It’s after sundown, and a person is digging a rectangular hole in the ground as around 20 men watch. The image was captured in a TikTok live shared on August 27, narrated by a man speaking in Algerian Arabic.
"Each time, they bring 30 or 40 [bodies]. Many people have died. There are people who are looking for their parents, for their children and they haven’t found them yet. El Ancer, Texenna, El Milia, [almost all of the region of] Jijel has been affected."
Jijel is the name of both a town and a wilaya – a province – located on the northeastern coast of Algeria. It was one of the main regions affected by a wave of forest fires that began on August 26, nicknamed “Black Wednesday” by locals and some officials. The flames reached the outskirts of the towns listed above between August 26 and 27, as shown on the FIRMS site, run by the US space agency NASA, which enables the public to watch the progression of wildfires in real time.
The person who filmed the video is a young resident of Jijel. Before the fires, he mostly posted about sports and fitness. But since they began, he’s been documenting the situation.
He says the mass grave was being dug in "Djemaa Beni Habibi, which was badly hit”. This detail enabled us to verify that the video was filmed in the cemetery of a small town, 30 kilometres east of Jijel.
No official numbers despite PM attending funeral
The next day, other videos posted by residents give a sense of the scale of the tragedy.
In some of the images, you can see up to 13 caskets at once.
Another video, recorded at the cemetery after part of the mass grave had been filled, shows more than twenty individual graves, each a simple mound of earth, marked only by a water bottle or a stick. The excavator, still operating when the footage was taken, is covering at least three more coffins with dirt. A large section of the trench remains empty, seemingly capable of holding several more bodies.
One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site.
Algerian Prime Minister Sifi Ghrieb, as well as several other government officials, attended the burial. Official local authority social media accounts also reported on the burial, but did not say how many people were buried.
However, other sources are helping us establish the human toll. On the evening of August 27, the night before the burial, the village of Djemaa Beni Habibi posted two statements on Facebook (here and here) listing the names of wildfire victims recorded by two hospitals. The lists were meant for families, so that they could come to see the bodies.
the broadcaster Observers team documented a total of 72 names after examining both lists, accounting for duplications.
Death toll rising sharply from preliminary figures
The Algerian authorities have stopped publishing official numbers of dead and wounded from the fires in late August. The initial toll, given on August 26 by the Ministry of the Interior, cited 12 deaths and 54 people injured. But the numbers are clearly higher than that, as more people were buried in the mass grave in Djemaa Beni Habibi alone.
Moreover, information from the ground also contradicts the official numbers. An Algerian congressman who visited the affected zone on August 31 said on Facebook that 19 members of the same family died in the village of El Ancer during the Black Wednesday fires.
Our team counted at least 98 victims from the Jiljel region after examining statements made by officials, local governments and families. If you include people mentioned in articles published in local media outlets – difficult to verify because they don’t always name the victims – our toll rose to nearly 130 potential victims. Journalist Nozha Khelalef, quoted by Algerian media outlets and French newspaper Le Monde, documented more than 200 names using a similar method.
The number of victims is likely even higher than that. Pan-African media outlet Jeune Afrique cited, on August 28, quotes from anonymous sources close to the Algerian Ministry of Defence. They said that 385 people died in the fires, and more are missing.
Our team contacted the Algerian Civil Defence to ask them if the official death toll has risen since August 26. They did not respond to our question. We will update this article when and if they do.
A tragedy instrumentalised by pro-Morocco social media accounts
On X, the uncertainty around the death toll has been exploited by accounts that support Morocco, Algeria’s geopolitical rival.
One of them posted a video showing what he claimed were “more than 20 victims” who were “buried at 3am”.
"Another video that contradicts the version of events given by the Algerian military regime,” he said. The the broadcaster Observers team was unable to independently verify this video or his claims.
![This post, shared on August 29 by an account that supports the Moroccan government, features a video of about 20 coffins draped with an Algerian flag, which we were not able to independently verify. “Another video [that] contradicts the version of events given by the Algerian military regime,” he says.](https://s.france24.com/media/display/b7900d86-a6ee-11f1-860b-005056a90284/w:980/post-20-cercueils.webp)
Others have been using photos and videos of the mass burial in Djemaa Beni Habibi. An account called "Opinion Marocaine" shared the real images from the TikTok live showing the mass grave being dug. However, it claimed it showed “burial operations under the cover of darkness in mass graves for the fire victims in Algeria, and a total absence of Algerian official media”.
However, this footage doesn’t show the funeral, but preparations for it, which likely took place the night of August 27 to August 28. The burial didn’t take place in secret, at night, as this account claims. It took place during the day, and a large number of people attended, including local and national dignitaries, as shown above. Several Algerian media outlets critical of the government also covered it.
This article has been translated from the original in French.
