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Introduction

Starting in February 2019, thousands and later millions of Algerians took to the streets to voice their displeasure with their ailing eighty-two-year-old president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who sought to run for what would have been a fifth term. After weeks of peaceful and orderly mass protests, the long-standing president resigned in April 2019, before a new election could be held. As this new “battle of Algiers” continues to unfold, some Algerian and European observers have warned that Islamists will try to infiltrate the movement.¹ Their fear is that Islamists may seek to recreate the conditions that prevailed in the 1990s when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) exploited the country’s 1989 democratic opening to call for the establishment of an Islamic state; jihadi violence erupted after the military interrupted the electoral process in 1991, and the country descended into a decade-long civil war (1991–2001).

Such reignited fears overlook the sociopolitical changes that Algeria has gone through since the civil war ended, particularly the legacy of the conflict, the trauma it generated, and the transformation that the country’s Islamist movement has undergone since then. The Islamists have had virtually no role in the historic mobilization that has been shaking the Algerian regime for the past two months. The country’s Islamist parties joined the popular movement only belatedly, and by the second week of the demonstrations, citizens on social media were calling for vigilance against the “hijacking” of the movement especially by Islamists.² Algerian society is deeply marked by the violence that the FIS left in its wake in the 1990s. Today, as one protester put it, “we are vaccinated against the FIS and its excesses.”³

In the wake of the civil war, the Algerian government has succeeded in neutralizing the more extremist jihadi manifestations of political Islam by combining a soft and a hard approach. The authorities have paired a strong military presence on the ground to fight armed groups with conciliatory measures aimed at disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating former extremists into society.

While the government has achieved progress, it would be an exaggeration to say that political Islam in Algeria is no more. Undoubtedly, thousands of former jihadists have been rehabilitated, jihadi activity has fallen markedly, and the number of fatalities from terrorist attacks has steadily declined, but the risk of jihadi violence has not fully abated.⁴ Attacks by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, and their affiliates are not beyond the realm of possibility.⁵ Most Algerians condemn the violence of these jihadi groups and do not support them, but as long as the country is plagued by political exclusion, economic marginalization and social disparities, oppression, and occasional bouts of violence, there will be at least some people who wrongheadedly yield to the temptation to embrace jihadism.⁶

The influence of Algeria’s Islamist politicians has also waned, as ordinary citizens have shown their hostility toward the representatives of moderate political Islam. During the recent protests, for instance, Abdallah Djaballah, a longtime prominent Islamist leader who now heads the Justice and Development Front (FJD), was driven away by demonstrators who shouted “dégage” (which means “get out”).⁷ Abderrezak Makri, who leads Algeria’s first major Islamist party, the Movement for Society and Peace (MSP), was similarly marginalized and received with general public indifference.⁸ The lack of popularity of these two leading figures of moderate political Islam indicates the Islamist parties’ lack of credibility, legitimacy, and public support.

In a sense, by letting Islamist parties enter parliamentary politics and even participate in government coalitions, the Algerian authorities have succeeded in defusing moderate embodiments of political Islam. On one level, the participatory approach that moderate Islamists have followed in Algeria since 1995 has sustained them and allowed them to professionalize their cadres. But this political participation has allowed the regime to co-opt these Islamists, robbing these moderates of their legitimacy in the eyes of the public and hindering their capacity to mobilize voters.⁹ Many citizens see these Islamists as being as corrupt as the regime’s old guard. Few Algerians today believe the image of religious purity that the Islamists have tried to display nor in the spiritual utopia that they have promised. As such, mainstream Islamist parties are unlikely to regain their credibility in the near future or have any considerable role in the popular movement that forced Bouteflika from office. Instead, these co-opted parties are likely to keep accepting the rules of the game to have a place in the transition being supervised by the Algerian military.

While the moderate Islamist politicians have been co-opted and do not constitute a real challenge to the regime, other more grassroots manifestations of political Islam such as Dawa Salafiya are taking root in society. Dawa Salafiya is sometimes identified as a form of quietist Salafism, as the movement does not engage in overt political action and does not aim to overthrow the government. Despite this reputation for apoliticism, many Dawa members have strong political views and comment prolifically on political events. So although members of the Dawa Salafiya do not directly engage in political activities, the movement’s shuyukh contribute to discourse on national and international politics.¹⁰ As aptly put by scholar Jacob Olidort, “The silence of the quietists is the space in which one hears the political voice of Salafi activists. . . . Their political actions are quiet, but their political voice is loud.”¹¹

While Dawa Salafiya eschews formal participation in politics, it is now the mainstream Islamist societal movement in Algeria, and its influence is growing. Algerians are renovating Islamist politics from the ground up. While the country’s Islamists grasp that founding an Islamic caliphate in Algeria is a bridge too far, they are still not willing to renounce the goal of Islamizing society at large or to embrace a pluralistic public square. As of April 2019, the Algerian government has not entirely neutralized the challenge of political Islam, and the state acknowledges that Islamists will remain a part of the country’s sociopolitical scene for the foreseeable future.

