Algeria - Massacres

Between 75,000 and 100,000 people were killed in extremist violence since 1992. The month of Ramadan is the most deadly time. The MO for Muslim rebels is to attack small villages (mechtas or dovars) with knives and machetes and go for the jugular. The daily attacks take multiple lives. Children, women and old folks make the most convenient targets, their throats slashed like the livestock hanging on hooks behind those scrumptious displays of designer olive and feta salad at the deli in Von's. In the first two months of 1999, more than 200 civilians had their throats slashed. Besides throat slitting, survivors describe dismemberment by chain saw, villagers being burned alive, the decapitation of babies and the disembowelment of pregnant women. It would be superfluous to get into the incidents (hundreds of villagers are routinely slaughtered during a single massacre), which are clumped together like basketball games during a strike-shortened NBA season. Most massacres are the work of the Armed Islamic Group-though security forces have also participated in their fair share, many dressed as rebels, or working in the GIA deep cover for the government. One of the GIA's bloodiest massacres took place on September 22, 1997, in Bentalha, eight miles south of Algiers. Some 300 villagers were killed in a six-hour orgy of violence as army helicopters observed the slayings from overhead, doing nothing to stop the carnage. The guerrillas slipped away at sunrise as easily as they entered Bentalha. Much of the daily carnage takes places southwest of Algiers, in and around Ain Defla Province, Tlemcen and Relizane. On March 21, 1999, Muslim rebels cut a little deeper with their knives and beheaded four women and then impaled their heads on stakes off a road near Emir Khaled town in Ain Defla.