The West’s Blind Spot on the Muslim Brotherhood
25th September 2025
The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
activist class in the West either have no knowledge of — or choose to forget — one of the bloodiest internal conflicts in the modern Arab world: Algeria’s war against the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the FIS won the first round of parliamentary elections in 1991, the Algerian military intervened. What followed was a decade-long civil war — Algeria’s “Black Decade” – that left more than 200,000 people dead, many of them civilians.
This was not a remote or tidy struggle. It was marked by massacres of entire villages such as Rais, Bentalha and Sidi Hamed, where men, women and children were slaughtered. Armed Islamist factions used children as human shields. The state responded with mass arrests, secret detention camps, torture and widespread disappearances. Human rights groups estimate that 7,000–20,000 Algerians simply vanished after being picked up by the security services. It was a conflict of unrelenting terror that scarred Algerian society for a generation.
This was not an isolated episode in the Arab world. Across the Middle East and North Africa, — secular Arab governments — have repeatedly been forced to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood when it has threatened to seize state power. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Persian Gulf states (except Qatar), and of course Algeria have all confronted the movement. In each case, the lesson has been the same: when the Brotherhood is allowed to operate unchecked, the consequences are catastrophic for civil society, women, minorities and political pluralism.