Assailants have killed 14 Tunisian soldiers near the Algerian border, the government said Thursday, in the worst such attack in the army's history as it presses a crackdown on jihadists. The attack took place in the Mount Chaambi region on Wednesday evening as the soldiers were breaking their day-long Ramadan fast. The defence ministry said two "terrorist groups", a term used to refer to al Qaeda-linked jihadists, opened fire on twin army posts with machine-guns and grenade launchers.
Fourteen soldiers died, 18 were wounded and another went missing, making it the heaviest toll inflicted on the army since Tunisia's independence in 1956, the ministry's press office told AFP. One of the assailants, a Tunisian, was killed in the fighting, and there were also Algerians among them, the army said. But few other details have yet emerged about the armed group. The ministry has previously insisted that militants the army has been hunting since late 2012 in the remote western border region are linked to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
The army said nine of the soldiers had burned to death and vowed to wage "open war" on terrorism. "These attacks cost us 14 martyrs. Five were hit by bullets and nine were burned ... when the tent they were in caught fire," after it was hit by grenades, the army's head of ground operations, Souheil Chmengui, told a press conference. "This is open war. The war of a country and a people against an evil," he said, pledging to combat terrorism "day and night".
The army's chief of staff, Mohamed Salah Hamdi, said it was unclear if the missing soldier had been killed, wounded or taken hostage. President Moncef Marzouki declared three days of national mourning, while government spokesman Nidhal Ouerfelli condemned what he called a "heinous act".