That being said, understanding how the Algerian government has dealt with political Islam in the past provides an important window for trying to grasp how the regime and the country’s various Islamist groups are likely to navigate the uncertain political terrain ahead.

The Birth of Political Islam in Algeria

Algeria’s brand of political Islam can be traced back to the 1920s and the reformist movement headed by several ulema (scholars) such as Abdelhamid Ben Badis. The ulema called for Algerians to return to the sources of Islam by purifying the faith from the supposedly corrupting influence of marabouts (Muslim holy men) and mystical beliefs and by pushing for Arabization. In 1931, these ulema formed the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulema (AOMA), a religious organization that predated the country’s bid for independence. The association called for the purification of Islam and sought to restore genuine Islamic culture for the Algerian people.

The Early Years

Algeria gained independence in 1962, and a year later former militants from the AOMA like Abdullatif Soltani and nationalist reformists like el Hachemi Tidjani established an association called el Qiyam el Islamiyah (Islamic Values). The organization, commonly called el Qiyam for short, built on the thoughts of the leading theorist of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, and defended Islamic values in Algeria by advocating the Islamization of public life.

To thwart Islamists that were bitter about the nature of the newly independent state, which was far from the Islamic republic they had envisioned, the Algerian regime tried to give itself an air of religious legitimacy. To do so, the country’s leaders established the concept of Islamic socialism, a notion that reconciled Islamic principles with the government’s official modernist and secularist discourse. With appeals to the masses (via populist socialism) and the ummah, or the community of Muslim believers, (via traditional Islam), Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, and his successor, Houari Boumédiène, tried to bring together modernism and traditionalism.

Yet many Islamists disapproved of this approach. El Qiyam published a pamphlet stating that “any regime, any leader who does not rely on Islam, is declared illegal and dangerous. A communist party, a secular party, a socialist-Marxist party, a nationalist party cannot exist in the land of Islam.”¹² The Algerian government eventually banned el Qiyam in 1966 after the group sent then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser a telegram urging him to postpone Qutb’s execution. Still, el Qiyam had an important impact on the Islamist movement in Algeria, where the association was a gateway for radical Islamism. It laid the groundwork for what followed in the 1980s and 1990s. During that period, the Islamists successfully pressured the state to allow the country’s religious conservatives to promote an Arabization agenda and wield considerable influence over the country’s schools and the state bureaucracy, and its members positioned themselves as arbiters of morality over Algerian society. As a result, the Islamists advantage of the democratization of Algeria’s educational system and the government’s Arabization policy to further spread their ideology.¹³ Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these Islamists were very active in universities and mosques as they mobilized students to challenge the regime and encouraged violent political activism.

To counter these inroads that the Islamist groups were making and to burnish its claim of religious legitimacy, the regime imposed and intensified Arabization measures, encouraged the construction of new mosques, held regular seminars on Islamic studies, established Islamic institutes, and published a journal called Asala (authenticity). The regime also gave specific religious figures a great deal of freedom in terms of theological interpretation on the condition that they avoided any criticism of the regime and helped teach Algerians that socialism was only a contemporary variant of Islamic social justice.

The regime sought such cover hoping that this would make it more difficult for the Islamists to oppose its rule, but in reality, the Islamists contested the state’s religious legitimacy again and again. The government’s co-existence with the Islamists repeatedly devolved into confrontation first in the mid-1970s, again in the early 1980s, and finally throughout the 1990s when the struggle reached its climax during the civil war with violent Islamist jihadists.

From Ballots to Bullets

During this period, Algeria’s heterogeneous Islamist movement was composed of several factions or schools of thought.¹⁴ Despite the Islamist movement’s amorphous nature and internal differences, all of its factions agreed on one general strategy: preaching and proselytizing in mosques and universities. Their ideas spread over the course of the 1980s, and political Islam gained newfound momentum. With a firm foothold on campuses nationwide, the Islamist movement gained more followers among the country’s first postindependence generation, who had been disappointed by the educational system and disheartened by the lack of professional opportunities. The Islamists’ discourse convinced many members of this first postindependence generation that the Western model of modernization envisioned by the Algerian state was a failure. Their vision of political Islam offered an alternative system that extolled the country’s Arab and Islamic values; offered citizens a heightened consciousness of this identity; and claimed to furnish solutions that would lead to a better way of life, social justice, and a redistribution of political power and economic wealth.

