Revolution Again Echoes Through the Casbah : Algeria: An Arab fortress during the war of independence, this time the ancient quarter harbors Muslim militants fighting the government.

Thirty years ago, the Casbah sheltered Algeria’s revolutionaries from the guns and tanks of the French, its terraced rooftops and inscrutable alleys an impenetrable Arab fortress that mystified and finally confounded soldiers unaccustomed to urban guerrilla warfare.

It concealed bomb-maker Yasef Saadi through a network of tunnels in his lair that became known as “L’impasse de la Grenade,” and shielded terrorist Ali La Pointe and 1,500 contemporaries on its rooftops and in closed courtyards. The ancient hillside quarter that once hosted Ulysses and Hercules on their fabled voyages finally gave up its guerrillas to the French only when its alleys ran with blood.

Now, the Casbah is home to a new generation of revolutionaries, and its dark pathways are proving just as confounding to the independent Algerian army. Bands of police and soldiers armed with hunting dogs are prowling the steep streets by night, hunting down the Muslim guerrillas who have now killed more than a dozen officers and spread terror among the residents whose homes have once again become a battleground.

“This is the second time in the Casbah,” sighed 67-year-old Harjki, a quiet man in a long overcoat and a worn blue beret. “It’s exactly the same. Our hearts have died, because it’s happening again, and we never believed it could.”

The sound of gunshots racketed through the winding streets for nearly four hours on a Friday afternoon not long ago and has sporadically cut through the nighttime silence nearly every evening since. Soldiers stormed a house in the Casbah’s upper reaches just before dawn on one day, touching off a grenade-fueled explosion that killed four people and shooting a fifth man through the heart before dragging off Harjki’s son.

In Regents’ Square at the foot of the Casbah, a five-minute fusillade from the old quarter recently ended with a young man walking silently into the middle of the empty square, carrying the bloody, lifeless body of his 6-year-old daughter.

“His clothes were stained,” reported the Algiers daily newspaper Al Watan. “The father continued to advance, despite the attempts of those around him to stop him. Then the man fell and broke into sobs next to the body of his child. Tragedy.”

Several Algerian government officials say that many of the Islamic militants challenging the government’s move to cancel national elections, ban the Muslim fundamentalist political party and declare a state of emergency are styling themselves after Algeria’s revolutionaries who fought the French.

The most serious of the militant attacks so far, they say, have been launched from precisely the points where Algeria’s war of independence began in 1954: in the Casbah and its environs and in the Aures Mountains of east-central Algeria, where the city of Batna was under virtual siege last month after a Muslim uprising.

Just as in the days of the revolution--which ended in 1962 when the French, in the words of French journalist Jean Planchais, “no longer understood why they were fighting”--the Casbah has become a city of mirrors, with one side disappearing into the other in a shield of disguises.

A recent attack on a police station at the top of the Casbah was undertaken by militants dressed in regulation army uniforms, according to a man who witnessed the attack, which killed one officer and wounded another. A carload of men in fundamentalist-style beards was seen entering the nearby Defense Ministry compound recently, lending credence to Casbah residents’ claims that networks of plainclothes police officers in beards have penetrated the Casbah and popular quarters nearby.

The Casbah’s barber shops are full, as Islamic Salvation Front supporters shave off the trademark beards that have helped land more than 5,000 people in detention camps since President Chadli Bendjedid’s forced resignation Jan. 11.

Government and military authorities say many of the most militant fundamentalists come from among about 1,000 young Algerians, trained in Sudan and Pakistan, who volunteered to fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Before the present wave of uprisings, they could be recognized by their trademark knit caps, wide trousers and kohl-rimmed eyes--and their militant Muslim rhetoric, which argued for the imposition of an Islamic state in Algeria without benefit of elections.

Since the coup and subsequent state of emergency, the so-called “Afghanis” have gone underground, many believed to be hiding in the dark recesses of the Casbah.

Government officials say there is a difference between the revolution, when thousands of Algerians who had sheltered the guerrillas eventually streamed out of the Casbah and rioted, and now, when many residents are afraid of Islamic militants.

“The Casbah is a symbol of the revolution, and they are trying to copy them now,” said a Foreign Ministry official. “If you see the film ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ it’s happening all over again.

“Mao Tse-tung said a revolutionary is like a fish in the water. The fish is the freedom fighter. The water is the population. This is how they see themselves,” the official said. “In this case, they may be fish, but the population is not the water, because they are not following. They are fed up.”

“Everybody is fed up with this life,” declared Harjki, the man whose son was arrested after soldiers stormed the house where six Casbah families live. “All of them, the FIS (Islamic Front), the government, we want to be left alone.”

Kamal, a 42-year-old man who lived in the same house, said he was in the Casbah during the revolution when French soldiers resorted to bulldozing shop fronts and blowing up a house looking for the elusive Saadi and La Pointe. But they evacuated the quarters first, he said.

This time, he said, he was awakened at 4:30 a.m. by gunshots outside. As he got up to see what was happening, soldiers broke down the door and stormed in, firing their rifles as they climbed the stairs and throwing grenades. Kamal gathered his children and wife in one room, then was ordered downstairs to lie face down on the floor with his cousin, whose pregnant wife was waiting upstairs. By the time it was over, part of the house had been blown up with a grenade, killing four people, and Kamal’s cousin had been shot through the heart.

Now, Kamal and his family are living on the streets, sleeping in the already crowded homes of neighbors.

The streets of the Casbah these troubled days shift from lively banter in the afternoon marketplaces, where young men sell their smuggled watches and blue jeans, to the silence of dusk and Friday afternoon, after weekly prayers, a silence interrupted only by gunfire.

On a recent Friday, the narrow streets were empty except for half a dozen merchants crowding warily into a doorway. Suddenly, a dozen screaming young men ran up the street, the sound of gunshots ringing behind them, and dived into open doorways and side alleys. The merchants sprang back inside the shop, pulling two journalists in with them. The shooting subsided, then started coming from somewhere else.

A few days later and several streets away, a young Islamic Front supporter in a long brown robe, black jacket and curly beard, whispered quietly about the Muslims’ victory at the polls. “People voted for an Islamic state, and instead they are installing a dictatorship on us,” he whispered, stopping when a woman glided out of the house nearby, only her eyes visible behind the traditional white robe and veil of the North African Muslim woman.

“Spy!” the young man hissed at her, and then explained: “The police put her here to report on our activities. She is not part of our family.”

The woman glided back again, and the man reached out a hand and slammed a door behind her. She sprang back. “Eat dung!” she exclaimed.

An older man lunged out of the house, gesticulating at the young fundamentalist, several youths gathered around the young man, the woman began wailing and an Arabic screaming match ensued that eventually involved much of that part of the street. “Now you are seeing the Casbah,” said a young man named Omar.