Emily Hunt at WINEP writes that the Algerian government's six month offer of amnesty to domestic Islamist rebels, most of whom belong to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which expired yesterday, was a political victory it failed to end the terror threat. GSPC operatives, who believe in a "pure" interpretation of the Koran, are strong and increasingly support global jihad.
The GSPC has been linked to an external network of terrorists in Western Europe and is heir to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), one of the Islamist movement's vanguard parties, which defeated the Algerian regime in the 1991 parliamentary elections and would have swept the second round in early 1992 if the military had not intervened to prevent it. Tens of thousands of Algerians supported the FIS's vision of an Islamic Republic of Algeria, rooted in and governed by sharia. Today, their Islamist political agenda lives in GSPC. On March 11, 2005 the GSPC issued a fatwa justifying the murder of "the Jews and the Christians and all other nonbelievers" in Algeria.
The Algerian people are hungry for national reconciliation, but it would be naive to think that after almost fifteen years of violence ad some 200,000 dead, that the Islamists have abandoned their hope of imposing an Islamic political ideology on Algeria. Islamist leaders, active during the civil war, are increasingly testing today's political waters. Their means have changed, but not their ends.
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