Tunisian President asks Western countries for military assistance

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki asked western countries to increase military assistance to Tunisia in an address to an audience at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, Wednesday.

In the wake of recent attacks against Tunisian soldiers near Chaambi Mountain and elsewhere along the country’s mountainous border with Algeria, Marzouki criticized western countries for what he sees as their failure to support his government with the necessary military equipment and training to combat Tunisia’s ongoing “terrorist” threat.

“We didn’t have the support we expected from the U.S.,” Marzouki said. “We expected more. […] If Tunisia fails, you can say goodbye to democracy in the Arab world for a century.”

“The political crisis is now behind us,” he continued. “The second crisis, which is more important, is the security crisis. We didn’t expect that Tunisia would become a country where we would have terrorist attacks like in Syria. We were a little bit naive.”