War / Africa
Ethiopian Civil War
Pretoria is dead, Abiy holds a supermajority, and three simultaneous insurgencies now face an Eritrea-Egypt external axis.
Algeria and Morocco have been locked in a cold rivalry since 1975, when Spain withdrew from Western Sahara and Algeria began arming the Polisario Front against Moroccan rule there.
The two countries had already fought a brief border war in 1963. They share a 1,600-kilometer border that has been closed since 1994, one of the longest-shut land frontiers in the world. Algeria severed diplomatic relations in 2021 and killed the gas pipeline running through Morocco a year later. The Gulf states and Washington tilt toward Rabat.
The rivalry sets the ceiling on what North Africa can do as a region: no integrated market, no shared security, no unified Sahel policy.
The rivalry has widened across three simultaneous tracks since early 2025.
Morocco's C-24 maneuver at the Managua seminar is the clearest institutional phase shift: Rabat formally argued that Western Sahara no longer belongs on the Special Committee on Decolonization's agenda, seeking to strip Algeria and Polisario of their preferred legal register and lock the file inside the Security Council.
It matters because the territorial dispute continues to tie down Algeria and.
Weekly net escalation pressure, last 90 days
Morocco's C-24 maneuver is a long-horizon legal bet: removing Western Sahara from the decolonization committee closes the parallel institutional channel Algeria and Polisario use to sustain the decolonization framing.
The TSGP and NMGP are now in a race for construction irreversibility: whichever pipeline first secures binding European offtake commitments gains structural leverage over the other's financing and political viability.
Morocco's drone strike killing Lehbib Mohamed Abdelaziz raised the coercive threshold without an established escalation ladder; Polisario has no symmetric precision-strike capability.
Polisario Front operates from Algerian territory as Algiers's primary coercive pressure vector against Morocco in Western Sahara.
Sonatrach functions as a quasi-diplomatic instrument, using European gas contract leverage and TSGP construction momentum to reinforce Algeria's strategic.
Mali's junta maintains a security alignment with Algeria that structurally limits Moroccan diplomatic and commercial reach into the central Sahel corridor.
Morocco's Royal Armed Forces-linked commercial networks in Mauritania serve as a counter-influence layer against Algerian Sahel penetration.
Algeria backs Polisario Front diplomatically and logistically; Morocco backed by UAE, Saudi Arabia, and tacitly by US following 2020 normalization deal
War / Africa
Pretoria is dead, Abiy holds a supermajority, and three simultaneous insurgencies now face an Eritrea-Egypt external axis.
War / Africa
RSF masses on El Obeid as the US warns of imminent massacre and the RSF's parallel state consolidates across western.