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Amine Ayoub

Middle East Forum Fellow/North Africa Risk Consultant

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Jul 13, 2026, 4:56 AM

Pakistan’s $4B Libya Gambit: How Washington Outsourced the Quagmire to Islamabad

The international community has grown entirely accustomed to the weary theater of Libyan diplomacy, where endless cycles of Western-brokered negotiations yield little more than temporary freezes in violence and photocopied communiqués. Yet the quiet emergence of Pakistan as a...

Jul 12, 2026, 7:16 AM

Why the Superficial Truce with Mali Exposes Algeria’s Failing Sahel Hegemony

The unexpected normalization of diplomatic relations between Algeria and Mali in July 2026 marks a desperate pivot rather than a triumph of statecraft. The synchronized announcements from Algiers and Bamako confirming the sudden reopening of shared airspace and the...

Jul 11, 2026, 12:27 AM

The Dynastic Trap: Washington’s Realpolitik Gambit in Libya

Elevating Saddam Haftar offers temporary stabilization, but partitioning the state into family cartels invites systemic collapse. The Logic of Transactional Stability A decade and a half after the collapse of the Muammar Gaddafi regime, Libya has evolved from an active war...

Jul 10, 2026, 1:28 AM

Tunisia Is Dying While Chasing Political Ghosts

Kais Saied’s regime jails opponents, brands defunct parties as terrorists, and silences online voices, while university graduates riot for jobs and 30,000 skilled Tunisians flee the country each year. Legal theater cannot feed a collapsing nation. In July 2026, the...

Jul 8, 2026, 8:55 PM

IMF Warnings to Algeria on Deficit Bleeding After Gray List Exit

Algeria’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force gray list in June 2025 was celebrated as a major diplomatic and regulatory victory. The International Monetary Fund acknowledged progress in combating money laundering, providing international legitimacy to the regime's regulatory...

Jun 19, 2026, 7:52 PM

Shifting the Border to the Nile: The UK’s Desperate Bid to Buy Off North Africa

The Mediterranean Sea is no longer the southern border of Europe. As of this week, that boundary has been officially relocated to the banks of the Nile and the sweeping sands of the Sahara. UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper’s...

Jun 16, 2026, 6:53 AM

The EU’s New Migration Pact Will Make Libya’s Factions Richer and Entrenched

The European Union's new Pact on Migration and Asylum entered into force on June 12, and Brussels is already treating it as a bureaucratic achievement. It is, instead, a mechanism for subsidizing Libya's permanent civil war. The logic runs as...

Jun 15, 2026, 4:42 AM

Camp David’s Security Annex Was Built for 1979. It Shows.

Three years ago this month, an Egyptian conscript named Mohamed Salah crossed the border near the Kerem Shalom crossing and opened fire on Israeli soldiers, killing three before being shot dead. The Israeli military has since described the June...

Jun 13, 2026, 10:18 AM

Algeria’s Military Diplomacy Theater: Strategic Ambiguity as a Tool of Survival

Admiral John Wikoff's two-day visit to Algiers last week, culminating in meetings with Defense Minister-Delegate and Army Chief of Staff General Said Chengriha, was framed by Algerian state media as a milestone in bilateral military partnership. The optics were...

Jun 12, 2026, 5:31 AM

Egypt’s Turkey Embrace Is a Test Washington Is Failing

Egypt's decision to conduct simultaneous joint military exercises with Turkey and Oman this week has been greeted with the usual diplomatic boilerplate about exchanging training expertise and unifying operational concepts. In Washington, it has barely registered at all. That...

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About Me

Amine Ayoub, a writing fellow with the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco.

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