the higher unemployment areas in this province, more than the province overall. In contrast, we only found one fighter from the island of Jerobo, where unemployment, unlike, I believe it's at 18% in the 2014 census in Ben-Gurdon, it was about 90, 10% based on what subdivision of Jerobo you found. And that area was not really producing fighters in our examination. So now we look at Libya. This is a much more classic example of the three patterns. Eight out of 10 fighters came from the east. Two hotspots, the darkest one you see is Derna, widely reported. This is the highest rate in the world that we found for a province. Also, we have a job score that's quite low for the sample, 1.8. Also, you have about 76% under-employment from the fighters reporting. We don't really have good unemployment numbers for Libya from government data, but a bunch of sort of reported aspects suggest that it is quite high in Derna, higher than elsewhere. Also interestingly, a plurality of fighters from Derna had less than a high school education. Derna has also got a long history of jihadist organizing and was at the center of the Arab Spring protests. It was actually called out specifically by Qaddafi and the famous speech that really in some ways triggered US intervention. Moving out to where the second hotspot is Benghazi. It actually has the rate about a third of what we see in Derna. Correspondingly, the economic condition of fighters from there is actually a bit better. Benghazi was traditionally the center of the eastern region of Libya. Also, Benghazi at times would get some limited support from the Qaddafi regime, although here and there are not as strong as the West. And if we move to the West, we see only 18 fighters from this area out of a sample of 103. They have a job score that's actually above that of the region overall. This is not a particularly marginalized set for the Libyan contingent. And it's also not producing fighters at the same rate. So I just want to quickly, before I end, pull us out of the North Africa region and show how these dynamics are very specific to this region. So here we have Bahrain. Bahrain is interesting. It produces 21 fighters home to Mohawk, which is another of the top global per capita producers of fighters in our data. The mobilization in Bahrain is really new. There were no fighters from Bahrain found in the Sinjar Records. There were only six, I believe, in the Guantanamo files for covering people picked up in mostly Afghanistan, Pakistan, only one of these fighters from the ISIS files reported having fought in a previous job. Now, that's somewhat similar to what we see in Tunisia. However, it's far below the 56% of Libyan fighters who reported previous jobs as experienced, mostly in Libya. Also, this is not a particularly poor region. It's actually core to the Bahraini government's suppression of Arab Spring protests in Bahrain. And we see that there's a very clear ideological element where 17 fighters said they were recommended by Turkey bin Ali from a prominent family became ISIS's top religious official. And then another four were recommended by Abu Jandalo Kuwaiti, who had another key top military position in ISIS and came out of the Kuwaiti scene, which a lot of reporting suggests is quite connected to the governing elite politically and religious way. So then just finally, what can we conclude? Well, there are a couple of North Africa as sort of its own pattern of radicalization. Those patterns are quite local. Specifically, we have the Arab Spring effect, the existing marginalization that was built off of that, and then we have this prior history of jihadism and protests. This appears to be different from what we saw in the Arabian Peninsula. And then finally, I think that one of the key aspects is that many of these factors remain unresolved in the region, which is something we'll talk more about, whether that provides ISIS a chance to regrow itself after its scene defeats, not just in Syria and Iraq, but also has lost a lot of its at least territorial expression for the moment in North Africa. So with that, I throw it to our two speakers to give a brief discussion of their thoughts of where ISIS came from, where it is now and where it will go in North Africa. Great, well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I will say I've been anticipating this report after seeing a little bit of a teaser a few months ago. I think it's fabulous, especially the graphics are really, really useful for our understanding. But I want to talk a little bit about some of the themes that came out of the report and kind of situate them with where we are today. And as I'll mention, we're in a kind of special moment, particularly in Tunisia with municipal elections about to take place in less than two weeks. And so one of the things that I think came out of here is something that we've all been talking about for a long time, all of us who follow North Africa, which is the idea of regional disparity. And I think why are we looking at this as a political issue or an economic issue? What this report has really done is show that the difference between regions, the idea that there's vast socioeconomic disparities between regions in all of the North African countries, but particularly in the cases of Tunisia and Libya, these are not just socioeconomic issues, these are actually security issues that need to be addressed for security reasons as well as for other reasons. And one of the things that I think we need to think about is the fact that the Arab Spring itself started in one of these marginalized regions in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. And I was there a couple months ago, and what's really striking is that while there has been tremendous headway and there's been a lot of government investment into that particular region, the same sort of longstanding frustrations of the marginalized communities, the people who live there, that feed into ISIS, that feed into the recruitment patterns that we see in this report, those things still exist today. And so the idea that we're seven years past the kind of recognition in this one town that people are so angry and frustrated they're able to overthrow a 30-year dictator, that stuff's still there, that's a problem. And I think the Tunisian government gets that, but we can talk a little bit about how well they're addressing that issue. One thing in the paper that I wanna push back on a tiny bit is the idea that the Arab Spring caused Tunisia's foreign fighter problem or kind of its ISIS problem in general. And while clearly opening up the jails and letting bad guys out was not a good thing, and the post-revolution chaos and the government's struggle, which they're still dealing with today to deal with, to figure out this line between freedom and democracy on the one hand and security challenges on the other, these things are still real. But I think the factors that feed terrorist recruitment that, again, we're confirmed in the paper, this idea of socioeconomic inequality, people feel abandoned by the state and they don't have the ability to impact their own lives or to make positive changes in their own lives, these things were all a lot worse under Ben Ali than they are today or than they were sort of in the early years of the Arab Spring. And as I said, I think the Tunisian government, in particular, and I think Libya's a very different case, we can't, it's very difficult to even talk about a Libyan government, but the idea that the Tunisian government sort of understands this and they're getting a much better handle on the security situation and how to address the idea of dignity, but they're not there yet. And as I mentioned, you still hear a lot of the same frustrations that you saw before. But we're in this really unique period, which is the Tunisian elections, so they're going to be having their very first ever democratic local elections on May 6th in less than two weeks. And these are a real opportunity and a chance for the country and for the government to address some of the regional imbalances that I've talked about. The primary vehicle that they're doing this is through what they call positive discrimination. And this is something that is a very real, serious program for the Tunisian government. It's enshrined in the constitution. And the idea is that they will provide for