Eight months ago, the Tunisian government officially designated Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST) as a terrorist organization. Since then, Tunis has cracked down on the group’s activities, going after both its dawa campaign (i.e., proselytization and social-welfare efforts) and any links members have to terrorist plots. On the whole, AST’s public response has been to keep relatively quiet. Yet recent developments indicate that the group may be rebranding itself as Shabab al-Tawhid (ST; the Youth of Pure Monotheism), a shift that would have important implications for efforts to counter Tunisian jihadists and their associates in Libya.
SHIFTING GEARS
Within a week of the August designation, AST largely ceased releasing updates about its dawa campaign in Tunisia. The group may still be conducting lower-level dawa in rural areas outside the state’s reach, but if so, it is no longer publicizing such activity. The main messages it has put out via its Twitter account have been declarations of solidarity with arrested “brothers,” repeated calls for patience, and quotes from both traditional Islamic sources (the Quran and sunna) and ideological figures (e.g., Ibn Taymiyah, Sayyed Qutb, and Abu Qatada al-Filistini).
Indeed, AST has kept a low profile compared to its modus operandi before the designation; its only prominent announcement was leader Abu Ayyad al-Tunisi’s message of support for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the jihadist group deemed too extreme by senior al-Qaeda leaders and their official Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Until recently, this relative silence made it difficult to discern what was going on within AST, but new information indicates it might be rebranding itself under the Shabab al-Tawhid banner in Tunisia as well as Libya, where Abu Ayyad is now believed to be based. This shift could signal to exiled members in Libya that AST’s command structures are increasingly coming under the purview of its sister organization, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya (ASL).
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