Seven members of Algeria's security forces were killed by Islamic extemists in an ambush during a cleanup operation in a forest used as a hideout, and 13 others were injured, four of them seriously, security officials said Friday.
Reinforcements were immediately sent into the Begasse forest some 70 miles east of the capital, where an armed band attacked security forces as they cleared a blockade made of dead branches, the officials said. The insurgents, identified as the El Farouk arm of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), were encircled, the officials said. GSPC, which has aligned itself with al-Qaeda, is the only remaining terrorist group in Algeria capable of dealing death blows.
Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni tried at the start of the month to minimize the ranks of insurgents, saying that an 750 to 800 Islamic insurgents have been put out of action - captured, killed or turned themselves in - since September 2005, when the nation voted in a referendum for a national reconciliation pact which called for an amnesty.
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