Algeria hit by surge in guerrilla violence

[Bent_Bladi]

if i was an algerian in algeria then i'd be VERY afraid....

[Al-khiyal]

Angry might be better.

[Al-khiyal]

UN chief to visit Algeria Tuesday

ALGIERS, December 17, 2007 (AFP) — United Nations staff in Algeria observed a minute's silence Monday in memory of 17 colleagues killed in two bloody car bomb attacks on UN and government offices in Algiers last week.

Representatives of Algeria's foreign ministry were also at the ceremony, having announced that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will visit Tuesday the two UN sites bombed in the Algerian capital on December 11.

The attacks, claimed by a local branch of Al-Qaeda, destroyed the offices of the UN High Commission for Refugees and the UN Development Programme, killing 17 employees, of whom 14 were Algerians and three foreign.

A moment of silence was similarly observed at a Paris donors' conference for a future Palestinian state, where Ban reiterated the UN's commitment to carrying out its mission.

"The attacks of Algiers will never discourage us to accomplish the vital task which is ours throughout the world, regardless of the threats that weigh on our personnel," he said.

Any attack on the world body was an attack on those the UN agencies sought to help, Ban said.

In Algiers, UN Development Programme spokesman Kamel Dervis has already confirmed that the organisation will not reduce staffing levels in the city in the wake of the attack.

"We attach great importance to our work in Algeria," he added.

The official overall death toll was 37 but hospital sources report the blasts killed between 62 and 72 people, including students.

Ban Ki-Moon to visit UN attack sites: Algiers

[Bent_Bladi]

Angry might be better.

a combination of both... homicidal maybe

[Al-khiyal]

Deux terroristes tués et deux militaires blessés à Tizi-Ouzou

Lundi 17 Décembre 2007 -- Les deux terroristes abattus vendredi soir près de Boghni, au sud de Tizi-Ouzou faisaient partie d’un groupe qui projetterait le kidnapping d’un religieux chrétien dans la région, a appris toutsurlalgerie.com auprès de sources sécuritaires.

Un caméscope devant servir vraisemblablement pour filmer leur victime a été retrouvé à l’intérieur de la voiture abandonnée par les terroristes au après leur accrochage avec les forces de sécurité. La cible des terroristes serait un pasteur d’origine locale dont l’identité n’a pas été dévoilée par nos sources.

C’est la première fois depuis longtemps que la mouvance terroriste projette de s’attaquer aux non musulmans dans la région puisque depuis l’assassinat des quatre les pères blancs : Christian Chessel, Jean Chevillard, Alain Dieulangard et Charles Deckers le 27 décembre 1994 à Tizi Ouzou.

Le GSPC aurait tenté d’enlever un Pasteur à Tizi-Ouzou

[Al-khiyal]

Zohra Bechlah, 82,
holding a picture of her son Rabah Bechlah,
the suicide bomber,
with his sons, Younes, left, and Athmane

The 63-year-old Algerian suicide bomber

ALGIERS, December 17, 2007: As a suicide bomber he was most unusual. But the story of Rabah Bechla, a 63-year-old grandfather of seven who rammed an explosive-packed truck into a UN office here one week ago, killing 17, is in many ways the story of Algeria itself.

"Many Algerians can identify with this story," said Mouloud Hamrouche, a former prime minister of the same age, who opposed the decision to scrap a 1991 election once it became clear the Islamists would win. "He is a real-life example of what has gone wrong over the years."

His age has thrown into shock a nation accustomed to terror - but a terror usually associated with the malleable impulsiveness of youth. If his associate that day, a 30-year-old former convict who triggered the second of two bombs, has been described as the textbook case of a young radicalized man, Bechla represents a break with the usual stereotypes.

Like the first female suicide bomber in the Palestinian territories and the first white European convert caught with explosives, his case casts further doubt on the uncertain practice of profiling.

As one prominent journalist here observed: "If a grandfather can blow himself up, anyone can."

