For over half a century, the deep-seated rivalry between Algeria and Morocco has been largely defined by two core flashpoints: the contested status of Western Sahara, and the decades-long tussle for regional leadership across the Maghreb. A former Spanish colonial territory, Western Sahara is mostly controlled by Morocco, which claims full sovereignty over the region, while Algeria backs the Polisario Front, the indigenous movement demanding a UN-supervised self-determination referendum for the local Sahrawi population. Parallel to this territorial dispute, the two North African nations have vied for status as the Maghreb’s leading power ever since securing their independence, frictions that have fueled years of severe diplomatic breakdown: their shared land border has remained fully closed since 1994, and formal bilateral ties were completely severed in 2021. In a notable new shift, however, this long-running competition has now expanded far south of the Maghreb, into the vast, geopolitically turbulent Sahel region.
Today, the Sahel has emerged as a sprawling new arena for the two nations to extend their influence, with battles unfolding across diplomacy, security policy, infrastructure investment, energy development, cross-border trade, and even religious cooperation, all against a backdrop of rapid, sweeping geopolitical upheaval across West Africa. This new playing field has opened up just as the three member states of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — have actively distanced themselves from their longstanding Western allies, and are aggressively diversifying their international partnerships to reduce external dependence. It is within this fast-evolving landscape that Algeria and Morocco now find themselves locked in a tight, head-to-head contest for regional clout.
For Algeria, engagement with the Sahel is rooted first and foremost in non-negotiable national security imperatives. Both Mali and Niger share extensive, largely unpatrolled land borders with Algeria, meaning any political upheaval or security breakdown in these two nations has immediate, direct spillover impacts on Algerian territory. Transnational armed extremist groups, widespread cross-border smuggling networks, and chronic political instability along its southern frontier are threats Algeria cannot afford to overlook. This pressing reality has pushed Algiers to gradually abandon its long-held foreign policy doctrine of strict non-intervention in the internal affairs of neighboring states. As Jalel Harchaoui, a senior analyst at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, emphasized in an interview with Middle East Eye: “Algeria does not make its decisions based on Morocco.”
In a landmark break from past policy, just one day after a foiled coup attempt in Niger’s capital Niamey on August 30, Algeria deployed four Su-30 fighter jets to Niger at the formal request of local authorities. By October 25, Algeria’s national parliament had formally approved the deployment of Algerian ground troops to Niger, marking the first such foreign military deployment for the country since 1973. Algiers has also moved aggressively to rebuild its diplomatic footprint in a region where its influence had eroded significantly following a series of high-profile rifts with the governments in Bamako and Niamey. The diplomatic falling out with Mali dates back to December 2023, when Mali publicly accused Algeria of interfering in its domestic affairs, and both nations recalled their respective ambassadors. This rift deepened further in January 2024, when Mali’s ruling junta formally denounced the 2015 Algiers peace agreement — a landmark Algeria-brokered deal designed to end decades of unrest and stabilize northern Mali. The dispute escalated to engulf the entire AES bloc in April 2025, after Algerian air defenses shot down a Malian drone, with both governments insisting the aircraft had been operating in their own sovereign airspace. In the aftermath, all three AES member states recalled their ambassadors from Algiers, and Algeria reciprocated. In recent months, however, Algeria’s bilateral ties with Niamey have improved dramatically.
While Morocco shares no direct land borders with any AES state, it has also been steadily advancing its own strategic interests across the Sahel. Harchaoui cautioned against over-simplifying the regional dynamic, noting that observers should not automatically attribute every move by either country to a direct tit-for-tat response to the other. “It’s not about seeing Morocco everywhere,” he explained, adding that Moroccan influence is highly visible in Mali but remains far more limited in Niger. He reiterated that Algeria’s policy choices are overwhelmingly driven by on-the-ground security priorities, not a preoccupation with competing with Rabat. Harchaoui also highlighted a notable recent shift in the positions of the Bamako and Niamey governments, which now increasingly endorse Algeria’s longstanding policy of pursuing negotiated political solutions to the Tuareg question, rather than relying exclusively on military force. The Tuareg, a Berber ethnic community spread across northern Mali, Niger, and southern Algeria, have demanded greater autonomy and formal state recognition ever since their respective countries gained independence, grievances that have sparked multiple armed uprisings including the 2012 Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali. This growing alignment on conflict resolution has been a key driver of Algeria’s renewed influence in the Sahel, bolstered by its geographic proximity, decades of on-the-ground knowledge of local community dynamics, and long track record mediating Tuareg-related crises.
