A television series made by El Moudjahid 's Mouloud Benmohamed this spring attained the highest ratings of any Algerian-made programme. Viewers were shown the corpses of mutilated and decapitated women, and heard lurid accounts from several young women who had escaped captivity. One girl told how she and her mother had been kidnapped and taken to the mountains by her own brother. The girl managed to get away, but the mother didn't. They started attacking women because they're a symbol.
Women are the backbone of the family.
If you terrorise women, you terrorise the whole society' Mouloud Benmohamed, Algerian journalist Common criminals have been quick to take advantage of the anarcy to rape and pillage. We've got to the point where people are assassinated for the sake of assassinated for the sake of assassination, because they're easy victims,' says Zohra Flici, President of the government-backed Association of Families Victimised by Terrorism, whose own husband, a doctor, was murdered in 1993. Unknown outside her native country, her pretty face and long hair are now a familiar image throughout Algeria, printed as they are on posters which are carried in protest marches against the war. Until her death in 1993 she lived in Les Eucalyptus, a dusty, sinister slum on the eastern outskirts of Algiers. As a secretary at the Police Welfare and Sports Association, she was among the eight per cent of Algerian women to hold a paid job.