equitable, rather than equal, resource distribution across the country. So the idea that the people in the most marginalized communities, which happen to be the ones that are the highest contributors to ISIS, that the government is actively going to shift resources there in the short term and the long term to get everyone kind of on the same playing field. And in reality, you've had these sort of tax incentives and investment bonuses for the marginalized interior since the 1970s, but they haven't really done much. So I think this is just kind of something to look for in the future. Is this positive discrimination going to work? What is that model? Is it actually something that the governments and the newly elected local officials who've never held any sort of political power before are they gonna actually be able to take advantage of this and address some of these key concerns and these key drivers of extremism? And the flip side of that is that I think, the report really talks a lot about this idea of relative deprivation. So it's not just that people are worse off than other places, it's that they're worse off relative to someone else that they can see or that they can actually feel. And this is why I think you see the Tunis and the Tunis suburbs issue, where some of the highest levels of recruitment are in the suburbs of Tunis, where you have simultaneously the wealthiest part of Tunisia, Tunis, and then you also have some of the worst off neighborhoods. It's this idea of people seeing their neighbors and seeing the idea that, look how much better they have it than me. And so I do worry a little bit that this idea of positive discrimination could backfire in that sense. And you already see this in Sidi Bouzid, the birthplace of the revolution, where if you drive from Tunis to Sidi Bouzid, the road outside Tunis is great. You know, it's a beautiful highway like you'd find anywhere else. And then all of a sudden you get into this middle area where it's like a dirt road and you can't even pass barely on the road, it takes you forever to kind of drive there. And then right outside of Sidi Bouzid, it's a beautiful road. And they rebuilt this road after the revolution, that they wanted to put poor investment into Sidi Bouzid, but you still have this middle area. And you know, it's not done yet. And I think they'll get there. I mean, part of the reason it's a dirt road is because they're trying to fix the road. But this idea that it's relative deprivation, that you know, you look around you and it's not just that you're not doing well, it's that you're not doing well compared to someone else. And then the final point I'll make is just, I think this is the point that's made in the report about the history of prior Jihadist activity is really important in the case of North Africa. And if you look back at history and look at various conflicts, conflict in Afghanistan in Iraq and now this conflict with ISIS, the same towns, the same communities are the ones who sent high numbers of foreign fighters. So it's not just again this idea that Tunisia was, for a long time, I think they're not anymore, the number one contributor of foreign fighters to ISIS. That's bad, but it's much more of a manageable problem than it seems to be in that if you dig down to the local level as this report is done and really tackle these communities that for decades have sent tons and tons of foreign fighters, that's where you're gonna be able to solve this problem if the government's able to tackle that. And I'll leave it there. Yeah, I just wanted to thank David. I want to commend you and Nate on this report. I think it's really well done. I agree with Sarah too that looking at the local factors is important as well, especially when you have such a large scale mobilization like Tunisia where there are variations depending on different cities and provinces and so on and so forth. But I wanted to particularly focus on right now and how ISIS is looking at Tunisia's forthcoming municipal election. One of the things to note is that two months ago in mid-March, or I guess it's not two months ago, maybe a month ago, ISIS's weekly newsletter, El Naba put out a statement or an essay talking about Tunisia's election and the idea of democracy and of course anybody that follows jihadi ideology, it's a huge issue since they view democracy as a separate religion from Islam. And for them, because this would be such a huge victory for Tunisia's transition, I think that there is a possibility that in the upcoming municipal election, which is May 6th, that we could see violence. This isn't mere conjecture per se since one of the things we've seen over the last few weeks in other contexts with elections is that ISIS has hit registration places where people have tried to register and places like Iraq as well as Afghanistan. So I would not necessarily be surprised if we saw something similar in Tunisia because I think for them it would be important to discredit the whole process, especially in the areas that are outside Tunis because this would then show that the Tunisian government can actually provide security after all these years. And while that's not necessarily means that there will be violence since ISIS and Sinai also threatened violence during the Egyptian election about a month ago and that didn't take place. So you also have to understand intent and capacity but I do think it is something to think about especially since the way that they're arguing. One of the things that they mentioned in this NABA article was talking about how you had, they didn't specifically talk about Anachta but it was a clear implicit discussion about them how Anachta main argument was that we would bring religion to society through these elections which is a main argument that many within the mainstream Muslim brotherhood type groups have made over the years and that look at what's happened over the last few years nothing has changed in Tunisia. It's still mainly run by secular governments that the proposals that Anachta tried to do from 2011 to 2014 didn't put in whether it's related to issues on blasphemy whether it's related to gender equality issues and rolling them back. And more recently debates about inheritance and the equality in inheritance which is likely to pass in Tunisia in the near future which for them they cite as an illustration that Anachta has not lived up to their promise of using democracy to bring religion back within society in Tunisia and they then use different proofs within the Quran. Of course, this is their own interpretation of that and other Muslims might disagree with how they use that but it is important for them in trying to talk to the Tunisian population in public that might see this as something that resonates with them since there is a lot of grievances still many people feel that many of the promises from the revolution have not been fulfilled it is true that many of the political things have gone forward but still the economic problems remain and I think that for many that feel hopeless some of these messages are useful to them it provides them with a way to think about a positive future where they can go back against these authorities and individuals that promise stuff and then didn't follow through and it's not that something that that's so abstract where in the past a group like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State would talk about going all the way back to the seventh century in the original caliphate but now they can point to look, we had this government and state set up in Iraq and Syria and to a lesser extent in Libya which is right next door and many Tunisians of course were joining up with there so there is something that somebody could potentially hold on to as another hope in the future so it is something that continuously needs to be looked into especially since there's a growth in the prison population in Tunisia with many people involved and that's also historically been an area where people plan the future whenever they get released from prison and what could that mean to Tunisia in the future if things don't completely remain as stable it has been over the past couple of years so I'll just leave it there for now and thank you for the status. So one of the things I'd like to dig in on is this question of the role of democratization process so in our report one thing we found