Analysis: How Algeria came to treat the UAE as a national security threat

Submitted by Amel Boubekeur on Mon, 09/14/2026 - 11:49 The rupture with Abu Dhabi followed a gradual shift in which disputes once managed separately were reframed in Algiers as parts of the same sovereignty and national-security problem

Algeria's President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has repeatedly accused the UAE of interference without naming the country until last week’s diplomatic break, pictured at Villa Borsig, Berlin, 16 July 2026 (Tobias Schwarz/AFP) Off

Algeria’s decision to sever diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates on Thursday cannot be explained simply by adding together disagreements over Western Sahara, Israel, Libya and the Sahel. Most of those disagreements had existed for years.

What changed was the relationship between them. Issues that Algiers had previously managed on separate tracks were progressively linked to the same question of sovereignty and national security.

For a long time, Algeria could oppose Emirati regional choices while maintaining bilateral cooperation.

In February 2023, it hosted the 11th session of the joint military cooperation committee, with army chief Said Chanegriha receiving the Emirati co-chair.

The bilateral economic commission met in Abu Dhabi the same month and produced several agreements, while Algerian officials were still speaking of a possible strategic partnership.

Political contacts also continued. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune and UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed exchanged briefly at the G7 in Italy in June 2024, several months after tensions had become public.

This continuity is important because the UAE had already taken positions directly opposed to Algerian foreign policy.

It had opened a consulate in Laayoune in 2020, backing Morocco’s claim of sovereignty over Western Sahara, while Algiers backs the pro-independence Polisario Front. It had also normalised relations with Israel and supported military leader Khalifa Haftar in Libya.

Algeria suspends diplomatic relations with UAE after months of tensions Read More »

Yet, none of these disputes had made cooperation impossible. For several years, Algiers separated what it opposed in Emirati regional policy from the bilateral relationship itself.

That separation became harder to sustain from late 2023.

Algeria’s failure to join the expanded Brics grouping was later attributed in media close to the government to Emirati manoeuvring against its candidacy.

While Algerian official coverage identified Emirati opposition during the expanded Brics deliberations, the internal decision-making process of the member states was not made public.

The importance of the accusation lies elsewhere. Abu Dhabi was now being inserted into an explanation for an Algerian diplomatic setback, rather than treated only as an adversary in conflicts taking place elsewhere.

The deterioration of Algeria’s position in Mali carried greater strategic weight. Malian forces and their Russian partners took Kidal from a coalition of predominantly Tuareg separatist rebels in November 2023, and Bamako terminated the 2015 peace agreement brokered by Algeria the following January.

The agreement had given Algiers an institutional role in managing a conflict along its southern border. Its collapse reduced Algerian leverage in northern Mali and weakened one of the mechanisms through which Algeria had managed its immediate security environment.

The UAE did not cause this sequence. Bamako, Moscow and Algeria itself all had their own roles to play in the deterioration.

But Abu Dhabi was not absent from Mali either: it had developed security cooperation with Bamako, contributed €30m to the G5 Sahel regional counterterrorism force and supplied armoured vehicles to the Malian military.

As Algeria’s own leverage in Mali declined, this Emirati security footprint became easier in Algiers to read as part of a wider regional encroachment.

From regional to domestic issues

The shift then became institutional.

On 10 January 2024, Algeria’s High Security Council discussed developments in neighbouring countries and the Sahel and denounced hostile acts by an unnamed “brotherly Arab country”.

The UAE was not named, but the dispute had entered Algeria’s highest national-security institution. Over the following two years, the same concern appeared in presidential rhetoric, ministry of justice restrictions on selected Emirati-linked business transactions, as well as state media.

In May 2025, Sky News Arabia broadcast an interview with Algerian academic Mohamed El-Amine Belghit in which he described Amazigh identity as a Franco-Zionist creation. The reaction in Algeria went beyond disagreement with his remarks. The High Commission for Amazighity condemned them, while state television treated the broadcast as an attack on national identity and unity.

An Emirati media platform had therefore become part of an argument about Algeria’s internal cohesion.

By February 2026, Tebboune was making this change explicit.

Without naming the UAE, he accused the Gulf state of interfering in Algerian elections and referred in the same interview to threats of international arbitration over Emirati investments.

As the UAE expands military footprint in Africa, Algeria draws line in the sand Read More »

The underlying evidence has not been made public, shifting the analytical focus to the allegation's political and diplomatic effects. Its importance is that the president himself was now placing the relationship inside questions of domestic political sovereignty, not only regional competition.

Economic relations show why this political redefinition did not produce an immediate break.

From early 2024, Algerian notaries were instructed to stop concluding transactions involving companies in the Algerian-Emirati tobacco partnership, and later investigations targeted actors linked to the same sector.

Yet other arrangements remained in place. The Emirati logistics company DP World continued to operate at Algiers and Djen Djen, while the Algerian defence ministry continued to list the Algerian automobile manufacturing company Safav in Tiaret as a partnership involving the Emirati Aabar Investment.

These surviving ties do not weaken the security argument. They reveal a difference of tempo. A state can redefine a partner politically faster than it can unwind concessions, contracts and joint ventures accumulated over many years.

Tebboune’s reference to possible international arbitration makes that constraint visible. The economic relationship therefore became part of the conflict at the same time as it limited how quickly the conflict could be translated into material disengagement.

The same lag appeared in aviation.

Algeria began terminating the bilateral air services agreement in February, although the Emirati civil aviation authority noted that flights would continue during the legal notice period. When Algeria later closed its airspace to UAE-registered aircraft, commercial flights serving Algiers were temporarily exempted until the end of 2026.

Even at the point of diplomatic rupture, practical separation remained incomplete.

Why the rupture came now

Mali also does not explain the timing of the September decision on its own. Algeria and Mali restored ambassadorial relations and reopened their airspace in July after a serious bilateral crisis.

The improvement with Bamako did not reverse the deterioration with Abu Dhabi because the Emirati dispute had already acquired a wider meaning.

Abu Dhabi was now being inserted into an explanation for an Algerian diplomatic setback, rather than treated only as an adversary in conflicts taking place elsewhere

Tebboune had also said in July that Algeria could have broken relations earlier but had refrained from doing so because it did not want to deepen divisions in the Arab world.

This suggests that rupture had become an available political option before September and did not necessarily require a single new trigger.

There is another possible reading.

Algeria’s exclusion from the expanded Brics grouping and the erosion of its mediation role in Mali were setbacks with multiple causes, involving decisions in Bamako and Moscow as well as Algeria’s own policy choices.

The growing focus on Abu Dhabi therefore emerged within a regional environment whose transformations cannot be attributed to a single external actor.

In the absence of publicly disclosed documents or formal legal proceedings, the dispute remains framed by official statements and institutional measures. But this does not erase the institutional change.

What distinguishes the later phase of the dispute is that foreign-policy setbacks, claims of political interference, media controversies and selected economic restrictions were no longer treated as unrelated files. They were increasingly connected through the same language of sovereignty and national security.

This concern did not begin with the state in 2026. During the Hirak, the mass protest movement that began in 2019 against former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth term, some protesters were already suspicious of Abu Dhabi and accused it of backing forces seeking to preserve the existing political order.

Seven years later, a suspicion once visible in protest politics has acquired institutional weight. That continuity helps explain why the rupture could resonate domestically without making the state’s later accusations identical to those of the Hirak.

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