The Terrorist Playbook
Contemporary lessons from the bloody Battle of Algiers
It's still considered one of the bloodiest and bitterest wars of in dependence in modern times. On Nov. 1, 1954, a group calling itself the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN) launched armed attacks in France's North African colony of Algeria, igniting a brutal conflict that would grind on for eight years and claim, perhaps, a million lives. Horrific atrocities were committed by both sides: acts of terrorism, including mutilations and bombings, by the FLN; harsh, indiscriminate reprisals by French forces, including the state-sanctioned torture of suspects.
In many ways, 1957 was a watershed year in this conflict. In January, French paratroopers violently suppressed a national strike in the capital, Algiers. In response, the FLN waged what has become immortalized as the "Battle of Algiers," a citywide bombing campaign that the French managed to quell mainly through mass roundups, internment, and torture of thousands of largely innocent Muslims.
The Algerian war became "a prototype of the modern war of independence," writes Alistair Horne, the British historian and author of the definitive, 1978 book on the conflict, A Savage War of Peace. It has been studied and copied by various terrorist groups since, including al Qaeda, because it proved that terrorism, skillfully used by a relative handful of guerrillas, can overcome larger, stronger but more conventional armies.
History lessons. Indeed, the conflict's parallels to the Iraq war are often stark. In a preface written last year for a paperback reissue of his classic, Horne argues that the architects of the Iraq invasion might have decided against sending troops to Baghdad had they been mindful of the lessons from France's defeat of Algeria. President George W. Bush and many U.S. military leaders have since read Horne's book, though it offers few—if any—arguments for military success against an entrenched insurgency.
France fought to hold on to a valued colony, which it had occupied since 1830. By the mid-1950s, the indigenous Muslim, largely Arab population numbered 9 million, but it was the approximately 1 million European settlers—the so-called Pieds Noirs ("black feet")—who enjoyed most of the country's economic fruits. Writes Martin Stone in The Agony of Algeria: "...the once relatively prosperous Muslim population...had been rendered second-class and dispossessed."
Armed revolution began in the wake of several failed efforts to grant citizenship and better economic conditions to Arabs, each collapsing under Pied Noir political pressure. It was truly an anti-colonial war, Horne stresses. "It was not an Islamic revolt."
Muslims considered pro-French were subjected by the FLN to mutilation torture and slow deaths. As in Iraq today, the terrorists particularly infiltrated and killed Muslim police forces. The terrorists also considered all European settlers targets, and the butchering of women and children, including infants, was not uncommon. In response, French forces began to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists, subjecting many to internment, torture, and death for the crime of having the wrong birthright. Villages were bombed without notice or evacuation.
Backlash. France's reaction showed why terrorism works. The FLN and its modern progeny count on heavy-handed reprisals to feed propaganda campaigns that generate public support and recruits. After a harsh French counter attack, one FLN member told a western journalist, "The stupid bastards are winning the war for us."
France finally capitulated in June 1962, and the territory came under FLN control. But the FLN proved itself ill-prepared to govern. Through the next three decades, poverty and corruption led to the rise of Islamism. In 1992, when it was clear that the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) would win control of the country, the FLN-based government canceled the election and banned the FIS.
The Islamists took up arms, and for much of the 1990s, Algeria was ravaged by a civil war that left some 150,000 dead. By last year, it appeared that several amnesty plans issued by the FLN government had largely ended that revolt, though a state of emergency remains in place. But since January, Algeria has been shaken by a series of bomb attacks claimed by a group declaring allegiance to al Qaeda.
The FLN's ironic legacy: It is being challenged by the terrorist techniques it pioneered 50 years ago.