The Villa on the dusty, empty street is one of many houses of horror in the ghost town of Bentalha. Some member of the urban working class, perhaps a taxi driver or a factory worker, put his life's savings into this unfinished house with its kitsch Moorish arcade on the roof terrace - where a dried-up river of blood clogs the drainage pipe.
The owners probably abandoned this villa years ago, when the eastern suburbs of Algiers became a rear base for Islamist guerrillas. Refugees from worse areas moved into abandoned homes, and on the terrible night of September 22nd-23rd, the residents of Bentalha sought safety in the houses with armoured doors and walled gardens.
Now the wooden shutters hang charred on their hinges, and black soot climbs the walls like silent screams. The steel gate is twisted and gaping where it was blown open by the killers who invaded Bentalha. The front door stands ajar, and wine-coloured stains flow down the stairs. "More than 40 people had their throats slashed here," says the gendarme who follows me as I try not to step in the blood. Mattresses lie like burned logs amid the pools of blackened, coagulated liquid.
Elsewhere it is redder, swirled and smeared, where the bodies were dragged out. Ordinary objects are scattered over this scene of carnage: women's hair curlers, plastic slippers, a Dali-esque melted clock. On the top floor, in the laundry room, blood is splattered over the wall.
In a nearby unfinished house made of red brick and cinder blocks, Boubker Hansali, an unemployed mason, drags his limp leg up the steel ladder to the neighbouring rooftop where he cowered with his wife and two children through the night of September 22nd, listening to the screams of his dying neighbours, watching their slaughter by the flames of burning houses. "Thirty-six people died in that house," he says, pointing to a grey facade across the square. "I saw one of my daughter's girlfriends, a girl of 12, thrown from that balcony, there on the third floor."
Hansali starts crying. He is one of the few survivors to have stayed in Bentalha, because he has nowhere to go. "A psychologist came here once, for two minutes," he says. "No one from the government has helped us."
Beyond Hansali's street lies the front line - miles of fields and forests leading up to the Atlas Mountains. The army has cut all the nearby trees down and burned them to deprive the guerrillas of cover. Army helicopters hover like gnats above Ouled Allel, to the southeast, and we hear the explosions of the rockets they fire.
"The people who massacred are being massacred too - by the state," Hansali says. After the disgrace of recent massacres, the army initiated what it bills as a major offensive against the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which it blames for the atrocities. Three days ago, another operation was started in the forests of Bainem, west of Algiers.
One month has passed since nearly 300 people were slaughtered in Bentalha. The basic facts of the massacre - who committed it and why - are still disputed. Most of the killers wore Islamic Afghan costumes. But some wore army uniforms. And why did the Algerian army - which has several positions nearby - ignore pleas for help? It seems that guerrillas who earlier enjoyed support here turned on those who no longer wanted to help them. "They fed the terrorists," a policeman posted in Bentalha said. "So why should we save them?"
In a recent televised confession, a woman named Zohra Ould Hamrane claimed she was forced to accompany the killers to steal the jewels of the women they massacred at Bentalha. Another woman, Nacera Zouabri, the sister of the GIA leader, Antar Zouabri, has also been captured. She allegedly made bets with male killers on the sex of unborn infants, then slit the bellies of their mothers. The Algerian public became so obsessed with the story of Nacera Zouabri that a general warned them not to "turn a cockroach into the Algerian Diana".
Rais, a few miles from Bentalha, holds the grim record for the biggest massacre of the war. A security source says 390 people were killed here on August 29th. At the community school, surrounded by gutted cars and houses, I met Omar, a teacher who is the sole survivor of his family. His father, mother and nine brothers and sisters all died with their throats slashed, and his three nieces were kidnapped by the guerrillas. He trembles and his voice quavers. "I want an international commission to investigate the massacres," he says. "Why didn't the army intervene? Why didn't they come out of their barracks?"
The Sidi Rezzine cemetery, where the victims of Bentalha and Rais were buried, lies next to the busy national highway into Algiers. The high-rise buildings of the capital can be clearly seen in the distance. More than 500 mounds of red earth are lined up in rows, with bricks to mark the heads and feet of the dead. Their names and ages have been hastily painted on plywood markers: Mehri Samagh (8), Hossein Mejrab (7), Walid Ghala (4), Sihab Frahi (3) and Hayat Kalam (7). The majority of the dead are women and children. Why, I ask the gendarmes who escort us. "Because the men ran away," they answer.