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The article reports on the claimed responsibility of terrorist group Islamic State and other extremists over the attack at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia on March 18, 2015 that killed at least 21 people. It notes the arrest of suspected nine people following the indefinite suspension of cruise lines. The attack also drawn demonstrations in the city on the following day. Experts viewed the massacre as a throwback to the tactics relied in the 1980s.

The article discusses a terrorist attack in which gunmen killed 19 people at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia, highlighting the potential impact on Tunisia's transition to democracy following the Arab Spring revolution. Topics addressed include recruitment efforts by the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) terrorist organization in Tunisia, as well as potential damage to the tourism economy in Tunisia.

The article reports that Tunisia's Islamist-led party Ennahda has refused a proposal by prime minster Hamadi Jebali to form a government of national unity.

CAIRO -- The six-month-old government of Tunisia cracked down with tear gas and batons Monday on thousands of protesters who filled a central artery of the capital in defiance of a new ban on demonstrations there. The confrontation, at the site of the protests that ousted former President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and kicked off the Arab Spring last year, was another manifestation of a role reversal now playing out across North Africa in the aftermath of the revolts in neighboring Egypt and Libya as well. In each, former exiles and political prisoners who spent careers under police state rule find themselves struggling to impose a new order on the bedlam left after the old regime's collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article was reported and written before Mr. Shadid's death in Syria. TUNIS -- The epiphany of Said Ferjani came after his poor childhood in a pious town in Tunisia, after a religious renaissance a generation ago awakened his intellect, after he plotted a coup and a torturer broke his back, and after he fled to Britain to join other Islamists seeking asylum on a passport he had borrowed from a friend. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TUNIS -- The liberal political parties emerging as surprise runners-up in elections here argued Tuesday that their success had tempered the commanding victory of the Islamists while offering lessons for their secular allies around the region. The liberals interpreted the results of the vote in Tunisia, the first of the Arab Spring, as a call for change, not necessarily an embrace of religious rule. But they also cautioned that voters had been looking to punish those secular parties that appeared to pick a fight with religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Tunisia's moderate Islamist political party emerged Monday as the acknowledged leader in elections for a constitutional assembly and began talks to form a unity government with a coalition of liberals in a rare alliance that party leaders hailed as an inclusive model for countries emerging from the tumult of the Arab Spring. By Monday afternoon, Tunisian liberal parties said they were entering discussions to form a government led by their Islamist rival, Ennahda, after it swept to a plurality of about 40 percent in preliminary vote tallies. The acceptance of the results by rivals signaled the beginning of a partnership seldom seen in the Arab world, where Islamists' few opportunities for victories at the voting booth have sometimes led to harsh crackdown or civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TUNIS -- As Tunisians prepare to vote on Sunday in the first election of the Arab Spring, the parties and their supporters have ramped up a bitter debate over allegations about the influence of ''dirty money'' behind the scenes of the race. Liberals, facing an expected defeat by the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, charge that it has leapt ahead with financial support from Persian Gulf allies. Some Islamists and residents of the impoverished interior, meanwhile, fault the liberals, saying they relied on money from the former dictator's business elite. And all sides gawk at the singular spectacle of an expatriate businessman who made a fortune in Libyan oil and returned home after the revolution to spend much of it building a major political party. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TUNIS -- In the final week of the first election campaign of the Arab Spring, political discourse here in Tunisia has been all but consumed by contention over the television broadcast of an animated film, ''Persepolis,'' which touched off accusations of heresy and censorship. In a campaign that people here often describe in terms of a choice between East and West, the debate has come closer than any poll to identifying the political center, underscoring why so many expect a victory for Tunisia's mainstream Islamist party, Ennahda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TUNIS -- As the country that kicked off the Arab Spring prepares for its first free election this month, Tunisia's transitional prime minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, has some advice for his counterparts in Egypt, Libya or other former Arab autocracies dealing with impatient public demands unleashed by the revolutions. ''When someone is hungry asking for food, you only give him what he needs,'' Mr. Essebsi said, describing his go-slow approach to meeting protesters' demands for jobs and freedoms. ''You don't give him more, or else he might die, so we offer a step-by-step approach.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CAIRO -- The interim Tunisian government on Wednesday postponed the first election since the ouster in January of the former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, citing technical problems for the delay but also inevitably reshuffling Tunisian political dynamics. The decision, in the nation whose unexpected uprising ignited the revolts sweeping the Arab world, pushes the scheduled vote for a constituent assembly to Oct. 23 from July 24. The deferral is likely to bolster the fortunes of the dozens of new political parties still scrambling to organize, perhaps at the expense of their better established rivals, both liberal and Islamist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Accused as subversives or terrorists, they bore the repressive brunt of the Tunisian dictator's reign -- two decades of torture, prison or exile. But since the dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled in January, the Islamists of the once-banned Ennahda Party have emerged from obscurity, returned from abroad and established themselves as perhaps the most powerful political force in post-revolution Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CAIRO -- A Libyan woman who became a symbol of her country's repression after security forces tried to silence her accusations that Qaddafi militiamen had raped her said on Monday that she had escaped to neighboring Tunisia. The woman, Eman al-Obeidy, told CNN on Monday that a defecting soldier and his family had driven her in a military car to a rebel-held border crossing last Thursday; she hid her face behind a traditional head covering, she said, and crossed the border as a refugee. She said she continued to fear pursuit by agents working for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and hoped to find protection from a Western government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

