The Malian military and its Russian allies retook Kidal last week after a tactical withdrawal by Tuareg separatists, who had captured the strategic city in April. According to some analysts, Algeria may have played a role in convincing the rebels to withdraw.
The developments come as Algiers works to restore ties with Bamako. Algeria reopened its airspace to Mali in July, ending a 15-month rift that followed a dispute over Algeria shooting down a Malian drone along their shared border.
Algeria, the second-strongest military power in Africa after Egypt, served for decades as a peace broker between Tuareg rebels and Mali's government. In recent months it has aggressively sought to reclaim that role, alongside its traditional status as a security mediator in the Sahel, amid escalating security threats across the region.
While Algeria's foreign policy maintains a strategy of noninterference in other states' internal affairs, it has historically viewed the Sahel and West Africa as its backyard.
"They've always sort of looked at the Sahel as part of the general geopolitical area in which they exert their influence," said Intissar Fakir, a senior fellow and the founding director of the North Africa and Sahel program at the Middle East Institute.
With Mali, Fakir added, "there's a lot of shared interests in terms of the Tuareg issue, in terms of counterterrorism." In particular, Algeria fears insurgency spilling over into its southern regions among its own Tuareg populations, according to some analysts.
But as Algeria's role in the Sahel has waned in recent years, it has become increasingly worried about foreign actors, including Russia and the United Arab Emirates, pushing for greater influence in the region. "Algeria began to find itself quite isolated in its own neighborhood," Fakir said.
Algeria has long disapproved of Mali's use of Russian mercenaries, despite its good relations with Moscow. That prompted Mali in 2024 to terminate the Algiers Accord, a peace deal brokered in 2015 by Algeria between the Malian government and a Tuareg-led coalition of Azawad separatists. Relations between Algeria and Sahelian countries broke down further after the accord was scrapped, before the recent thaw.