Zohra Drif-Bitat is a retired lawyer and long-time member of the Algerian senate, but she is best known for her participation in the armed wing of the Islamic Algerian nationalist movement of the 1950s. Although many, particularly the French far right, still view her as a terrorist, it is a label she rejects. She is unapologetic for the role she and her companions played in the so-called Café Wars, insisting that the National Liberation Front (FLN) was an organization of freedom fighters determined to deliver Algeria from French tyranny.

In the 1950s, young Zohra Drif, the daughter of a respected Islamic judge, was living with her family in Algiers, the capital city of what was then French-occupied Algeria. Nationalism had been on the increase in Algeria ...