DHIBA BORDER CROSSING, Tunisia -- For decades, the remote mountains of western Libya have simmered with resentment. An enclave of the Berber minority, mistrusted and neglected by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's Arab nationalist government, the region's isolated hamlets were among the first to join the uprising, raising the rebel flag on the first day of the revolt. But the Nafusah Mountain range, which rises out of the desert at the Tunisian border as a sudden, hazy shadow and runs several hundred miles east in a narrow chain, is hardly a rebel stronghold. Rebel fighters in the region estimate their ranks at just a few hundred ill-equipped and untrained young men. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Libyan government freed four New York Times journalists on Monday, six days after they were captured while covering the conflict between government and rebel forces in the eastern city of Ajdabiya. They were released into the custody of Turkish diplomats and crossed safely into Tunisia in the late afternoon, from where they provided a harrowing account of their captivity. Like many other Western journalists, the four had entered the rebel-controlled eastern region of Libya over the Egyptian border without visas to cover the insurrection against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. They were detained in Ajdabiya by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TRIPOLI, Libya -- A state of terror has seized two working-class neighborhoods here that just a week ago exploded in revolt, with residents reporting constant surveillance, searches of cars and even cellphones by militiamen with Kalashnikovs at block-by-block checkpoints and a rash of disappearances of those involved in last week's protest. As rebel fighters in the country's east celebrated their defeat of a raid on Wednesday by hundreds of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's loyalists in the strategic oil town of Brega, many people in Tripoli said they had lost hope that peaceful protests might push the Libyan leader from power the way street demonstrations had toppled the strongmen in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Tunisia's interim government on Thursday purged almost all the cabinet ministers left over from the government of the ousted dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, bowing to two weeks of mounting street protests against the cabinet's continued dominance by the old governing party and resolving an impasse that had threatened to bog down the new government. Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, Mr. Ben Ali's former right-hand man, announced the changes in a televised address, but he himself did not resign. He reiterated a pledge to guide the country to free and fair elections within six months and then retire from government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- A standoff between street protesters and the Tunisian authorities deepened on Wednesday as officials first promised and then postponed a reshuffling of the interim government that has been clinging to power since the ouster of the former dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The interim government, condemned by protesters because of its domination by former officials of Mr. Ben Ali's administration, continued to move against the former president. The justice minister, one of Mr. Ben Ali's former lieutenants, said the government had issued an international arrest warrant for the former president and his family on charges of corruption and enriching themselves at public expense. The interim authorities are also bringing to trial six former members of Mr. Ben Ali's personal security force for inciting violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- The general who may be both the most powerful and the most popular figure in Tunisia spoke publicly Monday for the first time since the ouster of the former dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, pledging to uphold ''the revolution'' and urging patience until the interim government can hold new elections. ''Our revolution is your revolution,'' the military leader, Gen. Rachid Ammar, yelled through a megaphone to more than 1,000 demonstrators in a square near his office, according to several witnesses. ''The army will protect the revolution.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TUNIS -- Tunisia's interim government abruptly shut down the country's oldest and most popular private television network on Sunday evening, in an apparent violation of its pledges to respect freedom of expression after the ouster of the authoritarian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The state news agency said the government had arrested the network's owner and stopped its broadcast for ''grand treason,'' charging that the network was trying ''to abort the youth's revolution, spread confusion, incite strife and broadcast false information likely to create a constitutional vacuum and destabilize the country in order to take it into a spiral of violence that aims to restore the dictatorship of the former president,'' according to a government statement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Tunisia's interim government was holding its first meeting since the ouster of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Moufida Tlatli, an internationally known Tunisian filmmaker, took her seat as culture minister. Two opposition leaders stepped aside to confer privately. The prime minister confided that he was still in touch with his old boss, Mr. Ben Ali, who had in fact left hoping to return again after a brief hiatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- The powerful Tunisian trade union squared off against the interim government on Friday as thousands of protesters demanding the complete eradication of the old ruling party stormed into the streets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TUNIS -- Ali Larayedh was imprisoned and tortured for 14 years for his role as a leader of the outlawed Islamist movement here, then hounded for the past six years by the omnipresent Tunisian secret police. But six days after the ouster of this country's dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Mr. Larayedh now basks in a singular celebrity. He is one of the few remaining leaders of the only credible opposition movement in Tunisia's history. And in the aftermath of Mr. Ben Ali's flight, that movement's potential reincarnation is perhaps the most significant variable in Tunisia's post-revolutionary future -- yearned