Nighttime Terror Wakes Algerians to Bloody Fates

Ahmed Aitar did what any man could. When he heard the terrorists of the Armed Islamic Group coming to his district, howling like wolves in the middle of the night, the 59-year-old driver let panicked neighbors take shelter in his three-story brick house, one of the tallest on the block.

Two hours later, when the attackers arrived in his street in Bentalha, he fought them with stones and bricks from his frontyard. When they were breaking through the metal gate around his yard, he ran to the back and saved himself by climbing the wall of his house to a second-story window.

But by then, the attackers had blown open a door and were starting to kill whomever they could find. Amid the chaos, curses and screams, Aitar managed to lead most of his neighbors, including one badly wounded woman, onto his flat concrete roof for a last stand.

Their ordeal was to last four hours. When it was finished, 45 of the 110 people in the home were dead, including his wife, son and daughter and the wounded woman who had dragged herself up to his roof. Bodies of children were piled in the street.

Retelling his story last week, Aitar collapsed and wept. “Why did it happen?” he sobbed. “Why me? Why did they come to my house?”

The struggle between the Algerian government and its opponents has taken many forms for nearly six years now. Since early 1992, when the military moved to stamp out an Islamic movement that was about to win power via elections, there have been assassinations of government officials, journalists, foreigners and intellectuals.

Thousands of women have been abducted and raped. Bombs, torture, disappearances, murders at false police roadblocks--all of these horrors have blended into a reign of terror in which, human rights experts say, neither side is blameless.

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But none of these atrocities of Algeria’s dirty war have matched the extremists’ latest tactic: the massacre of scores, sometimes hundreds, of innocent civilians at night, in their homes, mainly in an area just south of the capital that has become known as the “Triangle of Death.”

There, old men and babies, pregnant women and children have been ruthlessly slain with no discernible pattern or motive. The killers have targeted not individuals but whole communities. Death comes in close, gory fashion--slit necks, decapitation, victims burned alive. These means spread maximum fear.

Because security forces usually arrive late, or not at all, there have been wide suspicions that le pouvoir--the power, the government--somehow has complicity in the killings. But in the absence of evidence, Western diplomats and most Algerians admit that they are simply baffled by the ghastly incidents.

The two largest massacres so far have been in Sidi-Rais and Bentalha, drab bedroom suburbs of the capital, Algiers. In these towns, stolid brick houses shelter working-class Algerians, large families spanning several generations who are caught in a nightmare.

In Sidi-Rais, unofficial sources say, as many as 500 people were massacred Aug. 29, and more than 200 are thought to have been slain in Bentalha on Sept. 23. The government tolls are lower: 180 fatalities in Sidi-Rais and 100 in Bentalha.

Why these areas, which supported the banned Islamic Salvation Front in the 1992 elections, were targeted is as murky as the Algerian conflict. Some residents saw the attacks as punishment for their withholding of support for the insurgents now. Others think the regime or its supporters took reprisals against those who had been too supportive of the opposition. To others, the communities were simply vulnerable.

One Sidi-Rais survivor emphasized how methodical the killers were. From his hiding place, he could hear them encouraging each other. “Please do your job slowly. Don’t hurry,” he heard one say. And the victims? “Of course they were begging: ‘Don’t kill me! Tell me what I’ve done,’ ” he recalled.

Aitar, the driver, was in bed on a Tuesday night when he heard howls shortly after 11:30 p.m. Other witnesses said the attackers had arrived in small groups and surrounded two Bentalha neighborhoods, preventing escape. Their howls were followed by gunshots and screams.

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It was not until 1 a.m. that the assault started at Aitar’s home. After he and 65 or so others had made it to the roof, they burned clothing and gasoline on the concrete steps as a barrier between themselves and the killers.

When the attackers tried to clamber up, they were forced back by a barrage of bricks, stones and metal rods. They fired at the crowd with Kalashnikov rifles, but the twisting structure of the stairs spared those on the roof for a time.

But down below, a slaughter was underway. The attackers cut off a room filled with children and mothers. Some hurled 10 youngsters to the street from a third-floor window; others--wielding knives, axes and machetes--slit the throats of the injured, including a 1-year-old.

Some victims were killed in the house, including Aitar’s wife of 35 years; she was gunned down in the kitchen. His son, 24, and daughter, 15, were mowed down, the telltale bloody signs of their fate left on smoke-blackened walls.

