CAIRO — People were not surprised when Sami Ben Said Kthir vanished from his hometown in Tunisia’s southern desert and slipped across the border to join Islamic State in Libya. It did come as a shock that so many others went with him.
Kthir, 27, disappeared three days ago from Remada with a group including two former soldiers and an air force pilot, according to a relative who asked to be identified only as Mbarka. The Interior Ministry said 33 people ages 16 to 35 are thought to be missing, including one woman.
‘‘Remada woke up to a mass exodus of its citizens to Daesh,’’ said Mbarka, using the Arabic acronym for the jihadist group.
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Located 250 miles south of the beach resort where dozens of European tourists were slain last month, Remada belongs to a different Tunisia. Impoverished and bristling with guns, crime, and Islamist militants, the town of 4,600 has more in common with neighboring Libya, like other parts of the south. The region’s problems threaten Tunisia with the kind of violence that, unlike most neighbors, it has largely avoided.
The Arab Spring’s ‘‘sole success story can produce such terrorism’’ because there are ‘‘two increasingly divergent Tunisias,’’ said Mokhtar Awad, at the Center for American Progress in Washington. Secular and Islamist elites hail from the coastal strip, while ‘‘the other Tunisia is the one that is neglected and undeveloped, the southern backyard of poverty, economic stagnation, and anger.’’
Maps reveal the divide. About 56 percent of Tunisia’s population and 92 percent of industrial firms are within a half-hour drive of one of the three northern cities, Tunis, Sfax, and Sousse. The area accounts for 85 percent of the country’s $47 billion economy, a 2014 World Bank report said.
When Tunisians elected a president in 2014, Beji Caid Essebsi won with support from the north while his main rival, Moncef Marzouki, swept the south.
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Locals say the neglect of the south stretches back centuries, even though its resources helped develop the country. A French geologist discovered phosphate there in the 19th century, and by the time Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was deposed in 2011, Tunisia was the world’s fourth-biggest producer of the rock. But residents felt excluded from the wealth.
‘‘Phosphate mining didn’t leave anything for future generations except environmental catastrophes, chronic diseases, and cafes filled with unemployed young people,’’ said Abderrazak Brahmi, general secretary of a local labor union.
In 2008, Remada was caught up in protests against hiring practices at the state-owned mining firm Compagnie des Phosphates de Gafsa. A police crackdown left three dead and hundreds in jail.
Feelings of marginalization ‘‘were subdued because of police repression during Ben Ali’s regime,’’ said Hasan Zargouni, president of the Tunis-based polling company Sigma Conseil. ‘‘But after the revolution they exploded to the fore,’’ leaving the entire region ‘‘in a state of rebellion and tension.’’