Terrorists Attack Tunisian Museum; Effects of Terrorist Attacks on Tourism in Tunisia Assessed
PAUL: It's 27 minutes past the hour. The breaking news right now on the terror attack in Tunisia is that Reuters reporting Tunisian authorities have arrested more than 20 suspected militants now. Gunmen opened fire at the Bardo Museum killing numerous tourists, 23 people in total, and that led to a nationwide security crackdown there. Earlier, though, officials had said two of the suspects did receive weapons training at camps in Libya. And in a new audio message ISIS is claiming responsibility for the attack. And we need to point out CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the message, but certainly most people say yes, it is troubling. CNN's Phil Black is in Tunisia. And Phil, just wondering what you've learned this morning about the new arrests?</s>PHIL BLACK, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christi, as you say, this is coming from Reuters, but citing the Tunisian interior ministry, 20 arrests in total, 10 of which are said to be directly linked to the attack which took place here on Wednesday, presumably the other 10 more of an association with individuals or that particular group. According to the interior ministry it is part of a wider campaign against extremism in this country. Now the government here has said that the two gunmen who took part in the attack received training across the border in Libya, that fracturing country where ISIS affiliated groups are really gaining a foothold. They haven't said what sort of training they believe these men received, but we spoke to a witness to the attacks, a man who watched one of these gunmen up close as he carried out this horrendous terror attack. His assessment is interesting. His view is that this is someone who has not received much training, someone who has little experience in handling a weapon. Take a look.</s>BLACK: These are the panicked scenes as security forces arrived at the Bardo Museum. By that time the gunman had already killed many people and moved deeper inside the complex.</s>WASSEL BOUZID, WITNESS: I was terrified.</s>BLACK: Wassel Bouzid witnessed the start of the massacre.</s>BOUZID: The moment when they started to shoot everybody, with no mercy, the blood and innocent people laying down.</s>BLACK: Bouzid, a tourist guide had been waiting by a bus for his tour group to return to the museum when he saw a man that didn't look like a terrorist.</s>BOUZID: Men.</s>BLACK: In civilian clothes?</s>BOUZID: In civilian clothes.</s>BLACK: Not military uniform?</s>BOUZID: Not military at all. Civilian -- blue jeans, Nike shoes, blue jacket, and shaved. And he did not pronounce any words.</s>BLACK: Bouzid says the man then pulled what looked like a gun, a Kalashnikov, from his bag, but didn't know how to use it.</s>BOUZID: At that moment I thought he was one of the guests, one of the clients, one of the tourists playing with a plastic gun.</s>BLACK: He got it working just as crowds were leaving the museum.</s>BOUZID: Around 60 or 70 guests, and he start to shoot everybody in front of him.</s>BLACK: Bouzid fled as security forces quickly arrived in bigger numbers. After killing the gunmen they were cheered as heroes.</s>BLACK: One of the attackers lived here. His family is confused, grieving, and angry. His uncle Abdel Malik says "It's true, he carried out this terrorist attack. He was killed. We don't have his body back. He is also the victim of terrorism." The family says the morning of the attack he drank coffee with them like any other day. Families in Tunisia and across the globe are now struggling to understand why that normal ritual was followed hours later by horrific violence.</s>BLACK: That witness we spoke to almost lost his life, but he is now most concerned about losing his livelihood, because he is a tour guide. He relies upon tourism. He and pretty much everyone else here believes that this brutal, simple attack was designed to damage the Tunisian economy, its political stability, but destroying its tourism industry. And the fear is that in the short term this attack at least will prove to be successful in that regard, Christi.</s>PAUL: All right, Phil Black, thank you so much.</s>BLACKWELL: Let's bring in Philip Mudd, CNN counterterrorism analyst and former CIA counterterrorism official. Phil, let's first get your reaction to the breaking news this morning from Reuters, 20 arrests. Thursday we were reporting nine and now 20. What's your take?</s>PHILIP MUDD, CNN COUNTERTERRORISM ANALYST: When you look at a counterterrorism investigation you want to think of a few stages. Let me give you three in particular. For the first few hours after the event there's almost an information vacuum. People like me in my old life at the FBI and the CIA are waiting for the initial information. Then you go into stage two, which is I think where we are now. The aperture opens tons of information coming in, people involved in the plot were arrested, people at the periphery of the plot, you're getting cell phones, hard drives from computers when you're raiding houses. So what we're seeing now at the initial stage of the investigation is the aperture of information and suspects is coming in. It's going to be a few days or maybe weeks before that aperture starts to close. You interrogate these suspects and start to get a clear picture of what actually happened here and what the extent of the conspiracy is.