Rachad accused of setting Algeria on fire

Aya Ezz

Algerian President, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, accused on August 13 Rachad Movement, the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Algeria, of setting fires in the eastern state of Tizi Ouzou.

Algeria classified the movement on May 18 as a ‘terrorist’ one and banned its activities nationwide.

President Tebboune said then that the head of his country’s Supreme Security Council studied the ‘hostile’ acts of the movement, concluding that those acts were aimed at destabilizing Algeria.

The decision to classify Rachad as a ‘terrorist organization’ came after several requests for the movement to be placed on Algeria’s terrorism list.

A number of Algerian lawyers submitted a signed request to the Ministry of Justice to classify the Brotherhood movement on the list of terrorist organizations for conspiring against the security of the state and the stability of its institutions.

What is it?

Rachad was founded in 2007 by five terrorists who were involved in criminal operations in Algeria.

These terrorists are Mourad Dhina, Mohamed Larbi Zeytout, Mohamed Samraoui, Abbas Erwa, Rachid Mesli.

Zeytout is accused of running a terrorist group that commits acts against state security and national unity, financing a terrorist group that commits acts against state security, participating in forgery, using forged administrative documents and money laundering within the framework of a criminal group, according to reports.

Dhina has been a professional terrorist since the 1990s, when he joined the terrorist Salvation Front in 1992 after he received training in armed terrorist actions in the terrorist camps of al-Qaeda in Sudan at the hands of al-Qaeda leader at the time, Osama bin Laden.

Today, he is the mufti of the terrorist movement, according to testimonies by some movement defectors.

Erwa is a specialist in medical physics. The terrorist movement defines him as an international expert in peace and conflict resolution.

Rashad includes a group of former activists in the terrorist Islamic Salvation Front which was dissolved in March 1992 against the background of its involvement in the violence and terrorism that took place in Algeria and left a quarter million people dead. It came to be known as the ‘black decade’.