This chapter examines coalition politics within the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). As the GSPC transitioned into al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), debates arose about the wisdom of aligning with al-Qaida. Moreover, as the GSPC/AQIM effected a “Saharan turn,” the organization’s decentralization and the ambitions of particular Saharan field commanders led to serious debates about strategy. Only some of these debates could be definitively resolved, resulting in a high degree of variation within a single organization. At the same time, leading figures in the GSPC/AQIM sought to use religious language and concepts to maintain a semblance of unity in their coalition. AQIM developed a sophisticated legal body, partly in order to maintain cohesion and to attempt to reinforce the central leadership’s power over independent-minded field commanders. The chapter argues that jihadist coalitions can avoid destructive schisms by empowering field commanders and tolerating a high level of dissent from them, but that this strategy has substantial costs in terms of the central leadership’s ability to impose a singular vision on subordinates.

This chapter tells the story of shifting jihadist coalitions within Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) initially built a broad coalition comprising veterans of Afghanistan, veterans of an earlier domestic Algerian insurgency, local hardliners, and other armed groups that the GIA drew in. Yet at the peak of coalition-building, the death of a unifying figure set the stage for bitter infighting as the local hardliners began to exclude and even kill the leaders of other coalition blocs. Eventually, the GIA fragmented along ideological but also geographical lines, with regional field commanders revolting against the clique of leaders from Algiers and nearby Blida. The GIA splinter organization the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (French acronym GSPC) represented the reaction of field commanders, who wished to move away from internal purges and civilian massacres and back to fighting the Algerian state.