in Tunisia in particular is that so the ISIS files we looked at they ask you who recommended you to ISIS or who is the recommender? It's not quite clear what that means in terms of were they recruiting you are they someone who can be called up or send something to confirm you? That's not quite clear but one of the things we found in Tunisia is that a large number of these people withstood recommenders with known links back or who came out of the Ansar al-Sharia movement and organization including one we found Kamal Zaruk who as what's the case with the number was openly touring Tunisia in the aftermath of the revolution something that's hard to imagine under the Ben Ali regime. On the other end it's hard to say that taking the authoritarian route would have prevented us given that you have this revolutionary upsurge and it didn't prevent that so I'm wondering if you have thoughts on how North African governments or the US Senate's partners should be walking the line between forms of democratization that produce openings for jihadist organizing and lack of democracy that prevents the sort of resolution of marginalization or lack of inclusion that seems to in many ways be at the root of the problem in the first place. I mean for me I don't necessarily think that the opening of society in of itself and participation led to this large mobilization of individuals and reemergence of networks within Tunisia after the revolution. I mean for me the original sin of the revolution was letting people out of prison that had been convicted for terrorism previously. Not talking about the political prisoners they definitely should have been left out but there were definitely hardened individuals that had been to Iraq, Afghanistan, had been involved in terrorist attacks and plots in Europe. If they were not let out of prison I don't think that there would have been that same kind of issue or mobilization within Tunisia and this was just further hurt by then Anachta's policies of having sort of this light touch approach where they felt that they could convince individuals to join the government. I think a lot of it was naivete and also hubris on their part that they would convince jihadists that wanted to overthrow not only Ben Ali's authoritarian system but also a democratic system to set up their own theocratic state that they would be willing to join a democratic process. So a lot of what's happened over the last few years I think is sort of trying to put everything back in Pandora's box and I think that Anachta's learned a lot from that experience as well as we've seen in terms of their approach and the way they discuss these issues now. So I'm unsure it's necessarily the type of problem that there was from 2011 to 14 or so. For me the biggest concern is what's going on in the prisons now and the future of the movement is happening there. Unfortunately we don't really know what's going on specifically. So a lot of that's up to the authorities in Tunisia and trying to rehabilitate individuals especially those that might be disillusioned or those that are not necessarily quite as involved in the violent aspects of it since many people were more just focusing on things in terms of online activism or on the ground proselytization. So I think that there needs to be a separation understanding the levels of whether somebody was actually involved in violence or not. Yeah so I think there's also a big factor in the Tunisia case which is Libya. And that Libya's next door and it's in chaos and so the idea that even if Tunisia was doing a much better job at kind of controlling this issue I mean I agree completely that letting these really bad guys out of prison was a horrible idea but the idea also that even if you control that you still have this porous border with Libya and this chaos and the major terror attacks that have taken place in Tunisia have been Tunisians who go to Libya train with ISIS and then come back and so until the Libyan conflict itself it quites down and until they really are able to control the border that's always gonna happen. But then the issue of kind of democratization overall I mean I think, I believe in the Jesus revolution I think it was a great thing but controlled democratization is a lot better to prevent chaos. So some sort of gradual opening, the liberalization of the country in general could have prevented some of the chaos that just took place right away. So I think if you are trying to, a policymaker and trying to figure out how to stabilize your country sort of longer slower democratization or liberalization is probably a better path but no one governments don't plan to be overthrown they don't plan for revolutions so it's not like they could have made that choice. So how much did the, in your view the 2013, 2014 ISIS mobilization required the Arab Spring revolutions and then looking forward are we looking at conditions in the region where we could see a similar rise of revolutionary feeling and if we don't get that should we not expect another mass foreign fighter mobilization like what we saw or will we see it regardless? I think there were a number of factors of course the opening in some countries definitely helped out as I alluded to but that doesn't take into account why so many people from Europe went or why so many people from South Asia went and other areas as well. Part of it was related to the policies of the Assad regime and what they're doing against the Syrian population and all the massacres. Another factor was also the usability of getting to Turkey to then get into Syria and the growth of sort of the tourism and also outgrowth of Turkish airlines and other number of places and therefore it was a lot easier for people to get to Turkey then get into Syria than say if somebody wanted to try and go fight in Mali which is in the middle of nowhere in the desert. So I think that there are distinct factors that led to sort of this unprecedented mobilization in Syria in many respects. I think that it would be hard to reproduce it but anything is possible. It's hard to predict the future but I'm unsure that it wouldn't necessarily play out in the same avenue that we've seen especially as more and more countries realize that they can't sort of control these individuals they're letting go since they will return home. So I think that there will be further foreign fighter mobilizations in the future as we've seen after Afghanistan you stole Bosnia and Chechnya after Iraq you had Yemen and Somalia and more recently with places like Libya and Mali but I still think that if you do see a growth in foreign fighters again most likely probably would be in Iraq and Syria again just because it is the heart of the Arab world and that's sort of where the strongest movements are these days. I will note one cautionary tale is if somehow pure chaos happened in Saudi Arabia then all bets are off because that's the home of Islam and it won't just be the Sunni Salafi jihadist it will also be Iran and their Shi'a jihadi guys and anybody else in between that wants to try and have some kind of claim over the legitimacy over Islam in the world. So that's something that I personally worry about I don't know if that will ever happen but it is something that I think would blow Syria out of the water in terms of potential. Yeah I mean I think that the idea that there's gonna be another revolution I'm not sure I think that's the case I think that the factors that led to the Arab Spring across the region are all still there so you're still seeing the same socioeconomic marginalization of particular regions you're still seeing with the exception of Tunisia you're still seeing authoritarian governments the economies even in Tunisia are worse off than they were before the Arab Spring so all those factors are still there but I think with the exception of Tunisia all the other leader and I guess Libya all the other leaders have figured that out and learned how to stop it so you have the extreme case of Egypt where you have CC elected by 97% and every opposition figures either in jail or killed or out of the country but in Tunisia where you do have democracy they're still struggling with this of how do you prevent a revolution with limited financial resources so they don't have the ability to buy off people or to even throw the kind of investment into the marginalized regions that they