For more than four years, Algeria’s regime has repeated the same refrain accusing the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK) as a “terrorist” organization, remote-controlled from abroad, notably Morocco. But this rhetoric, hammered home relentlessly, is showing its limits at home, while no one believes it abroad.
This came to the fore again after the Algerian defense ministry announced the dismantling of a Kabyle terrorist network, including Moroccans. A déjà vu claim.
The US State Department, in its annual terrorism report, explicitly contradicted Algiers, judging that the MAK designation was more political than security-related, and that the movement did not appear to have committed acts meeting the US definition of terrorism. It is a rare and direct rebuke from a partner with which Algeria otherwise maintains close counterterrorism cooperation.
Amnesty International went further, documenting entire case files stripped of tangible evidence. Activists convicted, some sentenced to death, solely on the basis of an alleged affiliation with MAK, with no element tying them to the acts they were accused of. Human Rights Watch has drawn the same conclusion year after year in its World Report chapters on Algeria.
Faced with this wall of international pushback, Algiers has long tried to internationalize the accusation by dragging Morocco into it and casting Rabat as the movement’s secret sponsor, a theory pushed without evidence after the devastating wildfires of summer 2021. But that line struggles to convince anyone beyond regime-aligned media. No Western chancellery has adopted the claimed MAK–Morocco–Israel nexus as its own.
MAK’s symbolic declaration in Paris in December 2025 shows just how far the demonization strategy has failed to isolate the movement. Rather than weakening it, the crackdown appears to have raised its international profile and reinforced its legitimacy at home and in the eyes of the Kabyle diaspora.
