One could easily argue that Al Qaeda and the worldwide jihad pansurgency have their roots in the Algerian War. Alistair Hornes’s magnificent book Savage War of Peace, Algeria 1954-1962 is a must read for a thorough understanding of what’s going on in Iraq and the Muslim world today.
The Algerian insurgents were, at the beginning, a mix of westernized intellectuals and Muslim fundamentalists, but soon enough the jihadists took over. Simply put, they were more brutal, willing to commit the kind of atrocities that would put them in the vanguard.
It is vital to understand that what’s going on in Iraq today is part of an old and reliable guerilla playbook. If you don’t understand the military and political stages, then you are fated to be crushed beneath the wheels of the jihadists. There is nothing improvised about the daily homicide bombings. It is a carefully thought-out tactic – part of a grand strategy that stabs at the soft heart of the Western middle class.
And the Battle of Algiers is where the Muslim jihadists first perfected it.
The strategy for modern terrorism was well defined by the Brazilian guerrilla leader, Carlos Marighela, before he was hunted down and killed:
“It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”
Marighela’s philosophy is simple: using terrorism will inevitably provoke the forces of law and order to strike back with overwhelming force and repression, thereby alienating the hithero uncommitted native population. The idea is to polarize the situation into two extreme camps and make impossible any dialogue of compromise by eradicating the “soft center.”
Wrote Marighela: “The government can only intensify its repression thus making the life of its citizens harder than ever. The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in having recourse to the actual physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the country will become a military situation.”
It was along this line of thought that the Algerians started their war against civilians – without mercy, without quarter.
The opening attack came in a small hot place called Philippeville. Philippeville was a small mining center of about 130 Europeans and about 2,000 Muslims, who for years had coexisted amicably. Apparently, labor relations were extremely good with a rare degree of equality between Muslim and European.
It appears that the Muslim community was aware of what was about to happen on August 20, 1955. A number of Muslim families even left town. But no one warned the Europeans.
Shortly before noon, four groups of fifteen to twenty Muslim men attacked the village, taking it completely by surprise. They were led by Muslim mineworkers who knew each house and their neighbors. Intimately. Telegraph lines were cut, the emergency radio transmitter was found to be “out of order,” and the village constable who was equipped with warning rockets had “disappeared.”
The Muslim attackers went from house to house, mercilessly slaughtering all the European occupants: men, women, children, infants, all the time egged on by Muslim women with their eerie ululations. From the mosque came exhortations to slit the throats of women and nurses in the cause of jihad.
It was not until two o’clock in the afternoon that a French para unit managed to reach the town. An appalling sight greeted them. In houses literally washed with blood, European mothers were discovered with their throats slit and their bellies slashed open by billhooks. Children suffered the same fate, and infants in arms had had their brains dashed against the wall. A mother was disemboweled, her five-day-old baby slashed to death and replaced in her open womb.