finish you off! We're here to send you to your God! Dispute over responsibility The GIA's responsibility for these massacres remains disputed. In a communique its amir Antar Zouabri claimed credit for both Rais and Bentalha, calling the killings an "offering to God" and declaring impious the victims and all Algerians who had not joined its ranks. By declaring that "except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death," it had adopted a takfirist ideology. In some cases, it has been suggested that the GIA were motivated to commit a massacre by a village's joining the Patriot program, which they saw as evidence of disloyalty; in others, that rivalry with other groups (e.g., Mustapha Kartali's breakaway faction) played a part. Its policy of massacring civilians was cited by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat as one of the main reasons it split off from the GIA. However, according to reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch army barracks were stationed within a few hundred meters of the villages, yet did nothing to stop the killings. At about the same time, a number of people claiming to be defectors from the Algerian security services (such as Habib Souaidia), having fled to Western countries, alleged that the security services had themselves committed some of the massacres. These and other details raised suspicions that the state was in some way collaborating with, or even controlling parts of, the GIA (particularly through infiltration by the secret services) – a theory popularised by Nesroullah Yous, and FIS itself. This suggestion provoked furious reactions from some quarters in Algeria, and has been rejected by many researchers, though others regard it as plausible. In contrast, Algerians such as Zazi Sadou, have collected testimonies by survivors that their attackers were unmasked and were recognised as local radicals – in one case even an elected member of the FIS. Roger Kaplan, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, dismissed insinuations of Government involvement in the massacres; However, as Youcef Bouandel notes; "Regardless of the explanations one may have regarding the violence, the authorities' credibility has been tarnished by its non-assistance to endangered civilian villagers being massacred in the vicinity of military barracks. " Another explanation is the "deeply ingrained" tradition of "purposeful accumulation of wealth and status by means of violence", outweighing any basic national identity with feelings of solidarity, loyalty, for what