Word: kabylia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...army headquarters in Kabylia, De Gaulle saw for himself the difficulties facing 25,000 French troops as they scour the thick scrub of mountain sides for rebels. He watched helicopters swoop low over a 3,400-square-mile waste of mountains "as full of holes as a Gruyère cheese," as one officer put it, and foot soldiers trudge up and down steep rocky inclines searching caves for the more than 10,000 terrorists hidden in the region...
...rebel combat commanders thrown up by Algeria's 4½-year-old civil war, none was more dreaded by French and Moslems alike than Amirouche Aït Hamouda, a peddler's son from the mountainous Berber stronghold of Kabylia. Barely into his 20s when he joined the underground, sinewy, long-legged Amirouche rose swiftly to the F.L.N.'s highest field rank, full "colonel," commanded a battle-hardened force of 5,000 men that made Kabylia the country's strongest bastion of rebel power...
...gendarmes tried to wrest the banners away, and then, inevitably, a shot rang out. In sudden fury, bands of Moslems took off through Setif, savagely attacking every European they saw with clubs, knives and hatchets. And as word of the Setif "uprising" spread through the rugged mountains of Kabylia, bloodthirsty Berber bands, killing, pillaging and looting, set off on the warpath against the area's 200,000 Europeans...
...F.L.N., loud in its denunciation of such French "barbarities," was no less brutal to French soldiers, European settlers or their own reluctant Moslem countrymen. In May 1957, to discourage the villagers of Kabylia from rallying to the cause of Messali Hadj-who had long since become the F.L.N.'s bitter enemy-F.L.N. gunmen herded more than 300 peasants into the village of Kasba Mechta (TIME, June 10, 1957), and, when darkness fell, passed among them shooting and stabbing until all were dead. Moslems who persisted in active loyalty to France risked F.L.N. "Execution"-or being found alive...
...outpouring of Moslem voters stunned the most optimistic Frenchmen. Even in the mountains of Kabylia, once an F.L.N. stronghold, Moslem women swathed in traditional robes waited patiently to cast the first vote of their lives. At Mostaganem, one pregnant Moslem woman defied doctor's orders to take her place in line and produced her baby right in the polling station. In impressive numbers, they voted for De Gaulle...