The two Tunisians
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The two Tunisians is John Kiriakou's account of the first counterterrorist raid he led after arriving in Pakistan as the CIA's chief of counterterrorism operations in January 2002.

The raid

Kiriakou has said the raid was on what the team believed to be an al-Qaeda safe house. As soon as they broke down the door they found two eighteen-year-olds from Tunisia, both of whom burst into tears. One asked whether he could telephone his mother. 

The nationalities and ages are not stable across tellings. A 2026 account describes the same two prisoners as "one from Tunisia, one from I think he was from Algeria, 18 years old and 19 years old", the hedge is Kiriakou's own, and both are again "low-level young fighters" who "immediately started crying," one of them begging to call his mother. That telling carries the raid past the door: the two were handcuffed, handed to ISI and taken to a jail in Rawalpindi, and the team's reaction was not reflection but relief, "we were giving each other high fives. Hey, that worked. That was great. It was easy." The recognition of what they had actually caught came later.

Kiriakou has described turning to a colleague and saying: "This is the fearsome al-Qaeda. This is what we've been so afraid of. These are children."  He adds that he simply filed the observation at the time, and that the raids continued, sometimes producing more significant figures, with camp commanders being the first captures he regards as significant. 

What it came to mean

The episode functions in Kiriakou's account as the concrete instance behind a general claim about al-Qaeda's rank and file. He has said the men taken at that level were illiterate, had no idea what the United States was about or where it was located, and could not name the American president; that they could not find the country on a map; and that for them the fight was a way to earn money.  

He distinguishes them sharply from the leadership, whose motives he describes in political terms, the establishment of American military bases in Saudi Arabia, which he says was Osama bin Laden's personal objection, and for others a reaction to what they saw as staunch American support for Israel. 

See also

- The Martyrdom Bonus
- The al-Qaeda foot soldier
- Pakistan Station (2002)
- John Kiriakou
