Algeria's Counter-Terrorism Barbarity

Photo: MC3 David Quillen/AFP and via: Telegraph.co.uk

The following are some examples of the Counter-Terrorism ops that the Algerian regime participated in:

Abderrahmane Meziane-Chérif, once told me [Robert Fisk] of his principles in dealing with “terrorists”. “A farmer can be an eradicator when he pulls weeds from the fields,” he said. “And sometimes a man has to purify water and cleanse things of insects and bugs...” Meziane-Chérif was called the “eradicateur”.

1. The slaughter of the good and the bad at the In Amenas gas plant was thus utterly predictable, because the Algerian military – the real rulers of the nation – were “blooded” in a civil war which taught them to care as little about the innocent as they did about the guilty.

2. It was the Algerian military which sent intelligence officers to Damascus in 1993 to learn how Hafez al-Assad destroyed the Islamists of Hama 11 years earlier – and then used the same tactics to liquidate Algeria's own Islamist insurgency.

3. Word has it that Algerian officers visited Syria last year to return the compliment: by teaching the Syrian military – now fighting a far more dangerous uprising – how the Algerians won their “dirty” war against the Armed Islamic Group and its al-Qa'ida affiliates.

4. The Algerians lent their “expertise” to Tunisia's Ben Ali just before his overthrow and offered the same to Mubarak's goons in Egypt.

... the real marriage of both al-Qa'ida and the Algerian military started after the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.

5. It is a largely secret story which even today has never been fully revealed. Desperate to stem their losses, the Soviet government asked their socialist Algerian allies for intelligence help; and the Algerian intelligence services dispatched their own men to Afghanistan to pose as “mujahedin” alongside real Algerian Islamists fighting for Osama bin Laden.

Information from these Algerian military spies allowed Soviet forces to fight back.

But when the Russians left and the Algerians came home, the army ordered their own men to remain undercover with the Islamist groups. 

So when the terrible civil war began, individual officers to keep their cover participated in the massacre of civilians. And thus became contaminated by atrocities. 

This is not a tale which the Algerian government admits to. Nor will the West examine this grim history.

... Algeria's military utter brutality towards its enemies, whatever the cost – have appealed to the Pentagon and to the French, who both maintained their co-operation with the army's elite at Cherchell outside Algiers in the 1990s – when they knew full well that the country's soldiers and paramilitary forces were indulging in an orgy of torture against insurgents and civilians.

Via: "The Independent"