might wish to in order to kind of stop this so you could see, again I don't think it's gonna be a revolution but you could start to see more people looking for a different outlet that this democracy thing's not working the Ben Ali thing didn't work what else do we have to do and I think that has driven a lot of people to ISIS and you see in the South in particular a number of people who fought in the revolution Tunisian revolutionaries who are now fighting with ISIS so you can see how that train of thought kind of goes but I'm not sure where that takes us and I think even if ISIS were to go away tomorrow you would still see some level of the population some people who were gonna be looking for somewhere to go so this is why it's so essential and I think the Tunisian government gets this but it's so essential to address these issues the issues that led to the revolution in the first place because again, even if they're not gonna go to Libya or to Iraq and Syria, they're gonna go somewhere and there will be someone waiting to welcome them into their arms and again, the report talks a lot about this that it's not ideology the North Africans are not going to ISIS because of the ideology which is what's even scarier because that means that they're ready to be picked off by kind of whoever's ready to take them So one of the things I want to ask you Sarah is that in our report, we saw a lot of reporting and other work that suggested that while you do in Tunisia have a meaningful chunk of fighters who are coming from sort of blue collar backgrounds which isn't quite what we're seeing in Derna where it's almost everyone just doesn't have a job whether that's because they were unemployed before or aftermath of the Libyan revolution and chaos that preceded but you do have this chunk of blue collar fighters but there's a lot of suggestions that it's a squishy blue collar nose that we see this in Ben-Gerdon and Adonis where it's a large trader population that's interlinked to a iffy sort of smuggling economy where many of them likely don't have access to benefits where it might be more like day labor also there was sort of Gallup survey work that suggested people who sort of objectively and standard economic measures would be doing pretty well or the country would be doing well people felt that due to corruption and other reasons it actually wasn't benefiting them and you just finished a big or not just anymore did a big report on sort of corruption and feelings on that in Tunisia how squishy is the sort of feeling of stability more blue collar not unemployed populations yeah I mean the idea of corruption is certainly feeding into terrorist recruitment I mean this idea that it's one of the many factors of things that have actually gotten worse not better since the revolution you can read my report for more detail but the idea I mean it's not necessarily even that corruption itself is worse but that the perception of the corruption is worse this is where we get back to this kind of democracy paradox that because people can now openly talk about corruption they're talking about it more which means more people feel like corruption is occurring and this coupled with massive under employment so you have a very educated population in Tunisia but skills that are not necessarily conducive to the sort of employment opportunities that are there that also coupled with the informal sector and the informal economy makes up 50% of Tunisia's GDP that's huge so some people are there by choice and it's a lifestyle it works for them they're traders they're on the border the border's very porous and it's easy for them but others would prefer to be inside the formal economy and the government hasn't figured out yet how to capture that and how to kind of make that work for the people but also for the economy overall and were they to actually not only capture kind of the tax revenue that would come for that but just capture people and give them a stable job give them the ability to have benefits give them the ability to have some more self-worth and more dignity which again fed the revolution I think that would help a lot with Tunisia's foreign fighter problem Before we turn it over to your questions I wanted to ask about the ISIS recruitment to go to Libya which our data does not look at and looks at the period before ISIS really started telling people don't come to Syria come to Libya Aaron however recently published a report specifically on fighters who went to Libya what did you see in sort of the regional differences or local factors and where does that foreign fighter mobilization sit now that at least the sort of main territorial holdings of ISIS have been smacked down by Libyans and US air support I mean right now you don't really see that many cases of people still going to Libya the foreign fighters that are still in Libya are those that had previously been there whether they're hiding out in central or southern Libya or whether those more aligned with al-Qaeda and based in Derna now but you don't see the large scale mobilization like we saw in 2015, 16 to Libya many of the same dynamics are similar to Syria especially since many of those that went to Syria from 2012 to 2014 went through Libya to get to Syria so you see a lot of similarities in terms of variation by region in the same type of key hotspots whether it's Tunis, Bazaar, Kabili and then Gardan region so there isn't too much difference of course the concern is because the countries are next to each other and there's greater linkages between the Libyan and Tunisian militants this could create more issues in terms of down the road just because even if things are on the down low now if there's the opportunity things could heat up again because these networks have been established and created and people know each other one of the things in particular that was interesting of note for me with regard to the Tunisians that went to Libya is there's this area called Ramado which is south of Ben Gardan it's close to the Libyan border as well which historically I didn't see too many people becoming foreign fighters from there but a lot of them went, I think there's up to 100 people out of a population of 10,000 that went to Libya to join up with ISIS so for me if ISIS was able to bounce back in Libya and they did try and take territory again on the Libyan Tunisian border it wouldn't necessarily just be an issue in Ben Gardan but also Ramada where you'd have a similar scenario is what we've seen in the Euphrates Valley in Iraq and Syria where they broke the borders between Iraq and Syria and you'd have a possibility that they would be able to do that and they'd have a potential population that could be amenable or at least acquiescent to it if they came in and were able to set up shop there of course the situation now doesn't look like that's gonna happen necessarily just because they have been pushed back and a lot of their fighters have been killed but everybody was skeptical of the Islamic State back in 2009 to 2012 and what they're doing in Iraq and we obviously have seen what has happened since then so I wouldn't necessarily discount it but as of now I wouldn't say it's on the front burner but it is something to also note in that it's not just Ben Gardan per se but you also have this other city of Ramada and therefore it could create this potential future base especially since you do see the connections between the smuggling black market economy and individuals involved in that and then joining up later with Jihadi groups too. Let's get your questions. We have a mic in the back so just raise your hand. Let's do right there in the back. Do we have the microphone? So while we get that and set that up I'll ask another question regarding your recent work on the Libyan fighters which is you noted that there was a large flow of fighters from the Sahel to Libya in our data that's really something that was new. We basically saw no fighters from anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Sahel maybe one or two in the records we were looking at. Is that something specific about Libya? Is that a new dynamic? Yeah, it is. One of the things historically is that most people that were involved in militancy in different areas of the Sahel region it was mainly local insurgencies whether it was people from Kenya that were going to Somalia or maybe