Mali’s prime minister in Algiers, five days before soldiers moved in Niamey
General Abdoulaye Maïga’s 24 August visit completes an eighteen-month Algerian re-entry into the Sahel that began with Niamey in February. The unresolved file is northern Mali.
Malian Prime Minister General Abdoulaye Maïga made a working visit to Algiers on Monday 24 August at the invitation of Algerian Prime Minister Sifi Ghrieb. Maliweb reported that the visit followed a telephone conversation on 9 August initiated by the Algerian side, which the Malian Primature said reflected the will of the highest authorities of both countries to favour dialogue, concertation and cooperation. France 24, in analysis published 26 August, said the visit signals the re-establishment of dialogue after months of diplomatic crisis but that the two governments' divergences risk resurfacing when the question of northern Mali is addressed. The Algerian outlet Algeriepatriotique — which is openly hostile to Rabat and frames the rapprochement as a defeat for Morocco — reports that after fifteen months of crisis the two states restored their ambassadors and reopened their airspace in July, and that Assimi Goïta is expected in Algeria. That last item is an expectation, not a scheduled event.
The sequence is worth holding together. RFI reported in February that Algeria and Niger had normalised and returned ambassadors to post, after relations deteriorated in April 2025 when Algiers announced it had shot down a Malian drone and the three AES states recalled their envoys for consultations, with Algeria withdrawing its own representatives in turn. Ambassadors and airspace with Bamako followed in July; Maïga in Algiers on 24 August; soldiers moving on Tiani in Niamey on 29 August. Africa24 TV carried what appears to be a direct quotation from the Algiers meeting referencing President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s position, but the capture is truncated and the speaker unconfirmed, so it is not used here.
Assessment: Read the thaw as Algiers buying back an entry point it lost in 2025, not as friendship. Algeria’s leverage over the Sahel has always run through the northern Mali file and the Tuareg question, and that is precisely the file both governments left untouched last week — the France 24 read on divergences resurfacing is the honest one. Nothing links Maïga’s visit to Saturday’s events in Niamey, and the coincidence of dates should not be made to carry weight it cannot bear. What it does establish is that if Tiani’s position is contested, the neighbour with restored ambassadors in all three AES capitals is Algeria, not any Western partner and not ECOWAS.