What’s on, baba?
Tunis, October 24, 2014

Going back home through the windswept alleys of the Hammamet medina at night I ruminated what I was told by a policeman at a checkpoint: something will happen before dawn. He was right. Elections are just three days away and something always happens when Tunisians head to the polls. So I wasn’t surprised when the phone rang in the morning with the news that a 25 years old soldier, Ashref Ben Aziza, was killed in a shootout with some jihadists. I jumped to the laptop and began to browse the web: there was nothing in the major networks’ sites and it took me some time to dig up the story from a local radio station (mosaiquefm.net). This also came with no surprise: Big News were the Ottawa terrorist attack, Ebola spreading to Mali, Boko Haram abducting girls and US-led air strikes in Syria. Much later in the evening the story was picked up by Al-Jazeera and the New York Times.

The gunmen opened fire after security forces surrounded a house in the Tunis suburb of Oued Ellil, where they believed that a group of insurgents were preparing an attack to disrupt the elections. Security forces encircled the house and cleared the neighbourhood, ready to storm the building. But an upsetting issue is turning a routine counter-insurgency operation into a Shakespearian tragedy: there are at least two children, aged 3 and 4, in the house, and a number of women. The police had brought the mother of one of the suspects to the scene, and she used a megaphone to call on him to let the children go and surrender. He refused.

At 02.00 a.m. this Friday the siege is still on. A bloody outcome is expected soon. And I cannot help but thinking to the kids in that greyish concret suburbian house, sitting in the dark with their frightened mothers while the bearded reckless madmen prepare to die with the Kalash in their hands.