flag of Algeria

When the regency of Algiers was invaded by the French in the early 19th century, Emir Abdelkader raised a resistance movement. He supposedly developed the flag design now used by Algeria, although evidence for this is lacking. The colours and symbols of the flag are associated with Islam, as well as with the Arab dynasties that ruled in Algeria and elsewhere.

It is known that Abdelkader’s grandson Khaled and the Algerian nationalist leader Ahmed Messali Hadj used the green-and-white flag in the 1920s as a rallying point for those opposed to French rule. In the 1950s the National Liberation Front and the National Liberation Army gave support to that flag, finally raised over an independent Algeria on July 3, 1962. Another symbol long popular on Algerian flags, the so-called Hand of Fatima or khamsah (the stylized silhouette of a hand), was represented along with a bright yellow ring in the green-white-green flag proposed in the 1940s by the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto. However, the Hand of Fatima was not used in the flag of 1962—perhaps because of its association with the non-Arab Berbers and with traditional ways of life that the National Liberation Front rejected.