quality:correction, quality:corruption
Algerian use of terror

Specializing in ambushes and night raids to avoid direct contact with superior French firepower, the internal forces targeted army patrols, military encampments, police posts, and colonial farms, mines, and factories, as well as transportation and communications facilities. At first, the FLN targeted only Muslim officials of the colonial regime; later, they coerced, maimed, or killed village elders, government employees, and even simple peasants who refused to support them. Throat slitting and decapitation were commonly used by the FLN as mechanisms of terror. Some other atrocities were committed by the more militant sections of the FLN as collective reprisals against the pieds-noirs population in response to French repression. The more extreme cases occurred in places like the town of Al-Halia, where some European residents were raped and disemboweled, while children had been murdered by slitting their throats or banging their heads against walls.

During the first two and a half years of the conflict, the guerrillas killed an estimated 6,352 Muslim and 1,035 non-Muslim civilians.