French Defense Ministry appoints official in charge of search for “French missing troops” during national liberation war

The French defense ministry has appointed a senior official to oversee the search operation for the remains of French soldiers still reported missing during the Algerian national liberation war and whose number is estimated, according to a French official, at 1,000 troops.

French Defense Ministry sources explained that there are between 500 to a thousand French soldiers still unaccounted for in Algeria during the November 1954 Revolution for independence, noting that the search for them is still ongoing, adding that the latter had  been either killed, or subjected to “abductions”.

The same sources also indicated that the painful and delicate aspect of this file is that the loss of these French soldiers was not due to military combat operations, but stemmed from their exposure to the different abductions.

To this effect, a French MP asked a question at the French National Assembly about the disappeared to the French Secretary of State for War Veterans and Memory who affirmed that “the number of French soldiers missing during the War of Independence of Algeria is estimated, according to reliable sources, at between 500 and 1,000. 

The search for their remains is all the more sensitive and painful because the disappearance of these soldiers most often resulted not from circumstances of combat, but from abductions”, as he put it.

In recent years, the question of French soldiers who disappeared during the national liberation war was regularly raised during official visits to Algeria, notably during the state visit to the country by the French President in December 2012, at the end of which the French and Algerian authorities expressed their joint commitment to facilitating the investigations designed to successfully locate the graves of the Algerian and French troops still unaccounted for”.