Algeria Is Sending Soldiers to Guard Gas, Not Niger's People

Ask yourself a simple question. How many soldiers does it take to guard a pipeline, and who decided that a pipeline deserved them more than the people living next to it?

On Sunday, Algeria's parliament convened in an emergency session and approved the deployment of troops to Niger. On Monday, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune's office announced the order. Algeria has not said how many soldiers will go, or when. It has not said what rules will govern them, or what they will do if a Nigerien civilian is caught in the crossfire. What it has said is that the mission is to protect "energy and economic interests" shared by two countries. Those interests belong to the state oil company Sonatrach, to its partners, and to the European buyers who will eventually burn the gas. They do not belong to the mothers of the Sahel.

This would be Algeria's first overseas military deployment since 1973, when it sent soldiers to fight alongside Egypt in the Arab-Israeli war. Fifty-two years is a long time for a country to keep its army at home. Now it is being sent across a desert border by a government that answers to no voter in the country it is entering.

Niger's ruler, General Abdourahamane Tiani, seized power in a military coup in 2023. Algeria condemned that coup at first. Then the diplomacy warmed, the tone softened, and the principle quietly went into storage. Niger's request for "military assistance" was delivered by men who took power without an election, who have not returned the country to civilian rule on any timetable anyone can verify, and who now sit in an alliance with Mali and Burkina Faso, the Alliance of Sahel States. Every one of those three countries is governed by soldiers who seized the state from their own people. We are being asked to accept that the cure for a junta is more soldiers, sent by another security apparatus, to protect the resources the junta controls.

Consider what the record already shows. In August, Algeria sent fighter jets and support aircraft to Niger, which Algerian officials described as a response to an attempt to destabilise the Nigerien military government. In April 2025, Algerian forces shot down a Malian drone near their shared border. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger responded by recalling their ambassadors from Algiers. Those are not the actions of a neighbour trying to calm a region. They are the actions of states that have already decided which regime deserves protection, and which people can be treated as collateral.

The stated mission is to secure the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline, a proposed project that would carry natural gas from Nigeria, across Niger, to Algeria, and onward to European markets. Europe will pay for that gas. Sonatrach will profit. And the Nigerien people, who are among the poorest on earth, will watch the gas flow past them toward the coast. Ask any Nigerien farmer whether that pipeline has brought electricity to his village. Ask any teacher in Agadez whether her school has better books because the gas is moving north. The answer is the same it has been across the Sahara for decades: resources leave, and the people who live on top of them stay poor.

This is the pattern we must name plainly. Foreign powers, and regional powers that behave like them, have spent years building partnerships with whoever holds the guns in Niamey, Bamako and Ouagadougou. They do it because those men are useful for pipelines, mining concessions and border control, not because they are useful for their citizens. Russia has its mercenaries. China has its loans and mining contracts. France has been pushed out of the region, and Turkey and the Gulf states are circling with arms deals and infrastructure promises. Algeria is no innocent bystander in this. It is an African state, and it is making the same bargain that outside powers have been making with African juntas for years. Our continent does not need to import that logic from Moscow or Beijing. We are capable of producing it ourselves.

Let us be clear about the security threat, because it is real. Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have endured years of attacks by armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS. Villages have been emptied. Schools have closed. Children have been orphaned by violence that no government has stopped. Nobody serious denies the danger. But the answer to jihadist violence cannot be a military government that jails critics, suspends parties, and asks foreign armies to guard its oil. Armies that cannot protect civilians under civilian rule will not do it better under a coup. History on this continent has already run that experiment many times, and the results are written in mass graves and refugee camps.

Here is what the Sahel needs, and what Algeria should be demanding rather than deploying. It needs a credible, dated transition back to civilian and constitutional government in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, with elections monitored by independent African institutions. It needs parliamentary oversight in Algiers, so that the two-thirds vote the 2020 constitution requires is followed by full public disclosure of troop numbers, mandates, rules of engagement and costs. It needs the African Union and the regional bloc ECOWAS to stop treating coup governments as partners until they hand power back. And it needs citizens in all these countries to demand that their security be delivered by institutions they can vote out.

We do not have to guess what works. Botswana has held regular, peaceful elections since independence and turned diamond revenues into schools, clinics and roads for decades, because it built strong institutions before it built wealth. Mauritius, with rule of law and an independent judiciary, transformed itself from a sugar island into a diversified economy that its citizens can trust. Senegal, in 2024, showed that a democratic people can vote out a governing party and hand power peacefully to the opposition. Ghana has changed governments through the ballot box repeatedly. These are African success stories. They prove that property rights, transparent contracts, free markets and accountable leaders produce stability that no foreign battalion can manufacture.

So here is what we demand. Algeria must publish the number of troops, the duration of the mission, and the legal basis for each deployment before a single boot crosses the border. It must commit that its soldiers will not be used to suppress Nigerien citizens protesting their own government. Niger's junta must announce a binding election timetable. The African Union must stop pretending that coups are an internal matter when they are being used to sell our gas and our future. And every Algerian, Nigerien, Malian and Burkinabè citizen who believes their country belongs to them must ask the same question out loud: who is this army protecting, and who gave them permission?

We are not asking for charity. We are asking for accountable government, honest contracts, and security that serves the many instead of the few. Sahara gas will keep flowing north whether we speak or not. The only question is whether the people who live above it will ever share in the wealth or whether they will keep being told that their soldiers, and their suffering, are the price of someone else's energy.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA