Escalating tensions : Mali-Algeria border conflict analyzed
Tensions between Mali and Algeria have intensified following Mali's withdrawal from the 2015 Algiers Peace Agreement, which was signed between the Azawad movements and the Malian government. Algeria sees itself as entitled to intervene in Malian politics, shaping it according to its own interests, particularly in regional conflicts. Since 1962, Algeria has sponsored four agreements between Mali and the Tuaregs, none of which have yielded concrete results, reflecting its ongoing attempts to impose its agenda on Mali.
The incident involving the Turkish drone, used by the Malian army, exposes Algeria's misleading claims. Contrary to the Algerian army's assertions, the drone was not shot down by its forces but rather fell near the Algerian-Malian border after being brought down by the Azawad Liberation Front.
What has changed in relations between Algeria and the Malian authorities, who have been in power since the coup on August 18, 2020?
Mali's transitional government emerged from popular demands to break away from past policies that served the interests of France, its former colonizer, and were subject to Algeria's influence. While Algeria does not oppose military rule, it criticizes the transitional government's decision to limit its influence in Mali.
Imam Mahmoud Dicko, now in Algeria, played a key role in the popular opposition that led to the overthrow of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. The secretary-general of Dicko's June 5 Movement was appointed head of the transitional government. Additionally, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), now renamed the Azawad Liberation Front following Mali's withdrawal from the Algiers Agreement, continues to participate in the transitional government with two ministers.
Does Algeria use opposition forces against the Malian government as leverage?
Algeria hosts and supports nearly all opposition forces to the Bamako government, whether religious, secular, or tribal. However, it lacks the leverage to force Mali's transitional government—strongly backed by Russia—into compliance. Algeria does not seek to overthrow Mali's military rulers but aims to re-establish its influence over Malian foreign policy. Once this goal is achieved, Algeria is likely to abandon opposition factions, including armed groups, leaving them to Bamako.
Algeria has also attempted to restore its ties with Mali through dialogue with Moscow, but Russia appears unwilling to allow its return to the Malian scene. Meanwhile, Mali's transitional government—despite concerns over human rights abuses linked to the Wagner Group—is pursuing internal reconciliations without external intermediaries.
Aside from Mali, Algeria has tensions with most of its neighbors...
Even Tunisia, under President Kaïs Saïed, remains under Algeria's influence in exchange for certain benefits. Algeria has been at the center of regional disputes, including border conflicts with Morocco and control over an oil-rich region in Tunisia. It has also played a destabilizing role in Libya, Mali, and Niger.
Additionally, Algeria faces accusations of sponsoring terrorism in the Sahel, with leaders of Daesh and the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims emerging from the Tindouf camps. Through its authoritarian policies, Algeria obstructs cooperation between Maghreb and Sahel countries, hindering regional integration and economic development.
Can Algeria regain its influence in Mali?
If Mali's transitional government continues to consolidate sovereignty by diversifying partnerships and fostering balanced regional relations, Algeria's influence over Malian politics is likely over. However, Bamako must address regional grievances, ensure justice and development, and curb human rights abuses committed by the Wagner Group against communities accused of supporting terrorism or opposition groups.
Do rising tensions between Mali and Algeria benefit Morocco?
Morocco has a strong and well-established presence in West Africa, particularly in Mali, through religious, historical, commercial, and economic ties. Royal initiatives have further strengthened Morocco's position in the region, marking its return to Africa's geopolitical landscape.
Morocco's soft power is well-rooted and should be complemented by a respectful, sovereign approach to African affairs. Developing cooperation based on a win-win principle, rather than focusing solely on defending its territorial integrity, will reinforce Morocco's influence and help fulfill its strategic vision for the region.
