The mujahideen slaughtered government officials, members of the security forces, journalists, feminists, intellectuals and French-speaking individuals in what appeared to be a bid to eliminate the educated class that, according to them, had been contaminated by Western values. They killed school teachers, soccer fans, tourists from the West, moderate Muslims, women, politicians, among other forms of outrageous brutality that made the country to recede to primitive age of savagery.
In Algeria’s struggle against terrorism, some 150,000 people lost their lives, and the country sustained some $30 billion in material and infrastructural damage. The root cause of the terrorist fanaticism could be linked to the over-indulgence of extremist elements in the name of Arabization of Algeria from French culture, but it took strategic and decisive steps by government and the military to overcome the ubiquitous terrorists.