Marrakech – What played out yesterday, February 4, near Ich, in Morocco’s Figuig province, was not an isolated border incident nor a misunderstanding between patrols. It was the latest act in a long-running Algerian script: when strategy fails, escalation replaces argument; when legitimacy erodes, intimidation fills the void.
Video footage shows Algerian forces carrying out overtly provocative maneuvers along Morocco’s eastern frontier, unilaterally planting white-painted stone markers, firing shots into the air, uprooting protective fencing, tearing down barriers, and vandalizing local sites.
According to local accounts, residents were stunned from the early morning hours by the arrival of two Algerian military units near their orchards – an intrusion that blended fear with a deep sense of provocation.
Soldiers advanced toward cultivated farmland, removed protective fencing, and behaved as though the land were Algerian territory, despite decades of Moroccan use and clearly established understandings.
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As night fell, Algerian troops escalated further, firing repeated rounds into the sky until around 7 p.m., a deliberate show of force that spread anxiety among civilians in a region long associated with cross-border coexistence and solidarity during Algeria’s own war of independence.
Moroccan Royal Armed Forces units moved promptly to a nearby position, closely monitoring developments while engaging directly with residents to reassure them that no immediate danger existed. Military sources indicated that full details were transmitted to higher authorities before Moroccan units withdrew shortly thereafter.
These actions, carried out under the watchful restraint of the Royal Armed Forces, were meant to project strength. Instead, they betrayed anxiety: the reflex of a regime that reaches for the rifle when the map no longer obeys. According to observers, it was less a security operation than a performance – designed to manufacture facts where law and history refuse to cooperate.
These reckless violations unfold amid acute regional strain, following Algeria’s recent execution of three Moroccan civilians and the detention of a fourth – acts that sparked widespread condemnation.
Since 2014, Morocco has fenced roughly 110 kilometers of its eastern border – closed since 1994 – to enhance security and curb cross-border crime. These developments come amid unprecedented diplomatic paralysis, with Algeria severing ties, closing its airspace, and keeping the land border shut for over three decades – making any border movement a source of heightened tension.
A cycle of provocation without strategy
The pattern is familiar. In 2021, Algerian forces expelled Moroccan farmers from the Arja oasis, only to retreat once the diplomatic cost rose.
Today, the same playbook was dusted off in Ich. Algeria harasses, retreats, and repeats – like a tide that advances not to conquer, but to reassure itself it still moves – reviving low-intensity, guerrilla-style pressure tactics seemingly designed to bait Morocco into a prolonged war of attrition, a futile echo of a hoped-for Sand War II that never materializes.
This behavior cannot be detached from Algeria’s broader strategic unraveling. Whenever its regional projects stall – whether the international erosion of the Polisario narrative, Morocco’s expanding diplomatic recognition, or economic stagnation at home – the border becomes a stage. The neighbor becomes a convenient screen onto which failure is projected.
Rather than signaling resolve, the pattern reveals the structural instincts of a revolutionary-born military junta that has long outlived its historical moment. Anchored to the mythology of liberation wars, the regime privileges coercive signaling over long-term strategy, interpreting escalation itself as evidence of relevance.
As diplomatic isolation deepens and strategic options narrow, the military establishment reverts to its default language: force, movement, and provocation.
The legal backdrop makes the provocation starker. Algeria routinely invokes the 1972 Moroccan-Algerian border treaty as sacred text – yet selectively, opportunistically, and now incoherently. Article 2 of that agreement explicitly created a joint Moroccan-Algerian commission to place boundary markers.
Article 6 allows unilateral action only after formal notification and within clearly described parameters. What occurred in Ich bore none of the hallmarks of legal procedure. There was no transparency, no coordination, no notification – only soldiers, stones, and shots. Law was not applied; it was impersonated.
The status of the southern border zones was not addressed by the 1845 Treaty of Lalla Maghnia signed between Morocco and France. The treaty limited delimitation to the stretch between Casbate Ajroud (present-day Saïdia) and Tenïet-el-Sassi, leaving the southern regions – including areas adjacent to Figuig – without defined borders.
This omission was not because these lands were terra nullius, but because France regarded Algeria as its ultimate colonial prize, one it intended never to relinquish. By keeping the southern frontier deliberately vague, France preserved the ability to detach Moroccan territories at will and append them to Algeria whenever imperial interests required.
A state assembled through colonial cartography
When France invaded the Regency of Algiers in 1830, the territory under the Dey’s effective control was largely limited to a narrow coastal strip and a few inland beyliks, estimated at no more than 200,000 to 250,000 km². Over the following century, colonial authorities vastly expanded “Algeria” southwards and eastwards, administratively annexing large Saharan regions that were never historically part of the Regency.
These expansions incorporated Moroccan Eastern Saharan lands such as Tindouf, Colomb-Béchar (Béchar), and the Saharan ksour extending toward Touat and Gourara, Tuareg confederation territories historically linked to Mali and Niger (Azawad and the central Sahara), as well as parts of southern Tunisia and western Libyan Saharan zones.
