Population regroupment was a long-established tactic of colonial occupation in Algeria and the French military mobilized it throughout the rural countryside during the War of Independence (1954-62) as a means of isolating rural insurgents from their supply lines. French finance inspector Michel Rocard, who first exposed the conditions of what French authorities called the “regroupment centers” (the word “camp” being to closely associated with Nazi concentration camps) in his leaked 1959 report, described them as little more than tents or temporary structures, surrounded often by barbed wire, which sheltered hundreds or thousands of Algerians. The consequences of these policies were devastating for the civilian populations cut off from their land, which provided their main source of income and food through farming and livestock; Rocard’s statistics showed that when a regroupment camp reached 1,000 people, one child died every two days. Yet although the “regroupment centers” were directly under the control of the French military or the SAS (Sections administratives specialisées), a civil-military project that former governor-general Jacques Soustelle had instituted in 1955 as a means of establishing more contact with the rural Algerian population, the vast majority of the food and clothing that sustained the camps came not from the French government, but from Christian groups like Secours catholique and the World Council of Churches. In particular the American Church World Service, working in tandem with the World Council of Churches and the French Protestant aid organization Cimade, sent thousands of tons of American surplus goods to Algeria to be distributed in the regroupments. While much of this aid did eventually arrive at its intended location, this paper examines the ways in which complex diplomatic negotiations, bureaucratic delays, personal and territorial conflicts, and military strategy ensured that bundles of American cast-off clothing and surplus food, which sat untouched for months in warehouses in the port of Algiers, became some of the most contested commodities of the Algerian War. Using governmental and private archives of those directly engaged in the collection and distribution of what they saw as humanitarian relief, I demonstrate how the complex politics at play for the various actors involved in these events, from those engaged in acts of war to those helping its victims, shed light on the commodification of humanitarian relief in war, a situation not unique to Algeria.