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The triple reaffirmation follows similar declarations made Tuesday during both the ministerial opening meeting and the preparatory meeting of senior officials. During the ministerial meeting, Iwaya precisely stated: 'I wish to clarify that the presence in this meeting of any entity that Japan does not recognize as a State does not affect Japan's position concerning the status of this entity.' Japan's diplomatic corps further marked its reservation regarding the presence of the self-proclaimed 'SADR' by explaining that Tokyo refused to extend an invitation to the paper state and only invited 'countries with which Japan maintains diplomatic relations.' Japanese officials clarified that 'it is the African Union Commission that invited all its members.' This year's firm stance by Japan effectively slams the door on any political maneuvering space that the separatist group attempted to exploit last year when they infiltrated the preparatory meeting for TICAD-9. 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Morocco is constructing an Atlantic geoeconomic corridor with the Dakhla Atlantique port platform, logistics and renewable energy zones, and southbound connectivity for the Sahel – reframing the Sahara from 'disputed periphery' to hinge of a trans-Sahel supply chain. Rather than chase an abstract 'international community,' Rabat has built stacked alignments with Gulf partners, West African states, and Mediterranean interlocutors, each with issue-linkage across security, energy, migration, and trade domains. This represents coalitional realism, not bandwagoning. The law and norms terrain has markedly shifted. International practice now defaults to territorial integrity unless there's a decolonization rubric or catastrophic rights 'remedy' threshold. The Sahara file – after decades of UN stewardship – has settled into a political settlement track, not secession. The referential frame has shifted from plebiscitary romanticism to constitutional engineering, with sub-state autonomy as the UN-compatible instrument to square self-government with sovereignty. Consulates, trade arrangements applied to the territory, security coordination, and donor programming constitute quiet recognitional acts that are harder to reverse than tweets or communiqués. The security calculus has shifted as well concerning the Polisario. Arms flows, jihadist franchising, and smuggling economies in the Sahel are rendered worse by 'grey-zone warfare.' The market and state system now penalize actors who treat corridors like bargaining chips. This isn't only a Sahel-wide pathology; illicit flows traverse Polisario-held spaces east of the berm and the Tindouf camp economy. 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Marrakech – Algeria is frantically courting American energy giants in a transparent attempt to influence US policy on Morocco's Western Sahara. According to Bloomberg, Algeria is nearing deals with Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp to tap its gas reserves, including shale, for the first time. 'The technical aspects have more or less been agreed upon, but the commercial alignment is still under negotiation and will soon be finalized,' Samir Bekhti, chairman of energy regulator Alnaft, told Bloomberg. Algeria is clearly betting big on shale as it attempts to shore up state revenue in a country where hydrocarbons account for more than three-quarters of exports. This energy push comes as Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune received delegations from both Chevron and Exxon Mobil last June. These meetings revealed Algeria's calculated strategy to leverage oil and gas to attract strategic investments while simultaneously building indirect influence channels within Washington decision-making circles, above all to ward off any attempt by Congress to designate the Polisario as a terrorist organization. For the same reasons, Algerian political analyst Oualid Kebir even suggested that the military regime was ready to sell shale gas from the Eastern Sahara to Israel, not out of goodwill but to block any serious attempt within the UN to close the Western Sahara file – laying bare Algeria's toxic cocktail of hypocrisy, desperation, and utter moral bankruptcy. Algeria's frantic moves show it is feeling the heat, as US President Donald Trump's administration has made clear his intention to close the Sahara file once and for all. According to a June report by Instituto Coordenadas, Washington is preparing unprecedented pressure on Algiers – from demanding Polisario disarmament and dismantling the Tindouf camps to raising the threat of sanctions – measures designed to force Algeria into accepting Morocco's Autonomy Plan as the only realistic endgame. Furthermore, the ultimate blow looms: if the Polisario is designated a terrorist organization, Algeria would stand unmasked before the world as a state sponsor of terrorism – a pariah stripped of credibility, dragged into isolation, and branded by its own failed obsession with Morocco. Gas blackmail is not a Sahara policy For decades, the Algerian regime has persisted in the same exhausted maneuver – weaponizing its gas reserves, financing and sheltering the Polisario separatists who exist only in the vacuum of Tindouf, and attempting to manipulate global capitals. Algeria desperately wants the world to believe that the Western Sahara dispute remains an unresolved colonial chapter, when in fact the tide of history and diplomacy has already moved decisively in favor of Morocco's sovereignty with its Autonomy Plan. Yet this regime refuses to accept reality, clinging to Cold War dogmas and feeding off the illusion that blackmailing neighbors or threatening energy partners can somehow reverse a US recognition that has been in place since 2020, never withdrawn, and consistently reaffirmed through successive administrations. The Western Sahara file has moved decisively away from 1970s slogans and toward 21st-century realism, while Algeria's doctrine remains stubbornly stuck in the Cold War era. Algiers has run the same play for years: weaponize gas, bankroll