THE CASBAH used to be a Punic trading port, according to the New York Times:

The Crumbling of the Casbah

By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: July 23, 2006

ALGIERS

IT has stood for centuries, a slope of gleaming white houses climbing in steps from the sea like a construction of sugar cubes. It gave this Mediterranean port the nickname la Blanche, the white one. But despite the romance surrounding the old quarter, known as the Casbah and once home to pirates and freedom fighters, it is literally imploding from neglect.

Unesco has declared it a World Heritage site, and the Algerian government has designated it a protected landmark, to no avail. Closed in on itself, symbolizing the local population’s long isolation from French colonial rulers — and more recently, radical Islam’s retreat from modernity — this seemingly impenetrable agglomeration of houses is falling down.

[...]

Historic preservation is a luxury for steady times, and Algeria is still feeling its way toward the future from a dark and turbulent past. It has only just righted itself from a decade of fundamentalist Islamic violence. The nation’s focus is now on economic development. But tourism, the great engine of preservation in so many cities, is low on the list of Algeria’s concerns. Algeria doesn’t really need tourists. It has oil. Casbahs, from the Arabic for “fortified place,” exist across North Africa, and many have been beautifully restored. In Algiers the word once referred only to the citadel built above the old city, but it came to mean the old city itself. When people speak of the Casbah, they are referring uniquely to this crowded hillside between the fortress and the sea.

A Phoenician trading post called Ikosim occupied the point of land as early as the sixth century B.C. The Romans arrived 500 years later, and the arc of an amphitheater can still be traced in the walls of the buildings in the lower Casbah.

[...]

I didn't know about the Phoenician (Punic) connection, but I suppose it makes sense.