people from Niger going to Mali or people from Cameroon or Senegal going to Nigeria. What we really saw is that you then see people going from many of these West African, East African and those countries up into Libya to join up with IS. And that's one of the things that I think IS was attempting to do was using Libya as a base to project larger onto other parts of Africa to build up its networks there. Of course that's been hindered due to the fall of their territorial control on Libya but also because AQIM and Al-Shabaab are still the strongest actors at least in their spheres of influence in Mali and Somalia. IS has had more gains in Nigeria but it is something to think about in the future and what this means of those that did go to Libya that are then returning home and possible homegrown recruitment in a place like Ghana or Senegal that historically really haven't had these issues and therefore their governments might not necessarily think it's a big problem in the same way that after the Bosnian conflict many European states really didn't think too much about their citizens that went there and therefore that provided an open opportunity for there to be recruitment for then the next decade or so before many governments really taking it seriously. So I do think that there is the possibility that you could see larger growth in that. The only difference though is that in Europe there is sort of the minority majority dynamics so there's the potential for not only economic grievance but also ethnic or religious type of grievances whereas in a place like Senegal the country is completely Muslim. So there isn't that same kind of dynamic necessarily and there are outlets for religion there so it might not take on the same kind of hold but it is something to note for sure. So I think we have the microphone set and I think there was a question in the back row. Let's do that first. Thanks very much. Just a couple of questions or thoughts actually specifically on Tunisia. Tunisia has a bit of a unique history in the Arab world of sort of very state sponsored enforced secularism from the period of Burkiba onwards and your research really looks at the socioeconomic cleavages in Tunisian society and regionalism but I'd be interested in your thoughts on how those socioeconomic cleavages overlap with sort of religious and identity cleavages between secularist Tunisians on the coast which is sort of associated with the national narrative of power and how that sort of the socioeconomic exclusions that you talk about feed into some of the ways in which Islam can be adopted as an alternative identity for people who feel excluded from the power structure there. So that's the first question and the second question I'd sort of welcome your thoughts on the effectiveness of a lot of the CVE programming that is done by the U.S. government and other actors in light of your research findings. Thanks very much. Thanks. So our data from Daljad's local report I think isn't well placed to throw a lot of light onto this question of the role of secularism. It's worth noting that Tunisia does have that history and Libya to some extent also has the history although they're both complex. I think one thing that our more localized data really shows is that having that sort of view of secularism may be important and it's key at the national level but that doesn't really, at least to my eyes, maybe there is a difference, explain why there are localized hotspots. So I think, again, there's a key role of ideology but there's also something about having a population with underemployment into the high tens where you are drawing a fighter population with 70% underemployment that probably would generate anger regardless of whether it's secular or not but I think you two are a better place to discuss the role of Tunisia's at least former secular identity and where that is today. Yeah, I mean I think clearly it's an interesting factor to look at but the idea, so there's a couple things. First of all, the idea that there is a Nahtah, that there is a Islamist party that is incredibly powerful, you know, one of, Tunisia is almost a two-party state these days and that Nahtah was in power. I think that helped deter some of the people who might be motivated for more religious reasons to fight and that's why I think we don't see as much of an ideological driver there but one of the things that I wanted to point out is in polling and IRI polling and in the most, several IRI polls that look at the religiosity of Tunisia or the degree that Tunisians would like to see a stronger role for religion in the state, that's actually decreasing. So fewer Tunisians want to see more religion in the state and if you look even at Nahtah voters, the drop is bigger than the general population, just to say that, you know, as a whole, and I haven't seen this data at the local level so it would be interesting actually to look at some of the higher neighborhoods and see how this matches up but overall Tunisians are expressing less interest in a role of religion in the state and so not necessarily pushing more towards secularism but I think the idea that you have a strong Islamist party has kind of helped address that issue and that people feel like they do have an outlet for religion, they do have a voice for religion is no longer kind of shuttered or banned. I agree, I think that the issue of religion in some ways is probably more important for the growth of Nahtah back in the 60s and 70s and 80s than it is for the Jihadi movement in Tunisia in some ways, I think that they use the ideas of religion as a narrative that's strong for them but that's not necessarily why people join up in the first place, it then becomes part of the identity once they join the group but I think broader inequalities and other issues probably provide that opening for people to be interested in the first place. And on to the CVE question, I think the data in our report isn't well placed to really talk about any specific efforts but I think two of the key lessons that we sort of, I would draw out regarding CVE is first the really critical role of these local dynamics and beginning with an understanding of the local population and building up from that rather than building down from a vision of what the Islamic State believes. So I think that's critical and as dynamics like Sarah was saying about the dangers of having a governance project that just inflames the population in the next town or in the next neighborhood. The second thing is the report really shows the difference between what's happening in North Africa where there's these very clear socioeconomic factors and what's happening in a place like the Arabian Peninsula where there may also be socioeconomic factors. I don't want to say that the fighters we saw in the Arabian Peninsula were wealthy or didn't also have unemployment issues but you don't see something like Darna in the Arabian Peninsula. Instead we see things more like the Hark and the sort of Bahraini element I showed and I think that suggests that a lot of the counter-adiology work, things like promoting more moderate views of Islam getting trying to avoid or downplay radical clerics probably has an important role in the Arabian Peninsula. I'm doubtful it really has a foundational role in North Africa which isn't to say it won't reach anyone but the Darna problem doesn't exist because of radical clerics or extremist ideology. It's rooted in now four decades plus of marginalization and open warfare and that's not gonna be changed with some tweets or a new figure. I don't know if you all have things you want to talk about. Let's take another question. In the middle of it. Well, we can start on to the left and then go down. Thank you very much for talking to us today. So it seemed like you were implying that other than North Africa, extremist groups in Sub-Saharan and Western Africa tended to be more local and not sending fighters or receiving fighters from the Islamic State, but are there still any major ties between the groups that are cause for concern? So I can only say from the data, we add from the set of 3,500 plus files globally and in that there's I think fewer than 10 from Sub-Saharan Africa. I'd have to go look at the numbers. With that few, I can't really say anything about what that looks like to the extent I would, it would draw upon others. I