During a particularly brutal offensive in July 1959 named Operation Binoculars, General René Challe’s troops sought to root out the insurgents of the Armée de Liberation Nationale (ALN) hiding in the high Kabylia mountains by annihilating local villages that offered support to the nationalists. The policy of regroupement, or resettlement, moved the rural population to barbed-wire compounds resembling concentration camps —fifteen thousand people sequestered in a space meant for three thousand and surrounded by bleak torched fields “without water, without sewage or sanitation of any kind, without land to cultivate and for the most part without work..."