On Monday they abducted a 15-year-old from school and slit her throat a few metres from the building.. In another attack a woman, named as Zineb, 39, was killed with her husband at their homeIslamic groups have also targeted women for failing to obey Islamic law. The latest victims died in Reghaia, 10 miles east of Algiers, where two teenage sisters, one of them engaged to a policeman, were shot dead at the weekend.
Yesterday armed fundamentalists raided the home of Halima Toumi, 29, killing her and Hafida Bougerra, 25. Police believe the attacks are part of a campaign against families of the security forces. An ultimatum by the Armed Islamic Group that dependants would be killed if arrested “women believers” were not freed expired last Thursday.

Algiers (AFP) – Islamic extremists killed three women yesterday near Algiers, bringing to seven the number killed since Saturday. But we won’t be able to speak any language at all if we cease to exist. Here everyone is mobilised for the struggle against the terrorists.” And the villagers dutifully chorused the same refrain as they stood above their cherry orchards, their fig trees and potato fields and their sheep pastures, country boys for whom the words “civil war” still do not make sense.. “It was they who decided to protect themselves from the terrorists at night, sealing off their villages from sun-down to sun-up I am myself a militant in the Berber Cultural Movement. “It’s the villagers who asked to carry out their own protection,” he says. And today, there are Berbers who suspect the village militias are more loyal to the former FLN party than the republic of Algeria, supporting a ruling clique against any Berber friendship with the “Islamists”.This is not a thesis that would commend itself to the son of Colonel Amirouche. FLN terror thus cut down many villagers in these remote hills as brother killed brother.

His son was a man – who unselfconsciously referred to the Boulevard Amirouche in Algiers as “The Boulevard of My Father” – who would know all about loyalty and the lack of it.It was also in these mountains that the French army found some of its most loyal Algerian supporters, men who would fight the FLN guerrillas and whose fate, often as not, was what the French called “the Kabyle smile”, a slicing open of their throats. “These men are Algerians fighting for Algeria, who are crushing the fascism of fundamentalism.” He spoke in French, a language the villagers did not understand, although he turned out to be a man who had good reason to speak the language.He was Nordi Amirouche, only son of Colonel Ait-Hamouda Amirouche, the most ferocious of all FLN fighters in the 1954-62 war against the French, a man whose systematic purges and throat-slashing of Algerian comrades left 3,000 FLN men and women dead before he himself was shot by the French in 1959. Si Mohamed was also a local Berber.Was this not, I suggested to a thin, eloquent middle-aged man from the Kabyle capital of Tizi Ouzu who had arrived in the village, how the Lebanese war began, with locally recruited villagers turning into gunmen loyal to individuals rather than the state? “Impossible,” he roared. But how do you vet the menfolk of every isolated village? And how do you account for the old boy who climbed out of a sheep-wagon in Igoujdal with an Italian hunting gun, only to admit to me that he didn’t know where it came from because “it was given to me by the police”? And how do you explain the fact that Si Mohamed Mustapha, the local Islamist leader shot dead by Mr Boutdra’s men, comes not from far away Medea, as the villagers would have you believe, but from the next village down the mountainside. Some of the men of the Kabyle mountains, especially those close to the Front des Forces Socialistes party, are more disenchanted with the Algiers government than with the banned Islamic Salvation Front with whom they are supposed to be at war.Officially, every member of this rag-tag army must be vetted by the authorities, must carry only his own hunting gun, must obey the instructions of the police corporal.