note that it doesn't seem to be purely local given that in the 2015, 2016 period, you do see this mobilization to Libya, but I don't know. Yeah, Puffs. I mean, I essential, their closest ties are probably still two places in the Sinai, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan. I think it's more disparate to a place like Nigeria or Mali, or Burkina Faso to a lesser extent, just cause there isn't the same kind of historical connections between networks and individuals, but also those groups started more local and have more of a local focus than sort of a local plus a regional plus a global focus, if that makes sense. Let's go down to the room. Hi, so I'm from IRI. Regarding our data on religiosity, I think something that's really interesting is back before the 2014 elections, we saw a fairly large religiosity gap between NAHDA voters and Nideh Tunis voters. And what Sarah referred to in a drop in religiosity from NAHDA could be indicating that religious voters in Tunisia are jumping ship on NAHDA as NAHDA repositions itself as a Muslim Democratic Party. So I think that's really interesting because now you don't really see an appreciable religiosity gap in our data between likely voters for Nideh Tunis and for NAHDA in the upcoming elections. We certainly can look at data on a regional level to see how it matches up with the Aljihad as local report. I think that'd be really interesting. I do have a question though, which is regarding dessert. I find dessert to be sort of an interesting standout in terms of being a hotspot in that it's coastal, it's not a suburb of Tunis like Duwara Sher or at the Damman. It's not on the Libyan border like Bangor Dan. So what in your opinion, explains why we see such a large level of foreign fighter recruitment in dessert? So I'm not sure that we have a great explanation. In fact, it also, one of the things we note in the report is that also appears to be a bit different in protest activity, although that may just be the measure we were using on that, the Eklah data to per capita, it actually has lower than the sort of four multi-province regions we looked at. As you noted also geographically, doesn't really fit into the understanding of that breakdown. The best explanation I have that was in some of the reporting and I think may hold true, although it's difficult to see is that it was the hub of Ansar al-Sharia activity. And it's a network effect there. It was also you see fighters in the Sinjar record. So there is something about previous networks, I think. Another thing is just the way people were reporting their origins in dessert is that we weren't able to see more localized aspects as you sort of, we were able to draw a little bit out in Grantunas. So I do wonder if there's internal peripheries again. I don't know if you do have some. What's going on? Part of it's related to historical networks of recruitment. And most people that usually get involved in jihadi groups, it's based off of a family member or somebody that they're friends with. So if there was one entrepreneurial jihadi person that wanted to get involved, that then could snowball over time. And we did see a number of people from dessert going to Iraq. And then of course, one of the Ansar al-Sharia branches was in dessert too. So there was already networks there. So it might have just been related to interpersonal relationships than it being related to some type of economic issue or religious or whatever else. But I think there also is a little bit of the relative deprivation issue there. This is completely anecdotal, but I had a conversation a few months ago with a couple of young Tunisians from dessert who were in Washington for a few days. And they were saying that they were really frustrated that they are on the coast, they have the ability to be this massive, beautiful tourism place that no one goes there. And so there, I think you could, I think if you already have the network in place, you can kind of feed into that to say, look, look at Susu, look at Tunis, why are we not doing as well and not getting the same sort of infrastructure and not gonna sort of help feed the narrative. And I think it's also just there may be, there's a lot of flux in the data and that may be generated by network effects, by very localized relative deprivation. It may just be that's the nature of data like this. But even in sort of the eastern coast, we see areas that do produce at a relatively high or medium rate for Tunisia that would seem to be relatively wealthy. Fighters are reporting being relatively well off, job-wise. So Monastir is the example of that, that actually has a surprisingly high rate given the background of its location and elite status and that the fighters don't seem to be reporting that they're just unemployed from there. However, at least in the eastern coastal region, when you look at it as a whole, the peak that you see in, for example, Monastir is not near the peak you see, for example, in Kibili and the southern area or a sort of neighborhood level like at Ataman and Grand Tunis. So I don't know how much to take from that. I think to do that you really do need the kind of deep survey work and field work in the region which is another lesson of this report and I think it really promotes is, again, you have to begin from that local aspect and not from the what does ISIS believe, what is ISIS's view. You need to do that too, but it has less explanatory power when you get down to it. Do we have other questions? Let's do up front here. Hi, my name is Jack Kropansky, unaffiliated. Question about Egypt. In southern Egypt and in the Sinai, how connected are they to the Libya, Tunisia versus are they more closely related to Syria? And also there's the Yarmouk refugee camp in Belowa, Damascus and there's an ISIS fight going on right now. Is that kind of, where will those fighters gravitate towards? Will they go towards Syria and sorry, towards Sinai and Libya or where else? In our report we didn't look at Egypt. We took a brief look at it and made the call that it looked like it had a lot more to do with and needed to be analyzed with regards to the Levant countries rather than seeing close connections to this sort of Maghreb, North Africa region we ended up looking at. I'd like to look at it in the future. There does appear to be some element of people who had previous training in Sinai or John's experience there or who had fought in Gaza. What to make of that and how significant it is. I can't really say from the look that we did. The files we looked at basically nothing to say about within Syria because to have entered in these files that we got, you basically had to come through the Turkish border. So it doesn't really have anything to say about people who joined ISIS from within Syria. I don't know if you have thoughts to talk about. In terms of the connections, there are definitely connections between al-Qaeda and ISIS networks in Libya and in Egypt whether it's people that went to Sinai to get training and then go back to Libya or people that went from Sinai and Egypt to go into Libya for safe haven or training to then go back into Egypt. So there are connections within those networks for sure. It doesn't really specifically have anything to do with Syria though. It's more just the regional dynamics there. In terms of what's going on in the Yarmouk camp, I mean ISIS has had a presence there for a few years now but they're pretty isolated and they haven't been that connected to the rest of the organization that has been more in the northern and eastern parts of the country. So these individuals will either likely be killed by the regime, which wouldn't be surprising. Or they'll escape and maybe try and go down into Dar'a to join up with Jashal bin Al-Waleed which is a ISIS affiliate in the Dar'a region on the Israeli border. So that seems possibility. Very much. Have you shared your report with the Tunisian government or have they expressed an interest in the IRI surveys? Are the Tunisians or regional governments looking at those reports? I don't believe we have. We've briefed a number of people but I don't remember anyone specifically from the Tunisian government. The reports available online says hopefully people who work on interest issues and can do that kind of deep local look. Hopefully we'll take a look and it can move forward. And you can correct