Local people saved many foreigners from Seifeddine Rezgui’s bullets but if his attack destroys Tunisian tourism, the jihadis will have hit this Arab democracy hard

There will be no medals for the Tunisian beach crews who threw themselves in the way of bullets in the bloody Sousse tourist massacre. In fact, by next week many of them will have no jobs.

In this forest Tunisia is the only flower of democracy. And the terrorists want to cut this flower. Habib Daguib

In the aftermath of the slaughter of 38 tourists at the Imperial Marhaba hotel have come tales of valour by waiters, lifeguards and men whose normal job is renting out water skis and plastic bananas. These men braved bullets and terror to confront gunman Seifeddine Rezgui.

Their reward, with hotels in the area emptying fast, is likely to be unemployment in a country already struggling with a depressed economy.

When Rezgui struck, just before midday on 26 June, tourists fled in terror, while Tunisian staffers ran the other way to confront him. Lifeguards dashed to help the wounded, motorboat operators made daring beach rescues, and hotel staff braved bullets to shepherd wounded tourists to safety. The slaughter was terrible, but would have been many times worse without such bravery.

“Our guests work hard all year, they choose to come here for their holiday, in this way they help my country,” said lifeguard Eitham Ben Aisha. “So when my guest is in trouble, of course I help.”

Amid the carnage, the image seared into many minds is of beach workers forming an impromptu human chain stretching down the beach to block the gunman from hundreds of families huddled further down the shore. The men who formed the chain had no weapons and no training. “We just did it. I bared my breast, I said: ‘OK, shoot me, but you cannot go past’,” said Ibrahim Elghoul, just 18.

For years, the staffers here have formed a tight little community, proud to work the same stretch of beach, and being rewarded by a high number of Britons who come back year after year.

On Friday, visiting British ambassador Hamish Cowell laid a wreath at a freshly installed memorial at the site of the killing, then stopped to speak to tourists Paul and Barbara Young from Ipswich. The couple took their chance, urging Britain to recognise the bravery of the beach workers.

“We told him he’s got to recognise the hotel staff, through them being there they saved people’s lives,” said Paul Young. “We’re staying on, it’s a mini Dunkirk spirit, I suppose.” Cowell said that he, too, admired their bravery, having spoken with hotel staff who rushed out of the Marhaba, with the bullets flying, to protect their guests.

Tour companies are declining to comment on the numbers leaving, amid reports that 9,000 of the 20,000 British tourists have flown home, but almost empty hotels along this coastal strip tell their own story.

We just did it. I bared my breast, I said: ‘OK, shoot me, but you cannot go past’ Ibrahim Elghoul

Also staying on are the Lewis family, Paul, Caroline and teenage daughter Annie, from Leeds, who turned up at the beachfront ceremony. “We’re not leaving, no way,” said Annie. “A lot of tourists were told by their tour companies to go home, but with all the police around this is the safest place to be.”

But customer loyalty is one thing, the threat of terrorism another. Tunisia, four years after its Arab spring, is still a democracy in a region engulfed in chaos. Neighbouring Algeria and Libya are battling Islamic State insurgencies, and Tunisians say that jihadis fear nothing more than a thriving democracy.

“This attack was not to do with Tunisia, it was to do with wars far away, but we suffer for it,” said Habib Daguib, who operates quad bikes for tourists along the beach. “The Arab world is like a big forest, and in this forest Tunisia is the only flower of democracy. And the terrorists want to cut this flower.”

IN DEFENCE OF THEIR GUESTS



Mohammed Dabbou, 37, beach craft manager

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Mohammed Dabbou joined the human shield that faced the gunman, saying he acted out of pure instinct. He and his comrades were all that stood between the gunman and hundreds of tourists scattered farther down the beach.

“I said to him [the gunman] ‘if you want to kill somebody, here we are’. There were several of us, we made that human chain. We said ‘to hell with you, you cannot pass, if you want to kill the tourists. I threw my phone at him, it was all I had.”

Minutes earlier he had been caring for the wounded after the gunman’s initial onslaught. Worried that the killer would return from his murderous spree to continue in the hotel, Dabbou placed a sun lounger over one wounded woman, hoping it would conceal her from the gunman.

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For a few frozen seconds, the gunman waved his gun at the men of the human chain. Then he turned and sprinted back down the beach, turning into a narrow street where he ran into armed police who cut him down.

One week on, the tourists are leaving. There are still some customers for the water skiing and paragliding, but the word is that planes are arriving at nearby Monastir airport empty. Some tourists leaving come to embrace him, and an Italian couple take it in turns to hug him, promising they will be back, but many will not: “Sousse is a tourist town, we depend on the tourists for our living,” he says.

Looking back on the day of the attack, he says he felt not fear but anger as he witnessed the slaughter. “I wanted to kill him. My Qur’an, my prophet Muhammad, they say that I must protect these people who are my guests. This is the real Islam, not this terrorism. That’s why I said ‘kill me if you want’.”

Issam Ben-Mohan, 28, cigarette seller

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Issam Ben-Mohan, a beach cigarette seller, was asleep under a straw umbrella near Titanic, a ramshackle cafe on the beach about 200 yards north of the Marhaba, when he heard the shooting. He opened his eyes and saw a black-clad gunman sprinting towards him. “I look up, the gunman is right there, right in front of me.”

He lay back down, closing his eyes. “I just played dead, it was all I could think to do.” When the gunman ran past, he opened his eyes again, to see tourists being scythed down. “I watched people fall, they never had a chance. Eighty per cent of the people at that hotel are old.”