Morocco, by contrast, has pursued a distinctly different strategy that places far less emphasis on security cooperation. “Morocco is constantly working to strengthen economic, religious, cultural and diplomatic ties with Sahelian states,” Rida Lyammouri, senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South and an independent Sahel-focused consultant, told Middle East Eye. Moroccan banking groups already have established a widespread presence across multiple West African nations, and Rabat leverages this extensive financial network alongside targeted direct investments to expand its economic footprint across the region. The kingdom has also rolled out large-scale agricultural development partnerships and targeted training programs for Sahelian imams, framing these initiatives as vehicles for constructive religious and cultural cooperation. In April 2025, the three AES member states formally endorsed Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative during a summit in Rabat, a policy framework designed to grant landlocked Sahelian nations direct access to Atlantic coastal shipping routes via Moroccan port infrastructure. The initiative signals Rabat’s far broader ambitions beyond simple trade access: it lays the groundwork for a sprawling cross-continental economic corridor linking Morocco directly to West Africa and the Sahel. This strategy is already being advanced via the Dakhla-Nouakchott transport and economic integration project: a bilateral framework agreement signed in September between Morocco and Mauritania outlines plans to rehabilitate and expand Mauritania’s RN4 highway, as part of a larger integrated transport axis connecting Dakhla in southern Western Sahara, the Guerguerat border crossing, and the Mauritanian coastal cities of Nouadhibou and Nouakchott. The planned new Dakhla Atlantic port, scheduled to begin full operations in 2028, is designed to serve as the central maritime hub for this entire trans-Sahelian economic corridor.
This dynamic positions Mauritania as a critical strategic linchpin, sitting at the exact intersection of Morocco’s westward-focused regional ambitions and Algeria’s eastward-oriented Sahel interests. The two North African powers are now pursuing two competing, mutually exclusive corridor models: Algeria has long projected its influence southwards into the Sahel via its own southern land borders and historic trans-Saharan trade networks, while Morocco is building an entirely new Atlantic access route running through Mauritania. Both strategies are rooted in the shared core assessment that for the largely landlocked Sahel region, cross-border infrastructure and guaranteed access to global markets function as powerful instruments of geopolitical leverage. Energy competition has also become a key component of this contest: the proposed 6,000-kilometer Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline, which will run through Mauritania, is still seeking full project financing, and directly competes with the parallel trans-Saharan Nigeria-Niger-Algeria gas pipeline, whose Algerian section officially broke ground in June. Both projects are designed to transport vast volumes of Nigerian natural gas to lucrative European consumer markets. The United Arab Emirates has emerged as a quiet but influential background player in this regional competition: Abu Dhabi is financing and developing a network of new infrastructure and port facilities across Mauritania, moves that effectively strengthen Morocco’s strategic position in the area. Algeria has long viewed the deepening strategic alignment between the UAE and Morocco — and Abu Dhabi’s explicit support for Rabat’s position on the Western Sahara dispute — with deep suspicion. This long-running mistrust boiled over into a full diplomatic break in September, when Algeria formally severed all bilateral relations with the UAE, accusing Abu Dhabi of carrying out hostile acts and unwarranted interference in North African regional affairs.
This expanding economic and diplomatic rivalry has been accompanied by a parallel regional arms build-up. Algeria remains by a wide margin Africa’s largest military spender: according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the country allocated approximately $25.4 billion to its defense budget in 2025, marking an 11 percent year-on-year increase. Morocco ranked as the continent’s second largest military spender, with a 6.6 percent year-on-year rise to $6.3 billion. While this military expansion has sparked widespread concerns about the risk of future armed escalation, most regional analysts agree it is highly unlikely that the Sahel will become a theatre of direct military confrontation between Algeria and Morocco. Instead, the build-up underscores a broader reality: the decades-old strategic rivalry between the two Maghreb powers has now spilled far beyond their traditional shared regional borders. “The fundamental question is whether Sahelian states can turn this competition into an opportunity to strengthen their strategic autonomy,” noted Oumar Keita, former Malian ambassador to UNESCO and president of the Sahel-Africa Institute for Diplomacy and Influence (Isadi). Keita rejects the framing that the ongoing arms build-up will inevitably lead to direct military conflict between the two North African neighbors. “I would speak more of a competition for positioning and influence than of confrontation,” he explained to Middle East Eye. He also pushed back against the common external narrative that frames the Sahel as an empty, passive geopolitical space where outside powers can simply project influence unimpeded. For the three AES ruling juntas, which have already turned to Russia as a key security and political partner in their push to reduce decades of dependence on France and other traditional Western allies, the current competition between Algeria and Morocco creates valuable new diplomatic and material options. Keita argues that Sahelian governments should avoid aligning exclusively with a single external power, and instead pursue a deliberate “diplomacy of diversification” built on multiple complementary international partnerships. The key risk of the current dynamic, he warns, is that Sahel states may simply end up swapping one set of external dependencies for another. “Lasting influence cannot be decreed. It is built through trust, continuity of commitments and tangible results for populations.”
This reality will be the defining test for both Algeria and Morocco as they pursue their regional ambitions. At present, Morocco holds a clear early advantage in the economic and infrastructure development spheres, while Algeria retains unique strengths from its geographic proximity to the Sahel, longstanding security cooperation experience, and deep diplomatic ties across Mali and Niger. Neither power, however, holds unchallenged dominance over the region, which continues to be shaped by its own ongoing domestic political crises, local communal conflicts, persistent armed extremist groups, and the sovereign independent policy choices of Sahelian national governments. “The question is therefore not whether Algiers or Rabat will gain more influence in the Sahel. The fundamental question is whether Sahelian states can turn this competition into an opportunity to strengthen their strategic autonomy, development and collective ability to defend their interests,” Keita emphasized. The future trajectory of this fast-evolving regional dynamic will be clearly visible via two key upcoming milestones: the scheduled 2028 opening of the new Dakhla Atlantic port, and Algeria’s ability to translate its recent diplomatic reset with the Bamako and Niamey governments into tangible, visible on-the-ground development projects that benefit local populations.
