Word: fundamentalistism
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Louzoum's assassination was a reminder that no one is safe in Algeria as a populist Islamic fundamentalist movement struggles to take power from the army-backed state. Despite an official state of emergency under strict military enforcement, more than 3,500 Algerians have been killed in the past two years, the head of state was assassinated 18 months ago, and two former Prime Ministers have packed their bags and moved to Paris...
...years since the powerful military canceled the first free parliamentary elections to forestall a Muslim fundamentalist victory, Algeria has plunged into its bloodiest crisis since the 1954-62 war of independence from France. The Islamic Salvation Front, seeking to turn the country into a religious state, has attracted the allegiance of millions in a population ripe with discontent after 30 years of misrule by the one-party socialist government. Declining oil revenues, crushing unemployment, rampant inflation and widespread government corruption have fueled a revolt against the old leadership and a crisis in national identity...
Under a harsh military crackdown on the Islamic Front, outlawed in 1992, the battle for Algeria has only worsened. Armed militants ambush police, assassinate officials and murder intellectuals and others opposed to the fundamentalist movement. Security forces arrest suspects at will, torture prisoners and sentence alleged rebels to death in extraconstitutional courts. The government attributes the daily civilian slayings to the Islamists. But Algerian and Western sources say antifundamentalist death squads, suspected of links to the security services, also operate during the nightly curfews, kidnapping Islamists or their relatives from home and dumping their bodies nearby...
Egyptian officials, who are playing an increasingly prominent role as mediators, are trying to persuade Arafat to accept Israel's offer. Mubarak, facing his own troubles with Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, is known to fear a surge in Palestinian support for the extremist Hamas movement in the occupied territories if the P.L.O. fails to reach agreement with Israel. President Clinton's mid-January summit with Syrian President Hafez Assad in Geneva is sure to bring renewed pressure on Arafat as well. Optimists assume that, in the end, the Israelis and the P.L.O. will agree on a formula that allows Palestinian self...
...terms of the accord signed on the White House lawn in September, the Israelis were to start withdrawing troops from the Gaza Strip. The withdrawal has been delayed, but to demonstrate their scorn for the deadline before it had even passed, members of Islamic Jihad, an extremist Muslim fundamentalist group, decided to deploy a weapon only recently borrowed from Muslim radicals elsewhere -- the suicide car bomber. So early Monday morning at a highway intersection just outside the Gaza City limits, Aziz sped the ambulance toward an Israeli patrol. The soldiers opened fire, and the bullets ignited canisters of propane that...