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The Islamic Salvation Front (تحرير الجبهة الإسلامية للإنقاذ) (French: Front Islamique du Salut) is an outlawed Islamist political party in Algeria.
The FIS was founded in February 1989 by an elderly sheikh, Abbassi Madani, and a charismatic young mosque preacher, Ali Belhadj. The party capitalized on the discontent of younger, lower class Algerians and middle class traders who felt left out of the economy.
The Algerian constitution had been amended in the late 1980's to allow for new political parties, after decades of single-party rule. The FIS protested, in part, the secularization of the Algerian state, and the broadening of women's rights.
Soon, however, Belhadj's preaching got the attention of the army, and when the FIS called for a general strike in 1991 to protest the machinations of the official Front for National Liberation party, he and Madani were arrested. They would spend the next twelve years in prison, as a civil war raged around them.
Immediately after their arrests, the FIS won the first round of elections in December 1991; in response, the army stepped in and "interrupted" the electoral process, preventing the probable FIS victory in the legislative, if not presidential, elections. Massive civil unrest followed, and the FIS was banned in March 1992.
The arrests, the cancellation of the elections, and the banning of the party pushed the country inexorably into a civil war which would claim more than 100,000 lives, from which it only began to emerge at the end of the 1990s. Elements of the FIS established their own guerrilla army - the AIS, or Islamic Salvation Army - but were quickly upstaged by the more radical Armed Islamic Group. After some years of uneasy cooperation, the latter turned on the AIS[1] (http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/gia.htm), which, faced with attacks from both sides and wanting to dissociate itself from the GIA's civilian massacres, declared a unilateral ceasefire in 1997, and disbanded in 1999[2] (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/433/re4.htm).
Although Belhadj and Madani have been released from prison, their party remains banned, and they live under strictly controlled conditions.
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