Soliman shooting

Soliman shooting
Part of Insurgency in the Maghreb (2002–present)
Date 3 January 2007 Location Near Soliman Result Tunisian government victory
Belligerents
Tunisia	GSPC
Commanders and leaders
	Lassaad Sassi
Units involved
Tunisian police forces	≈40 men of Assad ibn al-Furat's army, related to the GSPC
Casualties and losses
2 death	12 deaths 15 prisoners

The Soliman shooting was a shootout that occurred on January 3, 2007 in the Tunisian region of Soliman, south-east of Tunis. The national police forces fought an armed group calling itself "Asad ibn al-Furat's army" which had been initially labeled by the government as "dangerous criminals". A previous shooting involving this same group had taken place on December 23, 2006, placing it in a context of jihadist terrorism and anarchist, insurgent, Islamist militancy.

Presented at first as a case of great banditry, a phenomenon little known in the country, the international and Tunisian press quickly managed to pinpoint the group's connection with Salafist Islamist terrorism, established in the Maghreb post-9/11. This connection was found especially in the neighboring territory of Algeria, from where the group, composed mainly of Tunisians, infiltrated.

For the French political scientist Vincent Geisser, this emergence of violent international Islamism in Tunisia marked a separation from Tunisian political Islamism, repressed in the 1990s through the Ennahda movement. According to him, this development would be the result of the "strategic systematic repression of the opponents" that would develop on the sidelines of political parties while allowing the government to justify the security strategy in place to the Westerners.^[1]

Apart from the Ghriba synagogue bombing in spring 2002, the country had never been targeted by the Islamist movement. But, like other Arab societies, Tunisia is seeing the return of the hijab, the rise of religion, the success of religious programs and the enlistment of several hundred young Tunisians under the banner of Jihad in Iraq.^[2] Following the Tunisian revolution, members of the Assad ibn al-Furat's army were liberated, associating themselves with the Tunisian Salafist movement.