Algeria orders three days of mourning as wildfires kill at least 12 in the northeast

President Abdelmadjid Tebboune declared three days of national mourning on Thursday after wildfires in northeast Algeria killed at least 12 people and sent 54 to hospital. Flags were ordered to half-mast. Cultural events and national sporting fixtures were cancelled. “With a heavy heart and a soul in mourning at the tragedy of the loss of our fellow citizens,” Tebboune said in a message to families.

Interior Minister Said Sayoud gave the first official split: five dead in Jijel province, four in Béjaïa and three in Tizi Ouzou. Six of the injured were listed in a serious condition with burns. Civil protection said 193 fires had been recorded in the previous 24 hours and that 46 were still burning on Thursday morning. The army put AT-802 water-bombers and helicopters into the line with ground crews. The gendarmerie closed three main roads near Béjaïa, Jijel and Sétif.

The Kabylie and coastal ranges burn most summers. This week’s fires moved faster than many residents could. Videos circulated of people trapped on roads as the fire front jumped. AFP said it could not verify the clips on first pass. Local officials described families who went back for livestock and did not get out. Some later, unverified accounts put the death toll much higher and spoke of a mass burial in Djemaa Beni Habibi in Jijel. The interior ministry had not adopted those figures by Friday afternoon. The official count remains the twelve named by Sayoud.

Tebboune noted that the state had only just begun to pay compensation for earlier fires that crews thought they had put down. That sentence is an admission of a pattern. Algeria has spent recent summers on the same ground: heat, dry brush, steep tracks that engines cannot climb, and a civil protection service that is large by regional standards and still outrun by the weather. The three-day mourning period is also a political instrument. It stops football and concerts in a week when images of burned villages would otherwise compete with ordinary programming.

Containment depends on wind and on whether the 46 remaining fires join up. Mountain communes in Tizi Ouzou and Béjaïa have few secondary roads. When the main corridor closes, evacuation becomes a walk. Crews will spend the weekend on those slopes. The useful number to watch is not the mourning calendar. It is whether Saturday’s civil protection bulletin shows the active-fire count falling, holding, or rising again after night winds.