In 1979 or '81 he formed the Group for Defense Against the Illicit, pressuring the government to implement Islamic law and to adopt policies that reflected "real" Muslim values.

This caused him to go into hiding; in January 1983, he hid with Hadi Hamoudi [ar] near Bouguerra Mountain near El Aouinet.

[13][14] On November 12, 1982, Bouyali and four others fired for the first time at security forces at a police roadblock in Oued Romane, near El-Achour.

[15] The group often attracted unemployed young men because "its rhetoric evoked 'memories of the bandits of honor in the mountains, paralleling the life of the Prophet and drawing on the original war of liberation'".

[21] On the night of August 21, 1985, Bouyali and his militants robbed a DNC (state-owned enterprise) factory in Aïn-Naadja of £110,000[22] or one million dinars[15] and on August 26–27,[note 2] 1985, MIA insurgents headed by Bouyali, attacked a police school in Soumaâ, killing an officer and seizing 340 weapons, and more than 18,000 pieces of ammunition.

Other important MIA members such as Abdelkader Chebouti and Mansouri Meliani were sentenced to death and subsequently jailed, but released in 1989 and pardoned in 1990 due to political reforms.

[30] Meliani would later be arrested in July 1992 and executed in 1993 after he and Chebouti were captured after a battle in Ashour, a few hundred meters from Bouyali's unmarked grave.

On June 15, or 20, 1987, the largest trial of Algerian Islamists started, with 202 defendants and four in absentia represented by a 49 man defense council.

[34][35] This group created the foundation for resistance leading to the Algerian Civil War as veterans of the MIA were the ones that launched the armed rebellion in 1992.

[37] In January 1993, Ali Benhadj issued a fatwa from his prison cell granting the MIA the number two spot in the FIS, after the GIA.