The hunger among Algerians for an explanation has been evident in a series of revelations about Bechla's personal life in the local press, some true - that he was very ill - others apparently wrong: Two of his sons did not die for the jihadist cause; indeed they are alive and gave a long interview in their family home outside of Algiers and denied that they were part of the Islamist movement.

Algerians are further intrigued by Bechla because his life contains the story of the problems that have haunted this country for six decades. As recounted by family members at Bechla's home, a cement shack in the village of Heraoua, some 30 kilometers, or 50 miles, from the capital, the family history in those years stretches from his grandfather who fought for France against Germany in World War II, his father who they say was tortured and killed by the French during the War of Independence, and Bechla's decision to vote for the Islamists in the 1991 presidential election that was subsequently canceled.

The trajectory continues to the present. One of his sons did something that many other young Algerians have tried: He made a desperate decision to try to get into Spain as an illegal immigrant.

At the home in Heraoua, footsteps away from the local police station, Bechla's children and his 82-year-old mother Zohra were still in a state of shock.

"We are against terrorism, we are against this act," said his oldest daughter, Hadra, 33, sitting on an embroidered cushion in a living room crammed with women in colorful head scarves, some crying, others shaking their heads. Behind her, on a wooden shelf stood a worn color photograph of Bechla in his 40s, a serious-looking man with a graying beard and piercing blue eyes.

"All we ask is that people also see the other side," she said, turning her eyes to the photograph. "My father was a victim, too."

Bechla started out as an enthusiastic supporter of the governing FLN, the popular party born from the national liberation army that won independence in 1962, Hadra said. But she said he grew increasingly disillusioned with a regime that failed to pass on the country's energy riches to ordinary people.

In 1990, the authorities denied Bechla a taxi license when rheumatism and kidney problems made it impossible for him, an illiterate, to continue working as a vegetable trader. "He felt betrayed, after his father had died for this country," another daughter, Assia, 28, said.

A year later, in what was hailed as Algeria's first ever free national election, the family said, Bechla voted with millions of Algerians for the Islamist Party FIS, which campaigned on a platform of generous welfare programs.

But the army intervened to cancel the elections, and in the following years, Assia said, Bechla learned of the arrests and torture of several sympathizers of the Islamist party in 1995, and decided to go into hiding in the eastern scrublands where Islamist militants were active.

"He said that he was not strong enough to stand torture," Assia said.

After several years without contact, the family heard of Bechla through friends. His wife, Aisha, now deceased, urged him to accept a government amnesty and to come home.

To hear his family tell it, Bechla was not always at ease with the militants. "He wanted to come back but he was scared: scared of the government and scared of Al Qaeda," Assia said, referring to a successor group named Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. "He said it was out of his hands," the daughter said. "He could not leave them."

Hadra, another daughter, said, "Al Qaeda has given us nothing," disputing any notion that Qaeda paid the family in compensation for the father's suicide bombing. She was pointing at the makeshift oven in the kitchen and the plastic sheet that replaced a broken window in the bathroom. "We have nothing to do with them."

She said one of her sisters only narrowly escaped the second bomb last week. And a nephew of Bechla named Ihab was killed by Islamists some years ago, she said.

Said Younes, one of Bechla's three sons: "We are caught in the middle of this."

Younes said initial reports that two of Bechla's sons had joined Al Qaeda and died in clashes with government forces were false. Athmane, the youngest, was also in the house. Halfway through the afternoon, the third son, Mokhtar, called the family mobile phone and was put on speaker phone, recounting to loud cheers that he had just made it to the Spanish enclave of Melilla in Morocco.

"Some go to the mountains to join the terrorists, and some try to go to Europe," Hadra said. "The country is rich, but the people are poor."

[Al-khiyal]

Le GSPC aurait tenté d’enlever un Pasteur à Tizi-Ouzou

Security forces foil an assassination attempt on a cleric in Tizi Ouzou