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Twenty-Five Killed In Algeria
ALGIERS, Jan 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Twenty-five people were killed overnight by alleged Islamists in the Chlef region in western Algeria, news agencies reported Sunday.
Some press reports said most of the victims were women, teenagers and children. News agencies also quoted a local doctor as saying the attackers abducted a 20-year-old girl.
The region, some 200 kilometers (120 miles) west of Algiers, along with neighboring Ain Defla and Medea, south of the capital, is often the scene of grisly attacks by unidentified groups the government claims are Islamic "fundamentalists".
Islam strictly bars the killing of civilians, children or women. Rape and murder are severely punishable under Islamic law, or Sharia'.
Villagers in the area have reportedly asked authorities to supply them with arms and weapons for self-defense but have so far received no answer.
Less than two weeks ago, twenty-three people were killed in an armed attack on an isolated hamlet in the Chlef region.
The current bloodshed brings the total of violence victims to 90 this month alone.
The killings are usually attributed to the so-called Armed Islamic Group and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, two movements that rejected a national reconciliation policy put forward by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in 1999.
In July of that year, Algerian authorities offered an amnesty to those opposed to the regime that were not guilty of murder, rape and other "blood crimes".
At least 4,000 people were reported to have turned themselves in and the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) was declared dissolved. The AIS was the armed wing of the
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which was poised to win a general election in January 1992 before the army violently intervened and called off the poll.
The FIS, subsequently outlawed by the secular authorities, has maintained that it was the army who started the bloodshed.
Algeria's civil war has claimed at least 100,000 lives since 1992.
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