“Who Really Bombed Paris?”

After the 1995 attacks in Paris, it has been often said that France was the first western country to be hit by Islamist terrorist attacks. Politicians and experts would not stop then alerting Great Britain to keep from admitting radical preachers and Islamists. After the London attacks, commentators hurried to suggest that Great Britain should adopt the French model of zero-tolerance and integration in the name of the republican values. The model would have protected France from attacks and Tony Blair announced that the rules of the game had changed in the U.K.
But, what opinion would we have of the French model if ten years later we had found out that the Paris attacks had been perpetrated by the Algerian intelligence service? In 1991, the Algerian army organized a coup-d’état in Algeria taking advantage of the western fear of Islamism. But in order to preserve power it was necessary to discredit the Islamist opposition. The Algerian secret service (DRS), which had long since infiltrated into the Algerian Islamist groups, put one of his men, Jamel Zitouni, ahead of the Islamist Armed Group (IAG), so every time the military regime vacillated, attacks were resumed.
To prevent Paris from withdrawing its support of the Algerian generals, the latter used their agents in France as agitators who would perpetrate the attacks. The Islamist Arm Group would at the same time kill the leaders of the Islamist Salvation Front (ISF). As a result of the attacks, France withdrew from the Rome agreements, which had envisaged the democratization process and reconciliation in Algeria. The mastermind of the attacks was identified as Ali Touchent but he was not inconvenienced. France preferred to keep the version that the attacks had been caused by the Islamists due to their economic links with Algeria, which were accompanied by a retro-commission that fed the coffers of the main French political parties.
Bearing the above in mind, we must be very careful with the term “Islamist” as applied to the perpetrators of attacks.