 Arrested after the Sétif massacre of May 8, 1945, during which the French Army and pieds-noirs mobs killed about 6,000 Algerians, Abbas founded the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA) in 1946 and was elected as a deputy.Founded in 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) succeeded Messali Hadj's Algerian People's Party (PPA), while its leaders created an armed wing, the "Armée de Libération Nationale" (National Liberation Army) to engage in an armed struggle against French authority.Many Algerian soldiers served for the French Army in the French Indochina War had strong sympathy to the Vietnamese fighting against France, and took up the experience from it to support the ALN.