The Armed Islamic Group (GIA, from French: Groupe Islamique Armé; Arabic: الجماعة الإسلامية المسلّحة, romanized: al-Jamāʿa al-ʾIslāmiyya al-Musallaḥa) was one of the two main Islamist insurgent groups that fought the Algerian government and army in the Algerian Civil War.
It was created from smaller armed groups following the 1992 military coup and the arrest and internment of thousands of officials in the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) party after it won the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991. It was led by a succession of amirs (commanders) who were killed or arrested one after another. Unlike the other main armed groups, the Islamic Armed Movement (MIA) and the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), the GIA sought not to bargain with the government, but to overthrow it and "purge the land of the ungodly" in its pursuit of an Islamic state. The slogan inscribed on all its communiques was: "no agreement, no truce, no dialogue". GIA's ideology was inspired by the Jihadist writings of the Egyptian Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb.
The group desired to create "an atmosphere of general insecurity" and employed kidnapping, assassination, and bombings, including car bombs, and targeted security forces and civilians. Between 1992 and 1998, the GIA conducted a violent campaign of civilian massacres, sometimes wiping out entire villages in its area of operation (notably in Bentalha and Rais). It attacked and killed other Islamists who had left the GIA or attempted to negotiate with the government. It also targeted foreign civilians living in Algeria, killing more than 100 expatriate men and women.
The group also established a presence in France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, and the United States. It launched terror attacks in France in 1994 and 1995. While it was the "undisputed principal Islamist force" in Algeria in 1994, militants were deserting "in droves" by 1996, alienated by its execution of civilians and Islamist leaders.
In 1999, a government amnesty law motivated large numbers of jihadis to "repent". The remnants of the GIA proper were hunted down over the next two years, leaving a splinter group the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which announced its support for Al-Qaeda in October 2003. The extent to which the group was infiltrated and manipulated by Algerian security services is disputed.
The GIA is considered a terrorist organisation by the governments of Algeria, France, the United States, Argentina, Bahrain, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations. The GIA remains a Proscribed Organisation in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000. Canada listed GIA as a terrorist entity until 18 June 2024.
According to Algerian veterans of the Afghan jihad who founded the GIA, the idea of forming an armed group to fight jihad against the Algerian government was developed not after the coup, but after leaders of the MIA were freed from prison in 1989. The idea was not acted on then due to the spectacular electoral political success of the FIS. Embracing Sayyid Qutb's takfir (excommunication) of secular governments and assertion that engaging in armed jihad against Jaahili societies was mandatory; GIA leaders condemned the FLN regime as apostates and called upon Algerians to rise up, pledge allegiance to them, and violently overthrow the socialist government in pursuit of establishing an Islamic state in Algeria. The support base of the GIA mainly consisted of the educationally and economically underprivileged classes of Algerian society.
Early in 1992, Mansour Meliani, a former aid to Bouyali, along with many "Afghans", broke with his former friend Abdelkader Heresay and left the MIA, founding his own Jihadi group around July 1992. Meliani was arrested in July and executed in August 1993. He was replaced by Mohammed Allal, aka Moh Leveilley, who was killed on 1 September 1992 by the Algerian military when it attacked a meeting held to unify command of the jihad.
In the early 1990s, the economic state of Algeria was dire. 41% of Algerians ages 15–24 were unemployed in 1990. Young Algerians were a main part of the GIA; it was able to "enlist young Algerians who felt overall excluded from mainstream society and the country’s political life", according to a study from the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
Leveilley was replaced in January 1993 by Abdelhak Layada, who declared his group independent of the FIS and MIA and not obedient to its orders. It adopted the radical Omar El-Eulmi as a spiritual guide, and Layada affirmed that "political pluralism is equivalent to sedition". He also believed jihad in Algeria was fard ayn, or an individual obligation of adult male Muslims. Layada threatened not just security forces but journalists ("grandsons of France") and the families of Algerian soldiers. From its inception on, the GIA called for and implemented the killing of anyone collaborating with or supporting the authorities, including government employees such as teachers and civil servants.
Layada did not last long and was arrested in Morocco in May 1993.
Besides the GIA, the other major branch of the Algerian resistance was the MIA. It was led by the ex-soldier "General" Abdelkader Chebouti, and was "well-organized and structured and favored a long-term jihad" targeting the state and its representatives and based on a guerrilla campaign like that of the War of Independence. From prison, Ali Benhadj issued a fatwa giving the MIA his blessing. In March 2006, Abdelhak Layada was released from prison, amnesty measures provided for in the Charter for Peace and Reconciliation launched by the president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, even offering himself as a mediator to seek a truce between the government and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.
On August 21, 1993, Seif Allah Djafar, aka Mourad Si Ahmed, aka Djafar al-Afghani, a 30-year-old black marketer with no education beyond primary school, became GIA amir. Violence escalated under Djafar, as did the GIA's base of support outside of Algeria.
Under him, the group named and assassinated specific journalists and intellectuals (such as Tahar Djaout), saying that "The journalists who fight against Islamism through the pen will perish by the sword."
The GIA explicitly affirmed that it "did not represent the armed wing of the FIS", and issued death threats against several FIS and MIA members, including MIA's Heresay and FIS's Kebir and Redjam.
About the time al-Afghani took power of GIA, a group of Algerian jihadists returning from Afghanistan came to London. Together with Islamist intellectual Abu Qatada, they started up a weekly magazine, Usrat al-Ansar as a GIA propaganda outlet. Abu Qatada "provided the intellectual and ideological firepower" to justify GIA actions, and the journal became "a trusted source of news and information about the GIA for Islamists around the world."
The GIA soon broadened its attacks to civilians who refused to live by their prohibitions, and then foreigners living in Algeria. A hostage released on 31 October 1993 carried a message ordering foreigners to "leave the country. We are giving you one month. Anyone who exceeds that period will be responsible for his own sudden death." By the end of 1993 26 foreigners had been killed.
In November 1993 Sheik Mohamed Bouslimani "a popular figure who was prominent" in Hamas party of Mahfoud Nahnah was kidnapped and executed after "refusing to issue a fatwa endorsing the GIA's tactics."