Before Ennahda movement came to power, the Tunisian army had never paid such a hefty price or witnessed the killing of its soldiers with such brutality at the hands of terrorists. Also, before the Muslim Brotherhood group came to power, the Egyptian army had never offered so many victims to terrorist attacks. In the first case, the terrorists barricaded themselves in the rocky Mount Chaambi on the border with Algeria, using it as a safe haven while maintaining contact with the other extremist Islamic groups in the Maghreb states and their African surrounding. In the second case, the terrorists gathered in the Sinai desert on the border with Israel and the Gaza Strip, thus rendering the Egyptian army – due to the Camp David Accords – unable to deploy the required troops to pursue these terrorists in the terrains, mountains and caves of the wide Egyptian desert, while transforming the tunnels with the Strip into passageways for the transfer of people and equipment, but also into evacuation routes. In that sense, Sinai and Chaambi are playing the same role for the terrorists who are trying to benefit from these areas' geographic location and the limited ability of the governmental troops to enter them to carry out their pursuit. This strategy was adopted by the terrorists in all the places in which they were active, thus managing to establish and fully control their hideouts. And this control extended with the collaboration of central apparatuses or political sides which deemed it to be in their interest to see the sustainment of these pits. The Algerian army was able to put an end to the wide-scale war in the country and annihilate the armed groups' hideouts following the bleak ten-year war in the 1990s, in order to instate a minimum level of political stability. However, the Pakistani army is still engaged in a quasi-civil war with the extremists that have barricaded themselves in their areas of influence on the border, amid ongoing political turmoil and accusations case against the Pakistani apparatuses. With the arrival of the Islamists to power in both Tunisia and Egypt, the aspects of a similar situation started to emerge – despite the numerous discrepancies – in the context of a strategy to establish the authority of political Islam. Hence, these countries' constitutional structures had to be reconsidered, in order to allow political Islam to seize the reins of power and limit any transition in the authority to its bare minimum. It is in this context that we saw the targeting of civil society organizations – as the protectors of plurality and social diversity and the guarantors of power transition – but also the indirect targeting of the main forces which constitute the nerve of a country's social fabric, i.e. the military and security institutions that would no longer be the object of trust after their role ended to the Islamists upon their victory in the elections. This is why the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia formed their own militias under the pretext of defending the revolution, at a time when this step aimed to deter the Islamists' detractors. Consequently, assassinations were perpetrated by extremists, while confrontations are still taking place in Mount Chaambi in Tunisia, clashes are erupting on the streets of the Egyptian cities, and armed clashes are ongoing with the regular troops in Sinai. We have repeatedly heard the denial of any relationship between political Islam and the terrorists and extremists. But if we look beyond the common ideological roots that were launched by the first and interpreted by the rest, the two sides converge at some point at the level of their political interests, at the expense of the social and civil forces, the state of the law, and plurality.