me if I'm wrong but they speak with the Tunisian government all the time. IRI briefs the Tunisian government at the local level, at the national level all the time and they're very interested. Stanley Kober. I'm having some difficulty following this discussion. I can understand the part about people being marginalized and they may even resort to violence to deal with that. What I can't understand is a complete absence of moral restraint, the indifference to human life. I don't understand how you get from being unemployed to just murdering children randomly. There is a process that is going on here and we're not talking about isolated phenomena. We're talking about a mass movement. So for our report the thing I'd emphasize is one of our sort of guiding views on this is looking at individual motivation is actually somewhat of a dead end for terrorism analysis. People have too many motivations. The motivations are too complex. Even just with any human action, why does someone do what they do? So our sort of approach was to try and pick the analytical level up a bit from designing or looking at an individual terrorist profile but then also not at the level of what does ISIS really believe? Which in our view also misses this kind of highly localized context, which is the pattern that shapes us. So one of the things we saw actually in our report is at the local level people who joined ISIS actually don't look all that different at least in the very limited socioeconomic factors at a broad level we have from anyone else in that area. But it's important that that area looks different from another area. So it's not that people from Etihadmen look particularly jihadisty or that there's something different about them and in fact obviously in any of these cases the rates are so low in sort of overall terms you can't go that way. But there's something important that it looks different what's going on in Etihadmen than on the eastern coast of Tunisia. And one of those is producing fighters at a high rate and one of those is that. I think there's clearly a need to have moral condemnation. It's just in terms of the analytical effect of that there's not all that much value to a counter-terrorism strategy and it doesn't lead us to a resolution of has terrorism scholar John Horgan has put it more than four decades of looking into the terrorist profile which has produced basically nothing. Obviously there's a big leap between being unemployed and becoming a terrorist. But I think if you look particularly at the Tunisian case what we've been talking about up here this idea of a loss of dignity and that it's not just that you're unemployed is that you have a college degree in some cases you have an advanced degree and it takes you eight years to find a job. You can't feed your family. You have nothing left. And in some cases now you have a revolution which promised you democracy and promised you all these wonderful things and a better economy and a better life. And guess what? Your life is actually worse than it was before. So you're angry, you're frustrated and you have nothing to lose. And if you look at the literal spark that started there in spring which was Mohammed Bouziz, he's setting himself on fire. He was also, he was employed in a sense. I mean he had a produce card. He was selling produce but illegally, didn't have a permit and something sent him over the edge. He could have just gone home and been angry that he got accosted by the police but he literally set himself on fire. And he didn't do that to start a revolution. He did that because he was frustrated and angry. So I think it's, we can't get into the mindset of every single terrorist nor should we try to. But it's, the thing that's dangerous is that a lot of these countries and particularly Tunisia has gotten past the point of unemployment. It's at the point of loss of dignity where you feel like you have nothing left. And that's where, and the terrorists themselves on the other side are preying on that. And they know how to psychologically manipulate people and get them to join. I'll just add that. Look, ISIS, Al Qaeda, their ideologies are totalitarian and violent by nature. So when somebody first joins the group they might not necessarily be like that but through socialization and culturalization within that and then group dynamics they'll become violent like that. So it's not necessarily surprising that that happens and we see that with other violent movements too. It's not necessarily specific to jihadists per se. While this doesn't necessarily specifically have to do with Tunisia more of Western context what's been an equalizer in this too is the fact that some people can watch their videos online for hours and then through that be motivated and because of something that switches in their mind they then decide to do an action as well. So there's one, a potential group dynamic but two, somebody that could literally watch 24 seven these types of content which could lead to it as well since if you've watched their videos they're very emotive and visceral and you will feel something even somebody that doesn't even agree with them or believe in it. So I think that that's important to understand too which draws out this violence as well. We have any other? Down in front of you. Thank you. I was just wondering where your data came from and when did you first receive it? As this data is brought out of Syria it's more or less we believe the same data that the Combating Terrorism Center used and analyzed. We can't fully confirm that but based on both look at specific individual matchups there as well as the broad demographic findings as well as its origin. And so CTC looked at that with the military the military had I believe 98% of these files were corroborated that they at least had it. Now whether that means it's necessarily authentic but our sort of judgment is it's authentic. I think that's always something that you have to wonder about with these kinds of captured leaked stolen documents out of a terrorist group or sort of census given that these kinds of records have been used by others that they've been picked up by multiple journalists elsewhere is that these are authentic. Any more? Over here on the part. I just looking at the ISIS flows from Europe into the Levant there's something maybe counterintuitive. The wealthier countries Scandinavian countries Netherlands had a higher proportion of extremists traveling to Syria than maybe the less wealthier countries Spain, Portugal, Italy. Even if you look at the Muslim populations among those it was still a higher proportion in the Scandinavian countries. And so my question is someone's theory was you have to be a little bit wealthy to be jihadist meaning that if you were too worried about putting food on the table maybe you weren't too worried about a global Islamic movement. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that whether it's still applicable in the North Africa region and overall your thoughts on it. So I think that's sort of a key thing to think about whether there's a level of not having a job or just poverty that means you're just not capable of joining a terrorist organization or even just not interested. And you need to have a certain level. And I think that's important to look at. I think maybe you see that in sort of Huzan and Southwestern Libya which produced no fighters in our data despite having been very marginalized. In the report we go into a couple of reasons why understanding that marginalization may be different than what the East experienced in addition to the clear ideological elements as well as highly localized loyalties there whether to particular ethnic groups and leaders or to existing al-Qaeda networks. I haven't looked at that European data very much so I don't want to confirm any particular patterns what I'd emphasize is one of the lessons of this report all job is local is it's not that there's one ISIS pattern of radicalization it's very varied and it comes up from the local level and there seem to be regional patterns. So my guess is that Europe has a very different regional pattern and then within Europe you have localized patterns. So I would suspect that France looks a lot similar in some ways to Tunisia but in that it may have these sort of working class marginalized neighborhoods that are producing but then also has some