Lalla Fatma N'Soumer was a Kabyle Berber warrior and religious leader who organised the principal armed resistance to the French conquest of Greater Kabylia between 1854 and 1857. She was born around 1830 in the village of Werja in the Soummam valley, into the Aith Sidi Ahmed Ou Yahia, a marabout family of the Rahmaniyya Sufi order, and acquired her epithet "n'Soumer" from the village of Soumer at the foot of the Djurdjura where she settled in early adulthood.
She refused the customary marriage prepared for her in adolescence and instead retired to the zawiya of her brother Si Mohand Tayeb, devoting herself to religious and ascetic practice. The recognition of her spiritual authority across the Greater Kabylia region — unusual for a young unmarried woman — established the political basis for her subsequent leadership.
When the French expeditionary corps under Marshal Randon began the systematic conquest of Greater Kabylia in 1854, Lalla Fatma assumed the political-religious leadership of the resistance alongside Cherif Boubaghla. The principal engagements were at Tachkrirt in 1854, where her forces inflicted heavy casualties on a French column, and at Icherriden in July 1857, where the resistance was ultimately broken by overwhelming French numerical and artillery superiority.
She was captured at the fall of Takhlijt Ath Aïsi in July 1857 and held under house arrest at the Beni Slimane zawiya at Tablat until her death in 1863, at the age of thirty-three. Her remains were transferred to the El-Alia martyrs' cemetery in Algiers in 1995 by the Algerian government. She is conventionally treated as the foundational woman figure of Algerian anti-colonial resistance, alongside the Kahina of the seventh century and Hassiba Ben Bouali of the twentieth.