Two years ago, Tunisian rap musician Don Emino liked posing in American-style street wear in front of fancy sports cars and scantily clad women.

After spending eight months in jail on drugs charges, he opted for a stricter, more pious lifestyle. Last week, his Facebook profile picture showed him in combat fatigues while in another on the website he was seen pledging allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“He was a creative and very calm artist,” Mohammed Amin Hamzaoui, also a rapper, said by phone from Tunis. “After he got out of prison, he became less productive and sold all his musical instruments. Suddenly, I heard he became religious and traveled to Syria for jihad.”

At least 3,000 Tunisians are estimated to have left their homes to become one of the largest groups of foreign fighters in territories held by Islamic State. That radicalization now poses a threat to a country that sought to be a beacon of social and economic stability in the turbulent Arab world.

Many of those, like Dom Emino, who have answered the call of jihadist groups have traveled to war zones in Libya and Syria, where fighting has led to a collapse in security and enabled militant groups such as Islamic State to carve out territory. Two gunmen who killed 21 people at the Bardo Museum in Tunis on March 18 came back from Libya.

“Young people used to try to emigrate clandestinely to Europe, risking their lives for life, work and money,” said Ridha Sfar, who was minister in charge of security at the Interior Ministry until February when a new unity government took power. “Suddenly, some of these young people with fragile minds changed and shifted toward hotbeds of tension.”

Economy Hit

Since street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in December 2010 and triggered the Arab Spring of uprisings, Tunisia appeared to turn the corner.

The country held peaceful elections for parliament and president. The International Monetary Fund forecast the Tunisian economy to grow 3.7 percent this year, the most since before the revolution. Tourism, which made up 7 percent of gross domestic product, was recovering. Prime Minister Habib Essid said the museum terrorists dealt a “knockout blow” to the economy.

“It’s a major issue in terms of security and the economy,” said Riccardo Fabiani, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group. “They’re desperately trying to revive the economy and promote Tunisia as a destination. This feeds into a perception that it’s better to invest in a more stable country.”

Getting the country’s youth to buy into the story of improving prospects is the government’s biggest challenge, according to Sfar. He refers to a “youth crisis.”

Rapper to Radical

“The first element we need to tackle is the socio-economic factors, people who can’t find jobs and can’t improve their quality of lives,” former Foreign Minister Rafik Abdelssalem said from Tunis.

Islamic State recruiters are active in Tunisian jails, where petty criminals live alongside convicted terrorists, said Alaya Allani, an analyst of Islamist movements in Tunis. The group also has a policy of targeting public figures “for strategic propaganda purposes,” he said.

Sfar confirmed 24-year-old Don Emino, whose real name is Marouan Douiri, had left the country to fight, though he’s not suspected of any involvement in the museum deaths. His mother, Said Hayet Douiri, said her son traveled to Turkey three months ago for work and was shocked to hear from neighbors that he had gone to Syria to join Islamic State.

Loved Life

“He was a young boy who loved life but after getting out from prison he started to say that his life was broken,” she said by telephone from her home.

Don Emino sang about police brutality and disillusionment with the revolution. In a video interview in 2013 posted online, he said he “could not live in Tunisia because it gives us nothing.”

Islamic State supporters hailed his conversion to their cause as a coup against the west, and the journey that led him to the group isn’t necessarily unusual, according to Charlie Winter, a researcher at the counter-radicalization group Quilliam Foundation in London.

“It’s very possible for him to have had certain grievances that were manipulated by a recruiter or his peer group,” he said. “There are many different paths and it’s not necessarily totally shocking that a rapper who was drinking Jack Daniels and rapping about western culture in 2012 became a committed member of Islamic State in 2015.”

About 570 Tunisians have already returned from Middle East warzones, according to Sfar. Some have been sent for trial, others are under surveillance, he said in an interview. As many as 600 died overseas and about 1,600 are still fighting.

Easy Targets

One example is Shafiq Ouertani, who didn’t finish school, ended up drinking and was dead late last year by the age of 22 in Syria. His brother, Chakib, is still there, their mother, Najia Uerteni, said at her home in the farming area of Jendouba province that borders Algeria.

While she doesn’t know how they were radicalized, she’s certain they made easy targets. “Every night they returned home drunk,” she said. “My kids did not have luck. Problems followed them wherever they went.”

The weakness in state institutions after 2011 contributed to the numbers, as did a failure to police borders with neighboring Algeria and Libya, and a decision to set all jailed Islamists free after the revolution, said Sfar.

“There is only so much you can do in response to this,” said Winter. “The things that are making young people find the ideology of Islamic State appealing are difficult to deal with, structural issues that can’t be swept away with new laws.”