</s>BLACKWELL: So you'd expect that number to grow still?</s>MUDD: It might grow. I would expect some of these people probably are at the far periphery, maybe even uninvolved. Security services in these situations view this as an opportunity to pick up anybody and everybody, sort of the rules about who you pick up are out the window. So they may be picking up people. It might get smaller is what I'm saying because they may be picking up people because they have vague suspicions and they'll realize very quickly some of these folks probably weren't closely involved.</s>BLACKWELL: Then they'll narrow that down.</s>MUDD: That's right.</s>BLACKWELL: Guys in the control room, grab the foreign fighter map so we can put the numbers up while we talk about Tunisia. Tunisia was seen as one of the successes of the Arab Spring. But if you look at the numbers, and I think we have them here, the greatest number of foreign fighters traveling to Iraq and Syria come from this tiny country, 3,000, from Tunisia. How do you explain that, Phil?</s>MUDD: I wish -- as an analyst I'm supposed to have an answer to everything. I don't. This is a schizophrenic society. That is you have a country that is one -- about the only one that's transitioned well in the so called Arab Spring since 2011. Everybody else, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, has undergone great problems. I think their transformation will continue pretty steadily. Why they're 3,000 people going, and this probably goes back at least 10 years, this is not a new phenomenon, I can't explain. There is one recent phenomenon I think will worry that Tunisians that will help explain this, and that is after the revolution the information explosion, open society, people allowed to preach whatever they want in mosques, I think there will be questions about whether open society means there's more information, more ability for extremists to radicalize. And I think that will be a question you'll see come up in Tunisia in the coming weeks and months.</s>BLACKWELL: The other breaking news at the top of the hour was the report, sources telling CNN the U.S. military pulling out 100 Special Forces out of Yemen. We reported not too long ago we saw the same thing out of Libya and the closing of the embassy there. What's the significance of what we're seeing in Yemen now?</s>MUDD: This is hugely significant. When you are running counterterrorism operations you need an idea of what's going on the ground in very difficult societies for a westerner to understand. You want to have a pulse of the tribes. You want to have a pulse of the countryside where people like me can't reach. That pulse is provided by the local security service, and the liaison with that security service gets a lot tougher when you're not on the ground talking to them. You can continue counterterrorism operations. The U.S. government operates all the time in areas that are inaccessible, places like Somalia. But the ability to build a partnership with a sister security service who has access in the remote areas where Al Qaeda and ISIS can operate is really critical. And obviously when you lose that human interaction it makes life a lot tougher.</s>BLACKWELL: One more quickly before we go.</s>MUDD: Yes.</s>BLACKWELL: What we've heard this week was that two of the attackers in Tunis actually got training in Libya and we're hearing from the Libyan army chief there, that if ISIS is not stopped in Libya, they're going to move on to Europe. Is that just rhetoric from this army chief or do you believe if they could now move into creating some strongholds in Europe?</s>MUDD: The way you understand terror groups is pretty basic. Let me look at two characteristics in particular that we're seeing in Libya. In short, I agree with what she's saying. The two characteristics you need to focus on is what is the leadership of the organization and what do they want to do? In this case the leadership of ISIS and Al Qaeda has said we want to go to the west, we want to make them hurt for intervening in the Islamic world, for intervene in Afghanistan, for intervening in Iraq. So we know what intent is for people in the extremist circles in Libya. We also know what capability is. They've shown in Paris, they've shown in New York what they want to do. So if you give that leadership with the stated intent of going and attacking the west enough safe haven, time to organize, they will come after us. They've told us they'll do it and they'll -- I think if we give them time and space to do it they'll be here.</s>BLACKWELL: All right, counterterrorism analyst Philip Mudd, some sobering analysis for us this morning. Thank you so much.</s>MUDD: Thank you. Take care.</s>PAUL: So with this week's deadly terror attacks there are strong concerns about ISIS in the Caribbean. You haven't heard that before, have you? We're talking about tourist destinations like Jamaica, Venezuela, Trinidad, and Tobago. We're taking a closer with look with you at the dangers of traveling to those areas next.