The crisis began on 16 January when militants attacked two buses carrying foreign workers from the In Amenas gas facility, which lies in the desert in eastern Algeria, not far from the border with Libya.
Aside from this jarring image, Tirin Kot is a bucolic-seeming place, a market town of flat-topped adobe houses and little shops on a low bluff on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River, in a long valley bounded by open desert and jagged, treeless mountains.