Now Algeria's bloody civil war kills the little people

When the history of Algeria's secret war comes to be written, the villages of Bensaleh, Bouarfa, Douiret, Sliman Chaouch, Hamleli, Douaouda and Sidi el-Kebir will feature largely in its blood-soaked pages.

For, despite government censorship and a far more sinister silence by the cruel men responsible for the dreadful deeds being done in the countryside south of Algiers, terrifying details are now emerging of the latest bloodbaths in the Algerian war, a conflict now being fought out between "Islamist" gunmen and poorly trained village militias who have been armed by the government as "self-defence" units.

The statistics of death give credence to reports that up to 200 men and women are now dying every week in Algeria's civil war.

A bomb hidden in a coffee flask that exploded in a polling station at Relisane during last week's referendum, for example, killed 15 civilians and wounded another 200, according to eye-witnesses. An earlier car bomb in Boufarik killed 18 people. A bus bomb in Tixeraine killed 10, on 10 November. A massacre in Douaouda left 10 women and three children with their throats slashed. An even worse butchery at Sidi el-Kebir on 6 November left 32 men, women and children dead, so many that the authorities could not provide enough coffins. This mass slaughter - and there are others which have not yet been revealed - occurred in just the past seven weeks.

Up to 100,000 people are now believed to have been killed since the military- backed Algerian government cancelled the 1992 parliamentary elections which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) - demanding an Islamic state in Algeria - were certain to win. Violent Islamist organisations then went to war, attacking not only soldiers and policemen but their families, and writers, journalists, artists and feminists. Human rights groups have blamed pro- government death squads as well as the Islamic Armed Group (GIA) for the appalling death toll. The new constitution voted in last week is unlikely to lessen the carnage.

In the most recent massacres, the GIA appears to have been taking revenge on those villages which have set up government-sponsored militias. Boufarik and Douaouda had created "auto-defence" units composed of local men shortly before the attacks. So had the villages south of Laghouat when a bus carrying civilians on the road to Hassi R'mel was stopped at a checkpoint by men dressed as policemen on 7 October. In a country where Islamists often dress in security-force uniforms, and policemen often wear plain clothes, the occupants of the bus might have guessed this was one of Algeria's nightmare "faux barrages". The men, around 20 at the fake checkpoint, ordered the passengers to dismount for an identity check and then, systematically, cut their throats.

At one point, an ambulance carrying a sick woman and her husband, along with a paramedic, was stopped behind the bus. According to the Algerian newspaper Liberte - perhaps the only reliable journalistic source on the war - the GIA men cut the throats of the paramedic, the driver and the husband, leaving the sick woman in the vehicle. The slaughter went on for an hour while motorists, noticing the killers just in time, managed to turn their cars and drive for their lives back to Laghouat.

At Sidi el-Kebir, there was no such escape. The village menfolk were apparently in the hills above their homes, searching for the "terrorists" against whom the government had armed them. Behind them, up to 30 GIA members entered Sidi el-Kebir and proceeded, again systematically, to kill all whom they found in the village. A baby reportedly had its throat cut after a discussion among the killers about the morality of killing children. At least 10 women were egorgees. A newly married couple were executed in their home, the husband on the bed, the woman in the doorway of their bedroom after reportedly being ordered to lay out her wedding trousseau. Their baby was left tied up in the same room.

Exactly eight days later, in the village of Bensalagh - where 20 men had just been recruited to join the local government militia - the Islamists struck again. At least 14 civilians - including 5 women and 3 children - were murdered, most of them from one family. A 12-year-old boy in a state of deep shock later recalled how armed men had arrived at the home of his uncle, Medjber Abdelli, at 1.00am, burst into the building, grabbed his aunt by her hair, pulled back her head and cut her throat with a knife. Another member of the family was shot dead while other men decapitated his wife.

Three children then had their throats cut, one of them a 12-year-old girl, Hadjira Abdelli. When villagers approached the house in the morning, they found blood splashed over every room, and even across the garden.

These most recent of horrors have driven thousands of villagers into the towns around Algiers in fear of their lives. The refugees have complained that the authorities have done nothing to help them. One newspaper boldly pointed out that at the mass funeral of the Sidi el-Kebir victims, not a single representative of the government - save for the local wali - came to share the village's grief