BLOODY DAYS, SAVAGE NIGHTS

By LARA MARLOWE ALGIERS

The album handed out to visitors in Prime Minister Mokdad Sifi's office is gruesome testimony of civil war: 32 pages of glossy color snapshots from Algeria's morgues. Severed heads appear on most pages, eyes open, frozen in a terrified stare. Pools of blood fill the stumps of necks on headless torsos. The bodies of children caught in a bombing have been charred to cinders. The only discernible feature on a decayed corpse is the diagonal throat slash from right ear through to the spinal column-the ghoulish trademarks that every Algerian recognizes as the signature of the guerrillas who sprang from the outlawed Islamic Salvation Front (F.I.S.). "The fundamentalists are vermin," declares a government official. "We must wipe them out, even if we have to kill millions of people."

This bloody catalog is what the Algerian government showed when a handful of foreign journalists were permitted in the country last week under government protection. Even so, the visit offered a rare glimpse inside the maelstrom of a country where violence on both the Islamist and government sides has closed the door to outsiders, leaving Algeria to conduct its vicious hidden war in private.

But last week the reporters witnessed firsthand the Islamists' ability to commit violence at will when they were awakened by an explosion scarcely three miles from their hotel. At 5:50 a.m. on Friday, the Muslim holy day, a beige Peugeot pulled up in front of an apartment block in the Algiers district of Kouba. Residents who had arisen for morning prayers saw the driver climb out and jump into a waiting car with two men. As they sped away, the three shouted, "Allahu Akbar!"

Five minutes later, the Peugeot exploded, blowing the facade off the nearest five-floor apartment building. At least 63 people were wounded, but miraculously, no one died. The intended targets were the women and children living in the complex: they are the families of policemen, whom Islamists had promised to attack if female fundamentalists were not released from prison.

There is another side to the story not visible in the scrapbook or part of the government's tour. To see it, one must meet clandestinely with F.I.S. contacts who, in fearful asides, offer tales of summary killings by government security forces. Terrified civilians whisper of special execution brigades, dressed in civilian clothes, that roam the country hunting down and murdering Islamists. City residents say police patrols have fired at random into civilian crowds after being ambushed. In February, the same month in which the government quelled a riot in the Serkadji prison by killing more than 96 prisoners-Islamists say the toll was more than 200-the village of Belhacene, halfway between Algiers and the Moroccan border, was flattened by government helicopters, according to rebels. As many as 200 were reportedly killed.

All war is horrifying. But a special repugnance is reserved for internecine butchery of the sort that has enveloped Algeria (pop. 30 million) ever since the secular regime, widely discredited for its corruption and incompetence, embarked on an ill-fated attempt at reform in 1989. After the government reluctantly agreed to the first free elections in 29 years of independence, army generals pulled the plug when the F.I.S. won a plurality in the first round of voting. The generals installed a puppet civilian government rather than allow a second-round electoral victory for the fundamentalists, whose draconian vision of an Islamic republic had capitalized on the anger and discontent of millions of the young, poor and unemployed.

Since those elections were annulled, the country has been trapped in a vicious spiral of atrocity and reprisal in which each new level of military repression only accelerates the radicalization of Islamic sympathizers. Now the three-year campaign of assassination and sabotage between government and guerrillas has risen to the point where the lives of up to 1,000 victims are snuffed out every week. Together with an economic tailspin that has reduced the gross domestic product 8%, the violence has ushered in a profound social and political paralysis from which it seems all but impossible to break free.

The street bombings and slashed throats are mostly the work of the Armed Islamic Group (G.I.A.), a savage offshoot of the Islamic Salvation Front. As the war progresses, more moderate groups within the Islamic Front have been overshadowed by the G.I.A., whose dramatic hijacking of an Air France flight last December fanned fears that Algeria's war could destabilize all of North Africa from Casablanca to Cairo.

The bitter fruits of their campaign lie scattered across the roads of Algiers and the surrounding countryside: burned-out carcasses of buses, cars, buildings and factories. The fundamentalists consider anything or anyone connected with the "infidel state" to be a legitimate target. Miles of telephone poles lie felled. A few months ago, the rebels began booby-trapping destroyed vehicles--and even corpses--with explosives.

When well equipped with armored vehicles, there are few places into which the security forces cannot venture. While this has given the soldiers an upper hand in cities, many militants have fled into the countryside. Driving beyond the capital, security forces find severed heads set on pikes and bodies strewn along the roadside. "Every bullet is met with a bullet," says a French Defense Ministry official. "This is not leading anywhere but deeper into anguish."

