Kusayla — in his own language Aksil, "the leopard" — was the principal Berber leader of the late seventh-century resistance to the Umayyad conquest of north Africa, and the immediate predecessor of al-Kahina in the genealogy of indigenous Berber confrontation with the Arab advance. He led the Awraba Berber confederation of the eastern Maghreb and was the principal political authority of the formerly Christianised highlands of what is now eastern Algeria and western Tunisia.
The medieval Arabic sources — Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam, al-Tabari, Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Khaldun — describe Kusayla as initially a tributary of the Umayyad commander Uqba ibn Nafi during the foundation of Kairouan in 670, then as a captive carried west during Uqba's 681 campaign to the Atlantic, and finally as the leader of the Berber-Byzantine coalition that destroyed Uqba's army at Biskra in 683. The engagement, in which Uqba himself was killed along with most of his command, broke Umayyad authority in Ifriqiya for five years.
Kusayla took Kairouan in 683 and ruled the central Maghreb from there until 688, in alliance with the surviving Byzantine garrison of Carthage. The new Umayyad governor Zuhayr ibn Qays moved against him with reinforcements from the east; Kusayla was defeated and killed at the Battle of Mamma in 688, and Umayyad authority was restored across Ifriqiya within the year.
The medieval narrative connects Kusayla to al-Kahina as predecessor and successor in the same political project — the indigenous Berber resistance to the Arab conquest from the Aurès-Numidian highlands. Together they represent the longest sustained Berber-led opposition to the Umayyad advance, holding parts of north Africa in indigenous hands for approximately two decades after the foundation of Kairouan.