The government's main opponent in the war was the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), an Islamic terrorist organization and Al Qaeda affiliate that was described by John R. Schindler in The National Interest in July 2012 as "supremely violent" and as the perpetrator of "a wave of bombings in Paris in the summer of 1995" that were "Al Qaeda's first attacks on the West". Schindler notes that "Algeria's nightmare years of 1993–1997 were a focus of the international human-rights community" but that "the terrible fratricide the 1990s got little coverage in Western media, despite the fact that it probably claimed twice as many lives as the Bosnian conflict, which ran concurrently and received nonstop Western attention." Schindler added that "Algeria's bloody civil war, which began twenty years ago, never really ended."