Each side uses excesses committed by the other to justify its own atrocities. "If we don't kill them, they'll kill us," says Major Mohammed, a gendarmerie officer patrolling the streets of Algiers with a unit of "ninjas"--commandos who wear dark hoods to conceal their identity. They are the point men in what has come to be known as the "strategy of eradication," in which armed elements of the Islamic movement are hunted down. Says Mohammed: "It's kill or be killed."

When security forces go on patrol, they look for young men wearing jeans, leather jackets--to conceal weapons--and running shoes. Unfortunately tens of thousands of Algerian men fit this description, so rebels remain elusive. Over the past year, the Islamists graduated to automatic weapons--mostly Israeli-made Scorpios and Uzis smuggled into the country--and launched more lethal attacks.

Last Thursday on a rural road 30 miles southwest of Algiers, reporters traveling with Major Mohammed and his ninja convoy witnessed a demonstration of the rebels' new tactics. As a deafening explosion shook the road surface, the three soldiers in the leading armored car jumped out and began firing into the fields beyond the bomb crater. Before they realized what had happened, a second explosion catapulted pieces of asphalt hundreds of feet into the air. When the ninjas moved to inspect the damage, a third bomb went off, swiftly followed by a fourth.

No one was hurt, but as they continued firing into the grass and trees, the rattled ninjas could be heard invoking the same Allah whose name is sacred to their fundamentalist adversaries. The team had encountered roadside explosions before, but never more than one at a time. Even more disturbing was the fact that the four bombs were spaced at 50-yd. intervals-exactly the distance the ninjas maintain between patrol vehicles. "They're where you least expect them," said Mohammed of the fundamentalists. "They strike when they want to, where they want to, and with the means they choose."

The key to the rebels' success lies not only in their brazenness but in the clandestine structure of their organization. Following the imprisonment of the president and vice president of the F.I.S. in June 1991, radical dissidents of the movement began to splinter into factions. The most violent groups, notably the G.I.A., evolved into an amoebic organ of terror in which individual cells operate independently and in isolation from one another.

These units are so cohesive that G.I.A. members do not even need radios to communicate. In Algiers they maintain a simple network of spotters, each within eyesight of another. The men exchange information with hand signals, standing in doorways or on street corners. On main boulevards they wade boldly into slow-moving traffic, peering through car windows in search of government officials, political opponents or foreigners. In October 1993, the G.I.A. pronounced a blanket death sentence on all foreigners remaining in the country, and it has killed 75 of those who visited or stayed behind. When high-ranking officials dare to venture out, they do so only in speeding motorcades whose escorts force traffic off the roads.

While the two sides battle it out, the rest of the country finds itself trapped helplessly in the crossfire. Much of the population finds itself plumbing the depths of despair. "We're just waiting to die," says a pharmacist in a fundamentalist neighborhood where security forces are often ambushed. Residents of the capital are bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. When explosions, gunfire and sirens do not keep them awake, fear does. "I drove my kids to school and saw children stepping over a body in a pool of blood to get through the door," says an Algiers housewife.

The climate of terror has silenced the discourse of everyday life. Some Algerians refuse to make appointments on the telephone because they believe phone-company employees monitor calls on behalf of the G.I.A. Spies and betrayal are everywhere. "Fourteen of my military classmates have been assassinated," says an army captain. "Someone in the military tipped off the terrorists."

Ordinary Algerians have lost faith that anyone can win the bloody showdown. In the three years since the war started, the secretive clique of army generals running the government has only deepened its credibility problem by appointing no fewer than three Presidents and four Prime Ministers. "Corruption has never been as bad as it is now," says Omar Belhouchet, an Algiers newspaper editor who has survived two assassination attempts. Even middle-class people who are frightened by the fundamentalists have little faith in the government. "Every official statement for the past three years claims to have broken with the past," says an exasperated civil servant. "But we haven't seen an iota of change."

Having proved itself incapable of controlling the country and crushing the rebellion, the government has batted aside the offer of an olive branch. Under a conference sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church in Rome two months ago, the F.I.S. actually agreed to renounce violence. But fearful that the plan's provision for lifting the ban on the F.I.S. and barring the army from politics would pave the way for an Islamic republic, government hard-liners rejected the proposal, condemning the conference participants for "washing Algeria's dirty linen abroad."

Having rejected compromise, the government has consigned the country to living with its balance of terror, trapped in a hell of anarchy and bloodshed. The fundamentalists appear determined to fight indefinitely. "Our weapon is time," warned a letter recently delivered to Major Mohammed's barracks. "Time is on our side. We are waiting for you." The letter was signed: G.I.A.