Ben-Mohan ran to the scene, arriving to find the dead, wounded and terrified huddled amid upturned sun loungers. He found an elderly woman lying wounded, her swimming costume drenched in blood. “She looked like she had been shot five times, the man lying beside her was dead.”



The gunman darted off the beach through iron gates into the hotel and Ben-Mohan made a snap decision. The gunman might be back, so he and another Tunisian used a blood-spattered sunlounger as an improvised stretcher.

“There was no other way of moving the wounded, I knew even the ambulance would get stuck in the sand.” A week later he is back at the Titanic, but the cafe is empty. “We feel like Tunisia died.”

Ibrahim Elghoul, 18, beach craft operator

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Ibrahim Elghoul is just 18, but this is his fourth summer on the Sousse beach, supervising paragliders towed along the shore. He was winding up the tow line when he saw the gunman attacking 300 yards down the beach. He joined other staff running towards the shooting, watching tourists stagger into the sea. He saw a woman who looked to be in trouble and splashed into the surf.

“They were so afraid, the people in the water. A guy brought up the red boat, so I and three others grabbed her and pushed her into it. With the water she was so heavy, but we got her in.”

The woman was 59-year-old Cheryl Ireland from Berkshire, who walks with two sticks after a knee operation. She had staggered down to the sea with her 80-year-old mother, Margaret Wolf, but both feared they would be shot or drown. Then came the motorboats, and willing hands to pull them aboard. “I am so grateful. That is the spirit of Tunisia.”

Elghoul waded out of the surf as the gunman raced back from the hotel on to the beach. “He was going towards Palm Marina to kill more people, but we couldn’t let him,” said Elghoul. His colleagues fanned out into a line, blocking the gunman’s path.



“We started shouting bad words at him, throwing rocks, I heard him saying, ‘I’m not here to kill you, go home.’ I showed him my chest, I said, ‘OK kill me’. I thought maybe he will kill me, but I thought anyway one day I will be dead.”

The human chain worked, the gunman fleeing back down the beach, to be shot minutes later in a side street.

Faysal Mihoub, 35, lifeguard

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Lifeguard Faysal Mihoub is known as the joker of the little community of guards and boatmen who work the beach around the Marhaba. The day of the attack, he was sitting under a sun umbrella 200 yards south of the hotel in his trademark hat with four feathers. He saw a black-clad figure walking down the shore with a bright parasol, and as he watched the parasol fell away, revealing a machine gun.

“He fired dub-dub-dub, on full automatic, he was just spraying bullets,” said Mihoub. With the other lifeguards, he sprang from his chair to help. “Guarding lives is our job,” he says. “You do not think of yourself at this time, you just think to help.”

He watched the gunman run down the shore, spraying bullets at the terrified guests, then run up the beach to a white house on the Marhaba perimeter. He knelt, changed magazines and started firing again, this time single shots.

Mihoub was still pounding through the sand when the gunman ran inside the hotel complex ahead of him.

Survivors emerged from the mass of bodies and overturned blood-soaked sun loungers. “First there were maybe three, then in the end there were about twelve. I told them to follow me.”

He led the survivors along the perimeter fence between the Marhaba to the next hotel, the Palm Marina, hustling them inside the gate to the relative safety of its compound.

Hours later, he found his phone jammed with text messages from former guests, desperate to know if he was all right. Sousse has many repeat customers, beach workers boasting of the “family” bond between them and the tourists. One set of texts from an Englishwoman named Natasha shows increasing anxiety as the hours pass, finally ending in relief when he texts he is OK. Her final text reads: “So glad you are safe, please stay safe, we will return.”

Daniel Ben Saad, 40, boat driver

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Daniel Ben Saad was driving a motorboat supervising two tourists on rented jetskis on the shore north of the hotel when he saw the gunman shooting across the beach.



He called for the jetskiers to come in, then revved up the engine and headed in a wide loop to come in directly on the Marhaba. In front of him, the beach was in upheaval, the gunman firing, people dying, tourists rushing in panic for the water and speedboats racing in to pick them up.



“I saw this English guy in the water, he was wounded in the shoulder,” said Ben Saad. He drove his boat into the shallows, bringing it around to keep the wounded man clear of the propeller. He managed to haul the man aboard.



Along the beach boats were doing the same. He was not scared, or surprised that his fellow beach workers rushed to help. “They were fighting for themselves, for their guests. Now they are fighting for their jobs.”

Moez Arfa, 35, boat driver

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Moez Arfa was working at the beach boat station across from the Bellevue Park, 100 yards south of the Marhaba, when he saw the gunman opening fire. With other beach workers, he rushed along the sand, wondering as he did so how he would tackle the gunman. “We had nothing in our hands, and he has a Kalashnikov, it was very dangerous, but we had to help the people,” he said.

He spotted a British man crawling on all fours, fists digging into the sand. Arfa approached and put his arms around the man’s torso but the man screamed.

“I thought he had been hit only in the arm, but also he was shot in the stomach,” said Arfa. Then the gunman darted into the hotel complex. “I told him, we have to go quickly.”

He pulled the man upright, put an arm around his shoulder and led him down the beach. Progress in the thick sand was slow, Arfa fearing they would get shot in the back by the gunman, who was still in the area. He said that he felt no fear. That came later. “For three days afterwards I don’t eat, I don’t sleep.”