On Monday, Tunisian President Kais Saied will host a landmark consultative meeting in Tunis with Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune and the Libyan Presidential Council head, Mohammad al-Menfi.
Notably absent from the meeting, Morocco and Mauritania, both integral members of the Maghreb region.
On Monday, Tunisian President Kais Saied will host a landmark consultative meeting in Tunis with Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune and the Libyan Presidential Council head, Mohammad al-Menfi.
The meeting was aimed at discussing the formation of a potential new Maghreb bloc, signaling a significant step towards regional integration.
Notably absent from the meeting, Morocco and Mauritania, both integral members of the Maghreb region.
This exclusion has sparked discussions about the implications for regional unity and the existing political dynamics, especially given the historical tensions between Morocco and Algeria, primarily over the Western Sahara conflict.
The leaders of Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya decided to hold tripartite Maghrebi meetings every three months during a sideline meeting at a gas summit in Algiers earlier in March. Their joint communiqué highlighted the need to "unify and intensify efforts to meet economic and security challenges" in the interests of their peoples. This initiative suggests a proactive approach to tackle shared regional issues outside of the longstanding but dormant Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), which was established in 1989 but has been inactive since the last summit in 1994.
Moroccan media outlets like Hespress and Le360 have criticized the initiative, accusing Algeria of trying to form a Maghrebi alliance against Morocco, their regional rival. This has added another layer of complexity to the already strained relations between Morocco and Algeria.
Algerian Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf defended the initiative, stating it aims to fill the void left by the inactive UMA. President Tebboune, in a television interview, emphasized that the new bloc is not directed against any state and that the door remains open to all regional countries, including Morocco.
Spain's Ceuta, still reeling from a rush of 72,000 migrants arriving on its shores in one week, is seeking the transfer of hundreds of unaccompanied minors still in the enclave to mainland Spain, local leaders said on Wednesday.
Libyan police said inmates staged a mass escape from a jail on Tuesday while armed clashes erupted nearby in two cities west of the capital Tripoli.
Spanish authorities should have anticipated the consequences of a court ruling that weakened a key deterrent against illegal migration and contributed to last week's mass crossings into the enclave of Ceuta in northern Morocco, a senior Moroccan official said on Monday.
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