Algeria

The country whose war of independence became the model for anticolonial struggle everywhere, at a cost few others paid. Algeria was Ottoman, then invaded by France in 1830 on a pretext involving an unpaid grain debt and a fly-whisk, and conquered over decades against Abd al-Qadir's resistance with methods that included burning harvests and asphyxiating whole communities in caves. It was then legally incorporated as part of France itself, three departments rather than a colony, and settled by a million Europeans who held the best land while the Muslim majority were subjects without citizenship. That legal fiction is why the war from 1954 to 1962 was so brutal: France was defending what its constitution called France. The FLN's urban campaign and the French army's systematic use of torture were both documented at the time, the war brought down the Fourth Republic and returned de Gaulle to power, and estimates of Algerian dead run from several hundred thousand to a million and a half. Nearly all the settlers left in 1962. Oil and gas fund the state. A civil war in the 1990s followed cancelled elections and killed perhaps two hundred thousand. Algiers is the capital. It is the largest country in Africa. Algiers holds the Casbah, a World Heritage site. The Sahara covers about four-fifths of the country. Tamazight became an official language alongside Arabic in 2016 after long Berber campaigning. The Tassili n'Ajjer rock art records a green Sahara thousands of years ago. Algeria supplies a significant share of Europe's gas.

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