How migration, terrorism and war are redrawing North Africa’s security map

LONDON: Along a stretch of desert where smugglers’ convoys often move as freely as state patrols, the borders separating Libya, Tunisia and Algeria have become the front line of a rapidly changing regional security crisis. 

Arms traffickers, extremist groups and migrant smuggling networks now operate across an increasingly interconnected landscape stretching from the Sahel to Sudan, blurring what were once distinct security challenges into a single transnational threat. 

That reality brought security officials from the three countries together in Tripoli on June 16 for the second session of a joint working group aimed at securing their shared frontier — an acknowledgment that no single government can contain the region’s growing instability alone. 

Hosted by Libya’s Ministry of Interior under the Tripoli-based government, the meeting focused on strengthening operational coordination against arms and drug trafficking, militant networks and irregular migration. 

It also reflected a broader strategic shift. What began as ad hoc bilateral cooperation is evolving into a coordinated regional effort to secure one of North Africa’s most volatile frontiers. 

“Over the past two years, the regional security environment has changed fundamentally,” Virginie Collombier, president of the Italy-based nonprofit Mediterranean Platform, told Arab News. 

“Algeria, Tunisia and Libya are no longer facing isolated challenges such as migration or smuggling. Instead, they are dealing with an increasingly interconnected security landscape stretching from the Sahel to Sudan.” 

She said three interlocking developments explain why border cooperation has become much more urgent. 

The first, and most significant, has been the expansion and geographic spread of militant groups linked to Al-Qaeda and Daesh across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, where violence has reached record levels. 

The Sahel accounted for 51 percent of global terrorism deaths in 2024, according to the Global Terrorism Index. 

“This has heightened concerns that militants, weapons and illicit finance may increasingly move north through long-established Saharan trafficking routes into southern Libya and, from there, toward Algeria and Tunisia,” Collombier said. 

The second development, she noted, is the spillover of Sudan’s civil war into the remote Libya-Sudan-Egypt border triangle — particularly around Jabal Uwainat, a mountain massif that has become a key corridor for arms trafficking, human smuggling and militant logistics — which has further weakened border governance and created new opportunities for criminal networks. 

“Migration — especially from Sudan — is part of this broader security picture rather than a separate issue,” she said, adding that the focal point of concern “is no longer simply managing migration across the Mediterranean, but preventing Libya from becoming a convergence point for instability.” 

Since the fall of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, the country has transformed from a destination for African economic migrants into a lawless transit corridor for hundreds of thousands attempting to reach Europe. 

Researchers estimate more than a million migrants have crossed from Libya’s shores since the uprising, based on an aggregation of yearly UN and EU data. 

Following a 2014-17 peak, when Libya became the dominant departure point for the Central Mediterranean route, the EU sought to intervene through a strategy that evolved from initial humanitarian scrambling into an increasingly systematic — and widely criticized — policy of “externalization.” 

This involved paying, training and equipping North African states to stop migrants before they reach European shores, rather than managing arrivals once they land. 

While recent data suggests such interventions have reduced the number of migrants reaching European shores, Collombier said the picture is more nuanced and should be understood in a wider context. 

“EU externalization has been a major driver of tighter border controls in Libya and Tunisia. In the short term, it has delivered results,” she said. “The problem is that these gains have proved difficult to sustain. Rather than reducing migration, externalization has largely reshaped it.” 

What researchers are witnessing, then, is less a reduction in migration than its reconfiguration across North Africa. Total irregular sea arrivals to Italy fell sharply between 2023 and 2024, dropping by roughly 58 percent as departures from Tunisia collapsed by 60 percent following its own crackdown. 

But the pressure simply shifted. 

According to later 2025 data from the Mixed Migration Centre, arrivals from Libya climbed 40 percent year on year, a newer corridor from eastern Libya to Crete surged 285 percent to nearly 19,857 people, and Algeria — now accounting for roughly three-quarters of departures on the Western Mediterranean route to Spain — saw arrivals from its shores rise 43 percent. 

Yet this complex, ever-shifting picture keeps evolving. Preliminary data from Frontex, the EU’s border force, shows Libya remains the main departure point to Europe, even as overall arrivals dropped some 40 percent in the first four months of this year compared with the same period in 2025. 

“The key point is that Libya, Tunisia and Algeria increasingly function as a single migration space,” Collombier said, adding that in doing so, these policies have reshaped the political economy of migration, making migration control itself a source of revenue, influence and political leverage for a range of local actors. 

That economy is substantial. Libyan officials estimate the country hosts around 3 million irregular migrants, whose remittances drain an estimated $7 billion annually from the economy, according to the Central Bank of Libya. 

It also hosts some 559,000 Sudanese refugees who have fled the war since April 2023. In response, the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity has declared illegal migration a top priority, pursuing mass detentions and expulsions. 

Over the years, the power vacuum left by the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Libya enabled militias and transnational networks to profit from human trafficking, extortion and rights abuses — revenue streams that also help fund arms trafficking and terrorism. 

Historical estimates by Chatham House put the value of Libya’s trafficking and smuggling economy in the hundreds of millions of dollars, occasionally nearing $1 billion depending on the prevailing political conditions. 

“The deeper concern is the consolidation of trans-Saharan criminal economies,” Collombier said, noting these networks are highly adaptive and thrive wherever state authority is fragmented. 

“Terrorism should be understood in that same context. The immediate concern is not necessarily large-scale militant infiltration into North Africa. Rather, it is that expanding criminal networks and increasingly ungoverned border areas provide infrastructure that armed groups can exploit. In that sense, migration is the most visible symptom.” 

Under international pressure, Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli have moved to strengthen their borders, investing heavily in unilateral fortification. 

Tunisia has built a trench and berm system along much of its Libyan border, designed to limit infiltration. It has also received a $95 million package from the US to upgrade its border security systems with surveillance, detection and response equipment. 

Algeria, meanwhile, has deployed special counter-insurgency units, radar-based surveillance and aerial patrols, and built concrete walls and electric fences. 

The current trilateral push aims to go further still, layering political summits and working groups on top of these national fortifications. 

But Collombier believes this approach remains too narrow, prioritizing containment over deeper governance reforms — legal migration pathways, asylum systems, protection standards — that she says are needed to address migration’s structural roots. 

“Border security and migrant protection are not inherently incompatible,” Collombier said. “The problem is that current policies have prioritized containment over governance. A sustainable strategy needs to recognize that migration is a structural feature of the region, not a temporary crisis that can simply be deterred.” 

In a region where border security policies collide with deep socioeconomic marginalization — in frontier towns where smuggling is a de facto livelihood — the question of whether tighter coordination can deliver lasting stability remains a central one. 

Migration, Collombier said, should be understood less as an isolated security threat and more as an indicator of broader regional governance failures. 

“Ultimately, this is also a political challenge,” she said. 

“As long as migration is treated primarily as a domestic political issue in Europe and as a bargaining tool in relations with transit countries, governments will continue to prioritize short-term containment over long-term solutions. 

“A more sustainable approach requires partnerships that balance security objectives with shared responsibility for protection and mobility.”