On Sunday, 9 January 2022, Guermit Bounouira, former private secretary of the late army chief General Ahmed Gaïd Salah, leaked on social media videos filmed from within the highly secured military prison of Blida. Videos presented as two parts of a long and damning testimony against current senior Algerian military officials have been broadcast and widely shared on Facebook and Youtube. Bounouira accuses Algerian army generals of practicing all sorts of criminal activity, including helping drug barons move illicit drugs from Morocco into Algeria and bringing weapons from Libya to stage fake anti-terror operations for public consumption. At this time, it is difficult to affirm or deny the veracity of these accusations. But we can already conclude that powerful circles within the Army facilitated these video leaks from Bounouira to jeopardize the position of Chengriha as head of the military and indirectly as the country’s strongman.
