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Amine Ayoub

Middle East Forum Fellow/North Africa Risk Consultant

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Sep 9, 2026, 9:18 PM

Cairo’s Pivot, Ethiopia’s Alignment: Horn of Africa’s Security Shift

While Cairo issues stern warnings against foreign naval presence in the Red Sea and deepens its strategic embrace of Beijing, a pivotal counter-diplomatic mission is underway in Washington. President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi “Irro” of Somaliland has arrived in the...

Sep 2, 2026, 8:47 PM

How Algiers Uses Force Projection to Prop Up Dictators and Spread Instability

When the Algerian regime dispatched four Su-30MKA fighter jets, an Il-78 aerial refueling tanker, and military transport aircraft to Niger on August 30, 2026, state media in Algiers immediately spun the intervention as a masterclass in preemptive deterrence. The...

Sep 1, 2026, 10:17 AM

Internal Cracks in Libya’s Executive Threaten New UN-Backed 4+4 Electoral Deal

On August 30, 2026, political delegates in Tripoli signed a final framework agreement sponsored by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. Facilitated by special envoy Hanna Tetteh, the signing of the 4+4 committee deal was framed by international...

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...

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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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