Ali Benhadj

Who is Ali Benhadj?

Ali Benhadj was the Vice-President of the Islamic Salvation Front.

Born in 1956 in Tunis to parents of Mauritanian origin from the wilaya of Adrar in Algeria, Belhadj became a teacher of Arabic and an Islamist activist in the 1970s. In 1989, after the Algerian Constitution was changed to allow multiparty democracy, he helped found the Islamic Salvation Front, an Islamic party which won the only ever free elections in Algeria since its independence. During this period, he was a preacher at the famous Al-Sunna mosque in Bab el-Oued, a popular district in Algiers.

In 1991, soon after FIS had finished a strike and massive demonstrations in Algiers, he, along with FIS president Abassi Madani, was arrested and jailed on charges of threatening state security. In late 1991, FIS won the first round of parliamentary elections, which were then called off by the military, who banned FIS; Belhadj remained in jail throughout most of the Algerian Civil War that followed, and was released only after serving a 12-year sentence in 2003 under the condition of abstaining from all political activity. Belhadj is in possession of a certain charismatic talent, his speech is more poetic than rational.