By the time Algeria gained independence in 1962, the country’s territory had been redefined into the borders we know today – a state of nearly 2.38 million km², making it the largest country in Africa, not because of pre-colonial inheritance, but primarily through French administrative re-mapping of the Sahara.
Algeria’s provisional government, under Farhat Abbas, initially pledged to address unresolved border questions after independence, giving earlier assurances to Morocco’s Mohammed V regarding the Eastern Sahara, which France had administratively severed from Morocco and attached to colonial Algeria.
It was precisely this promise – viewed as a matter to be settled between two brotherly nations – that led Rabat to continue backing the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), even as France proposed restoring those territories to Morocco.
History records that key FLN commanders, including Houari Boumédiène (then Colonel Boukharouba) and Abdelaziz Bouteflika (operating under the alias Abdelkader El Mali), ran operations from Oujda with Moroccan support – only to reverse course after 1962 independence, betray those commitments, and precipitate the Sand War.
A pact dismantled through unilateralism
Nowhere is this more evident than in Gara Djebilet. Algeria’s recent unilateral exploitation of the iron ore deposit – through deals with Turkish and Chinese partners – is not merely an economic decision. It is a breach of the very political bargain that underpinned the 1972 settlement.
Morocco accepted inherited colonial borders in return for joint exploitation of Gara Djebilet and broader regional cooperation. By hollowing out that counterbalance, Algeria has pulled a foundational brick from the settlement itself.
International law is unambiguous on this point: when a material counterpart of a treaty is violated, the entire agreement becomes legally contestable. Algeria demands and insists on strict respect for borders while undermining the very economic and political terms of the agreement.
The historical record leaves little ambiguity about the status of Morocco’s Eastern Sahara prior to the 1970s settlements. As the New York Times reported on May 31, 1970, the meeting between King Hassan II and Boumediene in Tlemcen took place amid what the newspaper explicitly described as a “border dispute” – not a settled frontier.
The report referred to negotiations aimed at resolving “long-standing disagreements over territory” and stressed discussions on the joint exploitation of iron ore deposits near Tindouf, a formulation that, in international law, presupposes contested or transitional sovereignty rather than settled national ownership.
States do not negotiate joint exploitation of resources located within undisputed territory; they do so when ownership remains unresolved or politically suspended.
The same New York Times account confirmed that the borders inherited from French colonial administration left the southern stretches – particularly Tindouf and the surrounding Eastern Sahara – imprecisely defined. Colonial maps, the paper noted, were administrative tools rather than sovereign instruments, often drawn for logistical convenience rather than legal clarity.
These ambiguities explain why the 1970 talks focused not only on normalization, but on creating mechanisms – commissions, shared projects, and reciprocal concessions – to manage territories whose legal status had never been conclusively determined.
At the time, the paper observed, Morocco retained strong historical and administrative rights, reinforced by the fact that Tindouf remained under Moroccan administrative authority until 1962, with Moroccan caïds exercising governance there even after Algerian independence.
Crucially, the New York Times also framed the Moroccan-Algerian rapprochement of the early 1970s as a political settlement, not a technical border adjustment.
The agreement that would culminate in the 1972 border treaty was portrayed as a broader quid pro quo: Morocco accepted colonial-era borders despite possessing legal grounds to contest them, in exchange for strategic cooperation – most notably the shared development of Gara Djebilet – and regional alignment on decolonization issues, including Spanish-occupied territories.
By unilaterally exploiting Gara Djebilet today while weaponizing the same 1972 treaty to justify border provocations, Algeria is not defending a settled order; it is selectively amputating history, invoking the letter of an agreement whose spirit – and balance – it has long since violated.
Escalation as evidence of decline
The symbolism of Tindouf today completes the picture. What Algeria calls refugee camps have long functioned as permanent military installations, sustained by petrochemical revenues and shielded by humanitarian rhetoric.
As recent reports have shown, hundreds of millions of euros flow annually into this apparatus – arms, training, logistics – while the Algerian people absorb the cost. Tindouf is not a sanctuary; it is a sinkhole, swallowing wealth, credibility, and time.
The same logic now creeps eastward to Figuig: militarize ambiguity, freeze reality, and hope intimidation compensates for strategic exhaustion. It is the geopolitics of a state running on inertia, mistaking motion for direction.
Morocco, by contrast, has answered pressure not with gunfire but with roads, ports, schools, and diplomacy. While Algeria fires bullets into the air, Morocco pours concrete into the ground. While one regime replays the past, the other builds leverage in the present. The contrast is devastating – and irreversible.
Algeria’s border theatrics are thus not signs of strength but symptoms of decline: the geopolitical equivalent of a failing engine revving loudly at a red light. Stones can be placed, shots can be fired, treaties can be misquoted – but arithmetic, history, and law remain unmoved.
In the end, Algeria’s strategy resembles a man pounding the table after losing the argument, hoping noise might still pass for authority. It will not. Borders are not rewritten by intimidation, nor sovereignty by repetition. And every stone placed in provocation only further marks the landscape of a policy that has lost both its map and its compass.