Although these various segments of the movement disagreed on many matters, their leaders and partisans came together in 1989 to create the FIS. The FIS gave political Islam in Algeria a more formal organizational structure for the first time, and the group went on to serve as the government’s main antagonist in the country’s lengthy civil war. The FIS opposed the country’s leaders, whom it perceived as mustabid (despots) and taghut (those who rebel against God or who are idolatrous) presiding over what it deemed to be an impious democracy that was irreligious because it stemmed from neither the traditions of the Sunna nor sharia.¹⁵

Yet it was that same supposedly impious democracy that the FIS used to try to gain power. In the local elections of June 1990, the FIS drew 54.3 percent of the votes for the Popular Communal Assemblies and secured 57.4 percent of the votes for the Popular Wilaya Assemblies.¹⁶ In the first round of the December 1991 national legislative elections, the FIS obtained 188 out of 231 contested seats the People’s National Assembly; the remaining 199 of the assembly’s 430 total seats were supposed to be decided in a second round election slated for mid-January 1992 that was never held.¹⁷ The military called off the second wave of voting days before ballots were to be cast and took full control of the country. The FIS was banned, and thousands of its sympathizers were jailed. Divisions arose with the ranks of the FIS between those who remained committed in principle to peaceful elections and those who called for violent opposition to the state.

Those who advocated using force against the government did not wait for the electoral process to be interrupted before they unleashed violence. They instigated a deadly attack on Guemmar in November 1991 (before the election’s first round the following month) that was led by an Algerian veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The interruption of the electoral process and the ensuing indiscriminate violence by the security forces triggered further violence. This violent streak reinforced the radical wing of the Islamist movement’s deeply held conviction that the only possible strategy was the use of force and that a peaceful political approach had proven to be a vain endeavor.

As a result, jihadi groups mushroomed around the country, the most prominent one being the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). The FIS aligned itself with the GIA’s call for jihad as the only viable way to establish an Islamic state, and it created a military force called the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS). But the FIS/AIS duo failed from a military standpoint because it neglected to contain the GIA’s extreme violence against civilians and its own members. The pairing also failed on political grounds, as it proved unable to unify Algeria’s Islamists and get its organizational ban lifted.¹⁸ After a decade of fighting, the Algerian state finally overcame its jihadi foes and reasserted its hold on power.

Mixing Hard and Soft Approach es to Combat Jihadism

That victory proved to be hard-won. The indiscriminate violence inflicted by the security forces was counterproductive and prompted many Algerian youth to become radicalized and turn to violence, joining jihadi groups in search of protection, respect, or revenge. Individuals who had long felt ignored and marginalized by the authorities joined and supported groups like the GIA. As a result, entire villages and towns fell under the sway of the GIA, which strictly applied sharia principles and administered their local affairs amid the governance breakdown that accompanied the war.

But public support for the GIA eventually decreased and abated when the group’s violence became indiscriminate and targeted people who once had offered it moral and material support. Eventually, many Algerian citizens turned to the authorities to ask for help and were armed by the state to protect themselves. When these islands of resistance began appearing in jihadist-held parts of the country, the Algerian authorities shifted their strategy. While they multiplied the military and counterterrorism operations on the ground and continued hounding jihadi groups—pursuing them as far as the country’s borders with Tunisia—the authorities also invested in development assistance to tackle violent radicalization at its roots and offered jihadists a way out by implementing a reconciliation policy to demobilize, disarm, and reintegrate former fighters who were willing to renounce violence.

The Security-Led Approach

Early on in the war from 1992 to 1995, the Algerian authorities were nearly overwhelmed by the scale of the violence and the strength of the opposing armed groups, especially the GIA. Many analysts at the time predicted that the regime would fall and that the Islamists would rise to power. Instead, the country’s security apparatus headed by the People’s National Army (PNA) proved to be highly capable, cohesive, and effective. As Theda Skocpol has explained, a state can remain reasonably stable, invulnerable to a revolt by the masses even after having undergone significant delegitimization, if its repressive apparatus remains cohesive and serviceable.¹⁹

The authorities employed a security-led approach in the first years of the conflict (between 1992 and 1995). By rescheduling the repayment of its external debt in 1995, the Algerian authorities were able to reallocate some funds for modernizing the army. The state sought to modernize Algeria’s military forces and provide them with advanced technology, and the government also strove to professionalize the country’s customs personnel and the police.