element of a broader ideological aspect generated by the particularities of French society and then if you go to the US I think in the United States we have a much smaller problem and we also don't really see the kind of marginalized neighborhood recruitment. You could potentially argue that in Minnesota we have something like that but that still even at the highest level you choose to look at that is just not anywhere close to what it means to live in DERNA. I would just add that I think a lot of it also has to do with whether there's local networks and also the government policy in those particular countries. So I think in most Northern European countries they don't really, they're not as harsh on these networks as your Western European countries in terms of cracking down upon them, arresting them and then also in places like Spain after the Madrid train bombings they pretty much rolled up all the networks and since then they've been working with the Moroccans to suppress as much as possible. In Portugal there's really no history of jihadism. In Italy the Italian government since the mid 2000s has been deporting people from the country so there isn't the opportunity for mobilization so I think part of it has to do with the historical networks and the ability for mobilization but also the level of harassment by government against these networks too. So I would suggest that in Northern Europe they probably weren't really doing too much with regard to these networks and therefore they're able to more easily travel. Since historically I think most people would recognize that Northern European countries that have softer policies on jihadi groups than more of the Western or Southern European countries. To go back, that's a lot of what we sort of in our report think is happening in Bahrain where you have this large number of group who say Turkey Ben Ali recommended them. That seems to be probably some level of actual recruitment there especially given he has family members in the records. So and he was preaching there and for at least a while relatively protected by his prominent status which looked a lot different from North Africa where at least until you get this broader opening in the revolutionary period and its aftermath of conflict you would not really be able to preach in that manner in a country like Libya or Tunisia or to the extent you did it would require a very different social position and security planning than it would for an elite figure like Ben Ali and Bahrain. So unless there's any other last questions. I have a quick question that's likely beyond the scope of the all jihadist local report but wondering if anybody has any comments. I think in a lot of the Western countries I know particularly in Spain, in France, in Belgium and the Netherlands a lot of their foreign fighter output or the folks that left first year in Iraq were of North African descent and I'm wondering if one there's in any data in any of your work that comes across linkages between networks of second third generation immigrants in those countries from the North African countries and the foreign fighters who came directly from Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, et cetera and then the second thing is just a thesis related thing related to the idea that all jihad is local and I know this data may not be available but if you trace the municipalities of where folks in Western Europe who came from North Africa were initially from in Morocco and Tunisia, et cetera do you expect that it would map on to the municipalities that you would find to be of high proportion of foreign fighter output in North Africa or would there be other factors maybe historical things, they came too early that would prevent that from happening or you would see different municipalities being important? I don't know, we didn't really look at that European data for this report there's certainly linkages back and forth and you see that to some extent and where people reported they traveled that they often do report or not often this is still low percentages but you do see reporting of travel to Europe for tourism or work among many of the Tunisian fighters and others in North Africa I think that just requires looking into European data In terms of the second part of your question I think that's probably too granular to know specifically it would be awesome though to really know that in terms of the first part there are definitely linkages whether it's people that from Tunisia that then became radicalized in Europe and then went back to Tunisia after the revolution so a good example of this is somebody like Boubacar al-Aqeem, he's a French Tunisian he joined up with ISIS in Iraq in 2002, 2003 and then was in prison in France and then after he was let out he went to Tunisia after the revolution and joined up with Ansar al-Sharia he was then involved in the plots to assassinate two secular politicians and then after that went to Libya to do some training then he went to Syria and became one of the senior external operations leaders for ISIS so that's just one example but there are also a number of cases of Tunisian French Tunisians that went to Tunisia after the revolution and joined up with Ansar al-Sharia and then there's also the linkages between sort of one of ISIS elite groups Khatibat-Batar of Libya there's a bunch of people there from France and Belgium and many of those were people from North African countries originally and then some of those individuals then went to Libya in 2015 and connected with the networks that were already in Libya and the Tunisian networks so they're sort of that mixing and matching there as well so there's different ways of looking at it but there are definitely connections that are there for sure. So I want to give you both the chance for any concluding remarks but also ask you looking forward what is the pattern or issue that gives you the most optimism for the North African region either regarding ISIS, Jihadism or just more broadly and what worries you the most in the next five years? I always try to end on a positive note so I'll do the negative first. I think, first of all thank you again for having me I think this has been a great discussion but I think both the things that gives me the most hope and the most fear is the decentralization process in Tunisia that on the one hand you have the opportunity you have actually I'm going positive first but you have the opportunity to actually address some of these local grievances you have the ability to empower people at the local level mentioned as in Sidi Wazid a couple months ago talking to young people and civil society actors and people running for the local elections and they're very hopeful they what they want to see is local control over their local affairs so that's very good but on the downside I worry about the expectations I think there's these really high expectations of what decentralization will bring to the country which is this idea that you're going to be suddenly flushed with resources that you're going to be able to correct a lot of these imbalances and the government's own estimation this is a 27 year process people don't are not patient for 27 years nor should they be I asked numerous government officials and local activists what do you want to see in one year or three months or five years and no one has an answer to that they're looking at this as a very long term problem so I worry what's going to happen in that between now and 27 years from now I agree with that one thing I'll note which I alluded to earlier I think if you want to understand at least the future of the Tunisian jihadi movement you really have to understand what's going on in the prison system right now and the mixing of individuals that join these groups whether they're homegrown whether they were foreign fighters whether they came from Europe that will really help map out what that means for the future of course there's a huge gap because we don't actually know what's going on in the prison system but based off of past cases whether it's in Yemen whether it's in France whether it's in Tunisia as well from 2006 to 2011 they are planning and they're also trying to recruit individuals that might not actually believe in ideas at that juncture yet too so that's something to think about too as well Thanks to our speakers for a great discussion