the Polisario, and hope the world blinks. It hasn't worked. What Algiers calls foreign policy is in fact nothing more than tantrum-driven brinkmanship – a brittle and transactional game. Entire pipelines have been shut down, not because of economic necessity but out of the pathological desire to punish Morocco and any country that dares to align with Rabat's proposal. This was precisely the case in 2022, when Spain publicly backed Morocco's Autonomy Plan and Algeria immediately froze a twenty-year friendship treaty, strangled trade ties, and rattled the energy saber. Threats to halt gas, followed by punitive economic measures, were less a strategy than a tantrum – broadcasting to European capitals that Algeria's foreign policy is transactional, brittle, and ultimately unreliable. Algeria once again proved that its diplomacy is built on vengeance rather than vision, on sabotage rather than strategy. Analysts ask: What kind of state deliberately destroys integration projects that could bring regional prosperity, merely to indulge its hatred of Morocco? Self-destruction disguised as principle The Maghreb-Europe pipeline closure in 2021 perfectly exemplified this self-harming obsession. Algiers cut a vital artery that had carried Algerian gas to Europe via Morocco since the 1990s – a decades-old infrastructure that symbolized regional interdependence. Yet, the regime in Algiers willingly severed it – not to advance peace, not to gain leverage for real negotiation, but simply to strike at Rabat. This self-destructive decision punished neighbors, spooked markets, and signaled that Algeria will gladly torch regional integration to score a point against Rabat, even at the cost of destabilizing markets, losing revenue, and damaging its own standing. According to observers, this is not leadership; it is self-destruction recast as principle – a policy posture that prioritizes starving itself and destabilizing its neighborhood over confronting the strategic futility of its Sahara gamble. Meanwhile, the so-called Sahrawi 'state-in-waiting' that Algeria sustains is nothing but a dependency structure built in the sands of Tindouf. The Polisario leadership enjoys privileges while the camps remain locked in poverty, an arrangement that has lasted almost five decades and produces nothing but grievance politics and propaganda. This machine forbids transparency and thrives only on indefinite stalemate, because the moment accountability is introduced, the entire facade collapses. Colonization by proxy in Tindouf Commentators view this not as decolonization but as colonization by proxy – a deliberate policy of freezing human lives to keep alive a failed narrative that the rest of the world has moved beyond. The serious diplomatic failures of Algeria's approach were brutally put into light by Rachid Nekkaz, former presidential candidate, who recently criticized Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf's performance as 'a complete failure on all levels.' Nekkaz pointed out that Attaf, who 'was unemployed for 19 years before being appointed as head of Algerian diplomacy,' has failed to 'stop Morocco's diplomatic successes regarding the Sahara.' Algeria's reliance on energy blackmail is doubly shortsighted; gas leverage is finite, and time is not on Algiers' side. Europe, shaken by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has already diversified its supply – securing US LNG, Gulf producers, and new routes that dilute Algerian influence. Every time Algiers reaches for the gas weapon, it diminishes its credibility and accelerates its own irrelevance. In long-term energy markets, only reliability is rewarded, not tantrums; trust, not threats. Even where Algeria has expanded ties, notably with Italy, its volumes and dependability are now judged against a crowded field, and weaponizing energy may buy headlines but ultimately erodes the only currency that matters in strategic partnerships: trust. At the heart of this failure lies a poisonous mindset: Algeria treats the Sahara not as an issue to be solved but as a theater to bleed Morocco, a tool to box in Rabat diplomatically, and a national myth to justify repression at home. It repeats the same sterile slogans of 'referendum or nothing,' ignoring that the UN process itself has moved on, that major capitals from Washington to Madrid to Paris have embraced Morocco's Autonomy Plan as the only serious solution. No amount of gas-fuelled pressure can reverse that trajectory. Washington's 2020 proclamation recognizing Moroccan sovereignty remains firmly in force, and US diplomacy has stayed fixed on Rabat's Autonomy Plan as the realistic path forward. Morocco, for its part, has done the slow, unglamorous but necessary work: devolving powers, investing in the southern provinces, and building a coalition of states that see autonomy as both ethical and executable. This is not a temporary mood swing; analysis suggests it has proven durable through subsequent administrations and UN cycles – especially as Trump himself reaffirmed this stance as recently as late July in a letter addressed to King Mohammed VI on the occasion of the 26th Throne Day. The naked truth is this: what Algeria sustains is not a foreign policy but a failing project propped up by energy bullying – a hollow strategy that confuses volume (of gas, of rhetoric) for vision, noise for influence, and mortgages the lives of so-called 'Sahrawis' to keep alive a grievance industry, Sahrawis whom the military regime does not even allow a census for. In the process, it even undermines its own economic interests just to preserve the fantasy of striking at Morocco. History is moving, the Sahara file is moving, Washington has locked in its recognition, and Europe increasingly treats autonomy as the only executable outcome. Yet Algiers continues to act as if time stopped in 1976, dragging its people into isolation, wasting billions on separatism, and reducing itself to little more than a supplier with a flag – a state that could have been a regional power but has chosen instead to be a regional saboteur. Tags: algeria and the USAlgeria and Western SaharaWestern sahara
