Notably, the man suspected of perpetrating Berlin’s lorry attack last week is one of a number of alleged extremists to emerge from Tunisia.
Beyond this, the terrorist who carried out a similar attack in the French city of Nice in July was also Tunisian.
According to media reports, citing security agencies, the tiny nation on the Mediterranean has spawned more than six thousand fighters who have pledged allegiance to Daesh.
In July, the International Crisis Group think-tank issued a report showing that a jihadist movement had been established in Tunisia in 2011 at the start of the Arab Spring.
Moreover, other reports suggest that Tunisia’s geographic location made it easy for recruits to train at Daesh camps across the border in Libya.
Radio Sputnik discussed the issue with Alexander Azadgan, Professor, Senior Geopolitical analyst and Editor-in-Chief of MiddleEastRising.com.
"Those are very young societies from Morocco all the way to Pakistan. The birth rate there is a lot higher than in Europe. Combine high unemployment and ISIS (Islamic State/Daesh) radicalization and you get these lunatics like this Anis Amri (allegedly behind the attack in Berlin) who has been refused political asylum in Italy, an armed arsonist, who served a prison term in Italy, a drug dealer, a gun purchaser in Germany who then made a contact with an ISIS recruiter," he told Sputnik.
He further elaborated that the rich secularism which existed in Tunisia before the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 had led to a very vibrant underground Salafist movement. The Salafists and the Wahhabis share a similar fundamentalist outlook, and both have a very rigid interpretation of Islam, he said.
On the other hand, there is the collapsing neighbor Libya, where young people can easily go and be recruited for hot spots like Syria.
Lack of employment opportunities and the socio-economic breakdown have fuelled extremism in Islamic societies, he noted.
"You have religious hedonistic ideologies, core ISIS ideologies which basically say: get murdered, become a hero, go to paradise and have intercourse with 72 virgins. It applies to Tunisia, which gets its main income from tourism, which is now in decline. Hence you get a situation where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, so you have a typical class struggle scenario," he explained.
"It should be no surprise to the west because we created this. The Arab Spring has always been the western concoction of the crazy neo-libs like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the puppet master of them all George Soros. We should have predicted this already back in 2010 and 2011 when it actually took place," he therefore said.
"Contrary to what Donald Trump has said, and that is the carpet bombing of these people, this is not a long-term solution but a political one. We need a vibrant democratic solution which will boost an economic growth creating more opportunities for the young people. And also we need the western companies to invest into these societies where the labor force is highly educated and highly motivated," he said.
On the other hand, he noted, there are very lousy assimilation programs in Europe, especially in France, where there is a large Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan immigrant population, as well as in Italy and Germany. Lots of people turn to the ISIS ideology out of protest, he said.
"You have to understand that a lot of these people were brought in at the end of the World War II as cheap labor to rebuild Europe and the idea was not for them to stay. Now we are looking at the third or even at the fourth generation who have always been social outcasts," he finally said.
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