 Zairi was born on 17 September 1956, the ﬁfth of ten children and raised in a small Algerian town of El Kouif, 4 km from The Tunisian Border.His father worked in a phosphate mine all his life.Zairi attended primary and secondary school in El Kouif and moved to Annaba, a relatively bigger town on Algeria's Mediterranean coast, to continue his college education.