What Just Happened?

Algeria is a black box for most Western foreign correspondents. Most of us, including me, have never been there. I sort of want to visit, but the place gives me the creeps in a really bad way. It is by far the most bloody-minded and ruthless place in the neighborhood.

The biggest reason this fact is not widely known is because during the unspeakable civil war there in the 1990s, every faction—including the government side—murdered reporters both domestic and foreign. Pretty much nobody went th...