Did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

Some counterpoints to this 'theory':

Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers portrays the urban warfare between Algerians and the French troops occupying their country.

"How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas," read the flier.

Modern urban terrorism began in Algiers, and one result of that development was France's creation of a monstrous, chaotic, military apparatus of torture to use any means necessary to dismantle the terrorist cells. Did torture succeed in Algiers because the paras were dealing with a small population in a cordoned-off area?

One wonders.

Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian filmmaker who explored terrorism and torture in colonial Algeria in the powerful and influential 1965 classic, “The Battle of Algiers,” died here on Thursday. He was 86.

The parallels between the Algerian war and modern warfare are striking, and lessons can be extracted from French successes and failures in its drive to contain and manage the Algerian uprising.

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