In his several writings on the Algerian war, he has exposed the regime and the fundamentalist opposition as the joint guilty parties in the country's tragedy.

[1] His father, initially a nurse, joined the Algerian National Liberation army, as Algeria began to fight for independence from France.

Parents sent their three sons, Mohammed aged nine and later his two younger brothers, to the cadet school of Revolution in El Mechouar Palace, Tlemcen.

[2] Khadra describes the beginning of his passion for writing in his autobiography entitled The Writer, in this way he was able to keep privacy that he missed in the cadet dormitories.

In the early nineties, as a commander in the special forces, he was stationed at the Algerian-Moroccan border and in Oran Province, during the military deployment against Islamic fundamentalists, AIS and GIA.

He has written these novels with a European (French) readership in mind as they focus on the psychological and social causes of Islamic fundamentalism using precise documentary detail and emotional intensity.

He describes, from the perspective of Inspector Llob, Algerian everyday life and its omnipresent violence – bombings, corruption and the lack of economic prospects for large parts of the population.

Together with his earlier books, Le Dingue au bistouri (1990) and La Foire des enfoirés (1993), they meet the formal criteria of the French roman noir subgenre.

In the final volume, the protagonist is discovered as the author behind the pseudonym Yasmina Khadra, is suspended from service, and dies.

In respect for his wife, who had laid the economic basis for the new beginning in France through trips and negotiations with publishers, he decided to keep the pen name.

His pseudonym posed initially a problem and rumours, from a public point of view it was a sensation:[2] The woman who had written several well-received novels in French and who had as a result been clasped to the Gallic literary bosom as a writer who would, finally, give an insight into what Arab women were really thinking, turned out to be a man called Mohammed Moulessehoul.

My novel The Swallows of Kabul gives readers in the West a chance to understand the core of a problem that they usually only touch on the surface.

Perhaps then it will be possible to find a way to bring it under control.Adam Piore of Newsweek wrote: "Yet it is the journey into the beaten souls of Khandra's characters that makes this book so affecting.

Few writers have so powerfully conveyed what it feels like to live in a totalitarian society, where uncompromising zealotry has thoroughly penetrated the national psyche.

The protagonist is a well-established medical doctor whose life is turned upside down when his wife becomes an Islamist terrorist and a suicide bomber.

[8] "Broader in its canvas then his page-turning stories of Baghdad or Kabul [..] tale of family, love and war [...] Rich in incident and character (and ably translated by Frank Wynne), the novel shows us from within the colonised Algeria that Camus – as he acknowledged – could only glimpse as an outsider.