The rooftop standoff, meantime, lasted until a muezzin in a nearby mosque sang the summons for the Islamic faithful to begin their morning prayers.

As the sky lightened, a leader of the attack again howled like a wolf, and the massacre ended.

The marauders, who had already stolen money from the house and stripped jewelry from corpses, departed with a final insult, casting gasoline all around and igniting what would become a bonfire of Aitar’s home. That blaze alerted firefighters--who eventually rescued Aitar and his neighbors from the roof redoubt.

Still, during the evening of nightmarish bloodletting, no police officers or soldiers ever came to the scene--although a large army garrison was only 800 yards away and some town residents had fled toward it.

Various explanations have been advanced for the feeble response in Bentalha and Sidi-Rais: The young military recruits may have wanted to help but were afraid; terrorists may have laid mines before the attack to block rescuers; the troops simply had no orders to take action, and no leadership to do so.

Some residents said privately that they suspect collusion, an accusation that authorities have heatedly denied.

“It was impossible” to help, said one gendarme, who used profanity in speaking of the “bloody” killers whom Aitar described.

At his home, as he showed where he had hidden some children in case he fell victim and could not protect them, Aitar suddenly squatted and sobbed, tears gushing.

From a roof next door, neighbors watched in respectful silence, for they too knew just how furious this killing rampage had been.

At the end of the street, near a house belonging to Said Rabahe, who hid while witnessing the mayhem, is a site where 36 people were slain. Rabahe said he saw the killers slash throats of victims and toss bodies from the roof.

His own wife, daughter and son sought haven on the heights of a neighbor’s roof. But they too were cast to the ground. He heard the sickening thud of the bodies. His three family members survived their falls. But his wife was killed after she hit the ground.

His daughter, 18, is missing. Rabahe believes she was taken by the terrorists to be raped. “I think that she is dead. She would not have allowed them to touch her,” he said.

His son, Boualam, was spared because he fell onto other bodies. Smeared in blood, he played dead for 90 terrible minutes and thus survived.

But he and the other survivors face new torments. They must grieve for their many dead, even as they are racked by guilt and doubt. Could they have done something different in that flash, in that critical moment, and thus saved a child, a parent or a spouse? The hollow-eyed survivors recount their experiences with stunned dispassion, as if narrating a film.

Take Nasir Amrouche, who relived an evening of agony as he made his way in the cemetery among rows and rows of mounds that cover the dead of Sidi-Rais and Bentalha. He and his wife took flight and survived when attackers came. But they were forced to leave their son Ahmed, 3, with his grandfather.

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After hiding under a bush all night long with his 4-year-old--who kept hissing, “Daddy, please don’t breathe, they’ll hear you!”--Amrouche raced to the home where they all lived, only to find his father and his son dead on the doorstep. His father had been shot; Ahmed’s throat had been slit. The boy’s body lay in his grandfather’s arms.

Amrouche decided to demonstrate the crime. He grabbed his 4-year-old son roughly, turned his head and ran the edge of his hand across the side of the boy’s neck. Terror spread across the child’s face for a moment.

Then Amrouche spoke, his voice thick with regret: “I don’t know why we divided our children like that. It happened so quickly. I don’t know why. . . .”

The emotion grew so thick that the interpreter translating his remarks could not go on.

Lamia Kedad, a general practitioner at the Beni Moussa Hospital in Algiers, was on duty the day of the Sidi-Rais massacre. Like the rest of the medical staff, she was ordered to the emergency room. She recalls seeing awful wounds and burns, the worst in her five years as a doctor. “I was asking myself why, and even how, technically, they had done these things,” she recalled. She mentioned one infant, burned over its entire body. “Some say that they put the babies in the ovens.”

A colleague, an ophthalmologist who for the first time was compelled to operate on general-trauma cases, broke down and still has not recovered from his 4 a.m.-to-noon emergency room stint, she said.

As for herself, she said: “I think a lot about the children. How will they grow up? I am afraid they will grow up with something missing in them and they may inadvertently commit the same acts someday.”

Algeria’s deeper tragedy, however, may be that none of these cases are so special anymore. With more than 65,000 people killed since the uprising began, there are few Algerians who have not attended the funeral of a relative or a friend. And, in the Triangle of Death last week, more bodies were found.