Algeria, January 15th of 1992.

The leader of FIS, Abdelkader Hachani, has been put in handcuffs and dragged inside a military truck, to be brought into incarceration after the coup in Algiers. With President Benjedid expelled from power and the new President, Boudiaf, ruling with the support of the junta, the FIS was nearly extinct after the incarceration of, according to Giles Kepel, forty-thousand members of the party; whose sheer amount of incarcerated convicts was so immense that the members of the junta agreed to set up prison camps in the Sahara desert in order to guarantee that they would not be broken out by militant members.

On the sixteenth of January, the death of a police officer was reported and the perpetrator was captured, his allegiance was to a group which now called itself the Islamic Armed Movement or the MIA, which immediately took up arms against the transgressions of the military; due to the nature of the conflict and the geography of Algeria as a whole, a desert in the south and mainly urbanized areas in the north means that most of the groups to combat in Algeria will, naturally, be urban. The armed forces and the HCE were both scrambling to make sure that urban areas were free of the Islamists’ influence, which was nearly impossible with the aggravation of the arrest of Abdelkader and other key FIS members.

The funding was bolstered for security forces and the armed forces by, respectively, US$40 million and US$60 million; with President Boudiaf already commenting against “aggravating the circumstances”. The President, last time he was spoken to, mentioned being a peaceful man and desiring to bring all parties to the negotiation table in order to guarantee a safe, stable government without further bloodshed. These calls were, unfortunately, not being heard. In January 22nd, a military officer slapped and forcibly shaved the beard of a 63-year old man in the streets of Algier, claiming that “he was clearly a FIS sympathizer”. That same officer was shot to death three days later on January 25th by anti-government forces, which are now under severe investigation.

It seems that the general situation of Algeria at the moment is extremely tenuous and the government is attempting to ensure that there is no confusion that Algeria is stabilized and is suffering merely from a small amount of radical elements that seem to have no connection to the coup in early January, but the veil is extremely thin, as seen from two captured militants on January 29th that claimed that “Algeria is a free nation that follows the will of Allah; our virtue is strong and we will not be stomped down by the government, the military or whoever decides that it is their right to do so; Allah is right beside us in this struggle and I’m sure we will persevere.” These words were censored by the Armed Forces of Algeria but many sympathizers of FIS and MIA ended up distributing the article clandestinely to hundreds of households.

The popularity of the armed forces at this moment in Algeria was lukewarm at best among the common populace, with bearded men scared of going out on the streets due to fears of being FIS sympathizers, children avoiding playing in the streets due to the rampant violence between police officers and Islamist militias, and a dangerous, rising investigation of a major acquisition of different components that are suspected of being utilized for the construction of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. For now, neither the Minister of Defense, nor the chairman of the HCE have anything to present or say about the case, other than “an investigation is ongoing and we will update the press about it once we have further information.” Naturally, an explosion in a supermarket two days later which killed three police officers and the store owner, begged to differ that the investigation was successful.