Of growing concern to the French was the effect that the more sophisticated propaganda of the F.L.N. under Abane was having on the reliability of veteran Algerian units within the army. … At night on 9 February 1956 a platoon of the 46th Tirailleurs stationed near Tlemcen was called out on an alarm — to be mown down by one of their own number, a caporal-chef, who wounded six soldiers before running off with the attackers. Worse followed ten days later when fifty men of the 50th Tirailleurs defected under another caporal-chef, a returned veteran from Indo-China, in similar circumstances. A French lieutenant and ten men were killed and twenty wounded by the mutineers, who then cleaned out the company’s arms store of over a hundred weapons and joined the F.L.N.

XREF: Relates to the broader theme of colonial armies' reliability eroding under nationalist propaganda, relevant to similar dynamics in other independence struggles.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 427