Hassiba Ben Bouali was an FLN combatant of the Battle of Algiers and one of the foundational young women martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence. She was born in 1938 in Chlef in the western Algerian Tell, into a family of modest means with maternal connections to the Beni Mellikeuch tribe of Lesser Kabylia.
She was educated at the Lycée Fromentin in Algiers and joined the urban network of the FLN at the age of seventeen, working initially as a courier and subsequently as an operations agent under the command of Yacef Saadi. The Algiers urban network — the principal organisational base of the September 1956 to October 1957 phase of the war in the capital — depended substantially on women combatants whose mobility through European-Algerian Algiers was less constrained than that of men.
She participated in the bombings of the September 1956 to early 1957 period, the strikes of the spring of 1957, and the running engagements of the summer that followed. She was killed on 9 October 1957 in the explosion of the Casbah safe house at 5 rue Caton, in which the French paratrooper assault on Yacef Saadi's hideout collapsed the building and killed Hassiba, her commander Ali la Pointe, the young Petit Omar, and a fourth combatant whose identity was never fully established.
She is conventionally treated as one of the foundational women martyrs of the Algerian Revolution, alongside Djamila Bouhired, Djamila Boupacha, and Zohra Drif. Her image — particularly in Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, in which her death is the climactic moment of the urban-war narrative — has continued to circulate in international anti-colonial political memory across the subsequent six decades.