Although some young people joined armed jihadi groups during this time, many also joined the PNA, especially those from small and medium towns located in the interior of the country.²⁰ The army offered recruits great professional opportunities with good benefits as well as the possibility to leave their little towns for a better life, participate in the fight against terrorism, and protect their country, as depicted in PNA public relations campaigns that helped greatly enhance its image.

The PNA conducted sweeps and air strikes in rural areas (such as Douar Béni Zermane, Douar Béni Aref, and Attaba), as well as in mountainous places (like Mount Zbarbar and Mount Chréa). Police forces were mobilized in urban areas, and the Gendarmerie Nationale (a national rural police force) carried out operations in both urban and rural zones. The air force, the gendarmerie, the police, and special forces personnel actively assisted the army on large-scale operations like the Battle of Aïn Defla. During that operation in March 1995, the army reportedly killed approximately 800 jihadists in the cities of Oran and Arzew as well as the Djurdjura Mountains.²¹ Over time, Algeria’s security forces significantly reduced the strength of the jihadi armed groups and recovered important stocks of weapons. Captured jihadists were crucial for helping the state and its supporters gather intelligence and foil further attacks.

The Algerian state also created auxiliary forces that helped turn the tide in the conflict. In 1994, the state created a series of militias (with an estimated 200,000 members) to operate in the most remote parts of the country.²² Moreover, the time period of conscription was extended to eighteen months. Approximately 15,000 reservists were called into service in May 1995 for twelve months to help keep the country secure.²³ They aided the government in fighting armed groups, protecting citizens, and preventing the reestablishment of armed groups in liberated areas, which allowed people to return home. These forces greatly helped weaken the armed jihadi groups, which lost more than 6,000 fighters between 1994 and 1996.²⁴

Preventing Violent Extremism

Understanding that a security-led approach would not be enough to fight jihadism and to regain legitimacy in the eyes of the public, the Algerian regime took advantage of the rescheduling of the country’s debt to invest in development, unlocking nearly $20 billion.²⁵ The government initiated a raft of economic reforms, including structural adjustment measures through price liberalization, the partial liberalization of the country’s protectionist economy to allow more foreign trade, and the encouragement of foreign investment. These reforms helped the government secure the private and international partners it needed to maintain itself both financially and militarily, since these measures furnished funds that could be used to modernize its military forces as well as its repressive security apparatus.

International aid and these reforms in 1995 allowed the regime to bolster social welfare programs for housing, employment, healthcare, and infrastructure. That same year, the government increased the funding allocated for housing credits from $10 million to $15 million and set aside $2.2 billion for food and medicine as well as $2.2 billion for capital goods.²⁶ By better meeting the needs of the population, the regime began calming social tensions and curbing the expansion of violent jihadi extremism by countering it at its roots.

Administrative changes within the country’s state-level governments followed. Fearing that Islamists had penetrated the political system—as many provincial governors (or wali) had close relationships with armed groups—and wishing to reestablish a monopoly on the country’s governing structures, the state dismissed many officials who had worked in customs or public administration. Newly appointed wali were charged with implementing a national policy designed to help unemployed young people secure jobs. Government officials encouraged the military and a variety of state-owned enterprises to recruit more young graduates, as roughly 150,000 jobs materialized between 1994 and 1996.²⁷ Over that same time period, local committees were set up to study potential investment projects, and a government agency for promoting and monitoring investment registered 900 new projects involving local entrepreneurs that created between 70,000 and 100,000 additional jobs.²⁸

In addition to these efforts to bolster employment, the government tackled the country’s major housing problems by announcing the construction of a substantial number of new residential units in May 1995.²⁹ In addition, the state instituted a policy to provide limited funds and other forms of support to help citizens return home after fleeing for security reasons. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of Algerian internally displaced persons (IDPs) reached 1.5 million, many of whom settled mainly on the outskirts of major urban centers. To help these Algerians return to their homes and redress the unequal distribution of inhabitants, the government undertook a national redevelopment policy. But a mere 170,000 of the IDPs went back home while 1.3 million continued to live on the fringes of the cities where they had resettled.³⁰ Still, these various measures helped begin restoring public confidence in the state and curtailing the recruitment of violent jihadi extremists.

