The techniques of murder equally had echoes from the grisly égorgements, the throat-slittings, from days of the Savage War, the "Kablyie Smile" as French servicemen dubbed it with unpleasant humour, frequently accompanied by castration. Beheading victims became common, their heads stuck on road signs as a kind of gruesome sport. Algerians themselves spoke of the "blind war," but in its prolonged, random senselessness it came almost more to resemble Europe's Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century.

QUESTION: The actual motivation for regime involvement remains murky — worth probing how regimes exploit public bewilderment to shape narratives.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 42