Since the beginning of the 1992 civil war in Algeria, the GIA has claimed responsibility for numerous kidnappings and assassinations as well as the hijacking of an Air France passenger flight in 1994. At its height, the GIA reportedly had thousands of members. A Beirut newspaper, the Daily Star, reported in a January 5 article that “action by the security forces had reduced the GIA to no more than about 30 terrorists… split into two groups.”

The latest developments came six months after the killing of Nabil Sahraoui, a leader of the larger and more active Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), another “Islamist” group that Algiers claims has ties to al-Qaeda.

The GIA came out of the dissolution of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), after a military junta nullified the party’s announced victory in the 1991 parliamentary elections and banned the FIS. Paris had urged such a measure by the Algerian government, citing the danger of “Islamic fundamentalism” to Algeria’s secular state. A 12-year-long civil war ensued, during which 150,000 people were killed, largely by right-wing attacks and government repression. According to Reuters, authorities in Algiers now claim responsibility for the deaths of 5,200 civilians during the war. These individuals were “taken in for interrogation by security forces in the 1990s and never seen again,” Reuters said.

The FIS was a bourgeois nationalist group, which gained support as a result of the overthrow of the workers and farmers government that came to power in Algeria in 1963 after the victory of the anti-colonial struggle against France. That movement was led by the National Liberation Front (FLN), a faction of which overthrew the revolutionary government of President Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965. Subsequent FLN governments used repression against opponents and implemented capitalist economic austerity measures, which eventually fueled support for “Islamist” groups. In 1989, the FIS became a legal party and the main opposition to the ruling FLN. At the time of the 1991 elections, the FIS promised to be less subservient to French imperialism than the FLN. At the same time, the group advocated “free market” economic policies to further open Algeria to finance capital. As with other “Islamist” groups, it veiled itself in militant rhetoric and a religious veneer with the stated aim of creating an Islamic republic.

The decline of the GIA and GSPC is part of a broader weakening of Islamism as a current in Algerian politics. In a 2000 amnesty under the government of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, two other such groups, the Islamic Salvation Army and the Islamic League for the Call and Combat, disbanded.

Over the last decade, Washington has made inroads in Algeria at the expense of Paris, the country’s former colonial master. Washington stepped up military aid to Algiers last March and collaboration with Algerian military forces under the banner of hunting militants linked to al-Qaeda along the country’s southern border with Mali. The Boston Globe reported last year that “this joint effort marks another front in the war on terrorism and a watershed in U.S.-Algerian relations.”  
 
 
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