Conciliatory Measures

The Algerian government first attempted to begin reconciling with its jihadi foes in 1995. Then president Liamine Zéroual unveiled a clemency law that urged jihadists to abandon violence and reintegrate into society under certain conditions. The Algerian military and the AIS conducted secret talks, and the AIS’s national emir Madani Mezrag eventually announced a unilateral ceasefire in 1997, an important moment that marked the start of a long road to national recovery. It seems as though Merzag calculated that it was crucial for the AIS to distance itself from the extreme violence of the GIA, but his decision to engage with the regime was also a question of survival. The AIS had been greatly weakened by a two-front struggle against the state security forces as well as the GIA, which had started a purge against other FIS and AIS members in April 1995. At the same time, the GIA obstinately refused to entertain the possibility of talks with the government or a truce. Merzag’s charismatic leadership, the centralized structure of the AIS, and the group’s openness to pursuing talks with the government allowed him to open lines of communication with the regime. Meanwhile, the GIA’s decentralized structure and the deaths of key leaders reduced its influence over the insurgents’ decision of whether or not to pursue rapprochement with the government. In the end, approximately 7,000 fighters (including 800 GIA combatants) renounced violence and laid down their weapons right after the ceasefire.³¹

When former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika came to power (1999–2019), he effectively extended the clemency law by enacting the 1999 Civil Harmony Law, which garnered widespread support in a subsequent national referendum.³² In theory, former jihadists were eligible for conditional amnesty if they had not been involved in particularly grievous offenses such as collective rape, massacre, or setting bombs in public spaces. For those who had committed such acts, the law allowed for reduced prison sentences. But in practice, things were less straightforward. Because of the sheer number of fighters and cases and the lack of evidence in many instances, it was highly difficult for the authorities to authenticate jihadists’ claims of innocence. Virtually any former jihadists that yielded and denied committing such offenses were pardoned.³³ The government took this approach to spur jihadists that were still holding out to turn themselves in.

Six years later, the Algerian government enacted the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. Building on the earlier Civil Harmony Law, the charter indemnified state security personnel and government-friendly militias from responsibility for extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances during the war. FIS members were forbidden from engaging in any political activities, although the authorities enlisted some of the organization’s leading figures such as Rabeh Kébir, Anwar Haddam, and Mustapha Kertali to endorse the reconciliation policy. Other former jihadists were given a platform on primetime television to talk about their motivations for joining jihadi groups and their decision to defect. This campaign helped raise public awareness about the dangers of violent extremism, gave the reconciliation policy an additional layer of legitimacy, and discouraged others from joining or remaining a part of the jihadi cause.³⁴

To help former jihadists reintegrate into society, prevent recidivism, and fend off economic hardship, the authorities offered them substantial financial compensation. Social enterprises, state-owned enterprises, and private companies offered former fighters professional opportunities. These job-centered rehabilitation efforts were critical because they provided former jihadists with a sense of belonging, pride and dignity, and a restored conception of citizenship. In doing so, the Algerian authorities undercut the appeal of being recruited by jihadi groups.

Post–Civil War Jihadism in Algeria

As a result of the Algerian government’s soft and hard approaches, at least an estimated 15,000 former jihadists renounced violence.³⁵ Due to the state’s successful efforts to crack down on jihadism and address its root causes, combined with public anger over the GIA’s indiscriminate violence, the jihadi group’s strength and influence plummeted, and it ceased to be a major actor on the Algerian jihadi scene. Some former GIA members resurfaced in 1997 to form an offshoot called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, a group that subsequently merged with local al-Qaeda affiliates in 2007 and rebranded itself as AQIM.

After the violence-plagued 1990s, Algeria’s security outlook has been far more stable since. In 2017, Gallup ranked Algeria as the seventh-safest country in the world.³⁶ Nonetheless, the risk of jihadi violence is not nonexistent, and even if AQIM does not constitute an existential threat as its predecessor did in the 1990s, sporadic, localized jihadi activity remains a nuisance. A source inside the Algerian army estimates that there are still between 500 to 1,000 jihadists operating in the country.³⁷ The population’s support for jihadi groups in general and for AQIM, in particular, is weak as proven by the loss of AQIM’s last bastion in the Berber hinterlands.³⁸ In addition, the losses of several jihadi leaders and assets have taken a toll. The Algerian security forces have continued to vigilantly pressure AQIM especially since the Arab Spring uprisings and what followed in the Sahel region when northern Mali fell into the hands of AQIM.

In Algeria itself, AQIM is highly mobile and works in small, detached cells, striking randomly and using suicide bombings to make its moves even more difficult to predict. While it is true that AQIM failed to pass on its dream of a caliphate to a new generation of Algerians, the group has continued to gain limited traction among some members of a generation that understand how heavily t