Zagouan, Tunisia: Before he tried to commit Tunisia’s first suicide attack in a decade, Ayman Al Sa’adi was a skinny teenager who loved Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho and American pop music; played online video games with his friends; and scored top-of-his-class grades in French, English and economics.
Then two years ago, at the start of his junior year in high school, his parents noticed a dramatic change. He started growing out his scruffy teen beard, and he threw away his jeans and other Western clothes and started wearing a long white robe.
He stopped talking to girls, and his grades dived. He told his parents he wanted to leave his public school and enroll in a boys-only Islamic school, where he would study only religion. And he told his mother he wanted to go to Syria to join the fight against President Bashar Al Assad. He said that Al Assad was killing fellow Muslims and that fighting to protect them was “following the ways of the Prophet” [PBUH].
His parents were shocked. They prayed at the neighborhood mosque, but their family lived a largely secular life.
“To us, religion is all about morals and ethics,” said his mother, Hayat Al Sa’adi. “You should smile and be nice. It’s not a religion of hatred.”
The family was comfortably middle-class. Ayman’s mother taught at a primary school, and his father was an agricultural engineer in Zagouan, a pretty town about 50 miles south of Tunis, famous as the starting point of a Roman aqueduct that carried mountain water all the way to the ancient city of Carthage on the Mediterranean coast.
“We told him, ‘You are smart, you are a good student’,” his mother said. “‘You can get a job and earn a lot of money, and you can help your cause by giving money to people who need it. Jihad is not only about fighting and weapons’.”
Al Sa’adi said she and her husband refused to allow Ayman to leave, and he pretended to accept that. But they knew that he was only humouring them, and that he was spending more and more time on radical websites.
Special interest
He also started spending more time with a man who had moved into the neighbourhood a few months earlier. He was older and married, but he seemed to take a special interest in Ayman, and he persuaded the teenager to come pray with him at another mosque, which was known as a centre of extremism.
Ayman’s father went to the man’s house and told him to stay away from Ayman, but the man told him there was nothing wrong with praying together. The Al Sa’adis asked around about the man and discovered that he seemed to have a lot of money, but no job. They suspected that he was part of some recruiting network, probably funded by wealthy backers in the Gulf.
“Our country has been infiltrated by so many foreign ideas,” Hayat said. “What happened in Syria changed everything, and suddenly our kids are going out of control when they are exposed to this extremist religious discourse.”
One day in March 2013, Ayman disappeared, and his parents reported him to the police. A friend came over and looked at Ayman’s Facebook account, where he found messages suggesting that Ayman was leaving for Syria with money supplied by the strange man in the neighbourhood.
That night, the police caught Ayman at a remote border crossing trying to enter Libya, a common first stop for young Tunisians attempting to reach Syria. His father picked him up, and Ayman was furious that his parents were “keeping him from martyrdom”, his mother said.
Ayman remained bitter. He spent his days using the internet and praying at the more radical mosque. He bought religious books and studied them. His mother asked him to go to the beach with the family, but he wouldn’t because men and women mixed there. And he spent a lot of time with the man in the neighbourhood, over his parents’ objections.
In August, he disappeared again and called his mother from what appeared to be a Libyan number. His mother said she knew she couldn’t help him anymore and started trying to steel herself for the possibility that her son would die in Syria.
Bid to detonate bomb
On October 30, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the Tunisian beach resort city of Sousse, killing only himself. And a half-hour later, Ayman, then 17, walked up to the tomb of Tunisia’s first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba, a popular tourist site in the town of Monastir. He tried to detonate a bomb but was tackled by security guards.
It was the first suicide attack in Tunisia since a 2002 incident that killed 21 people in a synagogue.
“I went to the jail to see him, and I didn’t recognise him,” Hayat said. “His left eye was all red and swollen. They had beaten him up. He still can’t hear out of his left ear. I started screaming and crying because I couldn’t deal with it. He was like a robot, he was so traumatised.”
His mother said he asked for her forgiveness and said he knew that what he had done was wrong.
“I’m sorry I put you through this,” he told her. “I want to study. Please bring me my math books.”
She said Ayman told her that in Libya he met Islamist extremists who refused to help him go to Syria. They said they were going to try to establish an Islamic caliphate in Tunisia. So they sent him back to commit his attack there.
Now 18, Ayman is still in a Tunisian jail, awaiting the resolution of his case. His mother said she hopes that the judge will be lenient because he was a minor and because he is remorseful.
“What happened to him is what happens to many other young Tunisian men,” his mother said, showing a visitor around Ayman’s room, where a worn Quran sat on a desk next to an economics textbook.
“When the government represses religion, these kids want to take revenge,” she said. “We should respect religion. If we are a democratic country, we should be inclusive and respect all movements. There must be a way to control the violent elements without repression. These days they are arresting people just because they have a beard and wear a long robe. It’s harassment.”
She walked a visitor out through her garden, filled with orange and olive trees. She had been speaking mostly in Arabic, but suddenly she switched to halting English.
“My final word is: My son is not a terrorist,” she said, breaking down into heavy sobs.
