The Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (English lit. Islamic Democratic[citation needed] Alliance; acronym: IDA[citation needed] or IJI; Urdu: اسلامی جمہوری اتحاد‎) was a right-wing conservative alliance formed in September 1988 to oppose the democratic socialist Pakistan Peoples Party in elections that year.[1] The alliance comprised nine parties, of which the major components were the Pakistan Muslim League (PML), National Peoples Party (NPP), Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), with PML accounting for 80% of the IJI's electoral candidates. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, under director Hamid Gul, had a major role in forming the center-of-right political alliance.[2][3] Care had been taken to ensure that the alliance comprised nine parties to generate comparison with the nine-party Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) that had campaigned against PPP in 1977.[4]