Analysis of a Terrorist Organization: The Armed Islamic Group
As facile as the phrase may be, one man's terrorist is often another man's freedom fighter. Katerina Dalacoura (2006) made precisely this point in discussing the various categories of putatively "terrorist" organizations operating in the world today. Some such groups are more legitimately called "domestic insurgencies" which operate with respect to a political or ideological agenda. This essay will present a case analysis of one terrorist group and answer a series of questions regarding the group's motivation, its tactics, and its causal antecedents.
The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) is described by the Intelligence Resource Program (2004) as an Islamic terrorist group that seeks to overthrown the secular government of Algeria and to replace that regime with an Islamic state. The GIA began violent domestic activity in 1992 in response to the Algerian government's voiding of the December 1991 legislative electoral victory of the Islamic Salvation Front, the main opposition party (Intelligence Resource Program, 2004). Since 1992, GIA has been engaged in an ongoing campaign of civilian massacres that have at times eliminated entire villages. Additionally, GIA has targeted foreigners living in Algeria since 1993, killing over 100 expatriates in the country, most of them European. Assassinations, kidnappings, bombings (including car bombing), and even airliner hijacking are among the terror tactics used by the group, whose numbers are dwindling and which may now consist of nor more than 100 individuals in Algeria and Europe (Intelligence Resource Program, 2004).
GIA is seen by Dalacoura (2006) as an example of an armed domestic insurgency that seeking to rectify perceived political inequities in Algeria. Specifically, GIA emerged after a hotly contested election in 1991 in which the existing regime in Algeria denied the victory of a staunchly conservative I...