for by legions of working-class and rural Tunisians, viewed with just as much apprehension by the cosmopolitan coastal elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Tunisia's interim government struggled Thursday to placate protesters demanding the eradication of the country's former ruling party. The government announced steps toward an amnesty for political exiles, including Islamists. Several cabinet ministers said they were resigning from the old ruling party. And demonstrators outside the party headquarters were met by soldiers who said the building now belonged to the people and who eventually helped pull down the party's name from the facade. The soldiers smiled as protesters put flowers in their gun barrels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Tunisia's interim leaders scrambled Wednesday to distance themselves further from the government of the ousted leader as opposition officials weighed whether to mount an effort to push out most of the cabinet members from the old ruling party. Both sides of the unity government -- the new minority from the ranks of Tunisia's tiny legal opposition parties and the leaders from the old ruling party -- appeared to be responding to popular anger that so many of the same faces remained in influential posts in the government even after President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had fled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- The new unity government of Tunisia tottered Tuesday as at least four cabinet members resigned after street protests erupted over its continued domination by members of the ruling party of the ousted dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The resignations compounded the pressure on Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, previously the right-hand man to Mr. Ben Ali, to resign as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Passions unleashed by the revolution in Tunisia resonated throughout the region on Monday as an Egyptian and a Mauritanian became the latest of six North Africans to set themselves on fire in an imitation of the self-immolation that set off the uprising here a month ago. In Egypt, Abdo Abdel Moneim, a 50-year-old restaurant owner, poured a gallon of gasoline over his head and set himself ablaze outside the Parliament building on Monday morning in downtown Cairo. Around the same time in Mauritania, Yacoub Ould Dahoud was setting fire to himself in his parked car near Parliament in Nouakchott. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- New battle lines appeared to take shape in traumatized Tunisia on Sunday as the military backed the nascent interim government in what state media portrayed as a fight against security forces loyal to ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, blaming them for the violence and rioting that has engulfed the country since protests forced him from power 48 hours earlier. State television reported that the military had arrested Mr. Ben Ali's former security chief, Ali Seriati, charging him with plotting against the government and inciting acts of violence. State television also said that a gunfight with Mr. Ben Ali's security forces broke out near a former presidential palace here in the capital, and that the military had called in reinforcements as it battled other security forces in the southern part of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CORRECTION APPENDED TUNIS -- Tanks, police officers and gangs of newly deputized young men wielding guns held the deserted streets of Tunis Saturday night after a day of sporadic rioting and gunfire. Power changed hands for the second time in 24 hours, and the swift turnabout raised new questions about what kind of government might emerge from the chaos engulfing Tunisia. The interim government named Friday had hoped that the toppling of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country, would satisfy protesters, but continued unrest Saturday made clear that they were determined to chase his allies from power as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- Tunisia's president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled his country on Friday night, capitulating after a month of mounting protests calling for an end to his 23 years of authoritarian rule. The official Saudi Arabian news agency said he arrived in the country early Saturday. The fall of Mr. Ben Ali marked the first time that widespread street demonstrations had overthrown an Arab leader. And even before the last clouds of tear gas had drifted away from the capital's cafe-lined Bourguiba Boulevard, people throughout the Arab world had begun debating whether Tunisia's uprising could prove to be a model, threatening other autocratic rulers in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HAMMAMET, Tunisia -- This ancient Mediterranean hamlet, advertised as the Tunisian St.-Tropez, has long been the favorite summer getaway of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his large extended family, many of whom have built vast beachfront mansions here with the wealth they have amassed during his years in power. But their new and conspicuous riches, partly exposed in a detailed cable by the American ambassador and made public by WikiLeaks, have fueled an extraordinary extended uprising by Tunisians who blame corruption among the elite for the joblessness afflicting their country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TUNIS -- The government of Tunisia scrambled alternately to appease critics and to crush growing unrest on Wednesday as a three-week-old wave of violent demonstrations spread for the first time to the capital, where swarms of protesters called for the ouster of the authoritarian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The protesters came together after circulating calls to rally over social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Many were unemployed college graduates, and they angrily demanded more jobs and denounced what they called the self-enrichment of Tunisia's ruling family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the speculations, including the involvement of the Islamic State, on the attack at the Imperial Marhaba Hotel in northeast coast of Tunisia on June 26, 2015 that killed several vacationers, mostly British tourists.

The article reports that the Tunisian officials promptly made an effort to contain the explosion of popular anger following the assassination of Chokri Belaid, one of the country's human rights defender and critic of the ruling Islamist party.