Sun 03 October 2021:
The Algerian government has banned French military planes from its airspace, the French army said on Sunday, amid a diplomatic crisis sparked by a visa row and reported critical comments from the President of France Emmanuel Macron.
France’s jets regularly fly over Algerian territory to reach the Sahel region of western Africa, where its soldiers are helping to battle extremist insurgents as part of its Barkhane operation.
“This morning when we filed flight plans for two planes, we learned that the Algerians had stopped flights over their territory by French military planes,” an army spokesperson, Col. Pascal Ianni, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). He said the decision “does not affect our operations or intelligence missions” carried out in the Sahel.
But the move increased tensions between Paris and Algiers, which Saturday recalled its ambassador to France, citing “inadmissible interference” in its affairs.
According to French and Algerian media reports, Macron told descendants of figures in Algeria’s war for independence that the country was ruled by a “political-military system” that had “totally rewritten” its history.
Since independence in 1962, the National Liberation Front (FLN), the leading pro-independence group with a strong emphasis on Arab and Algerian nationalism and anti-imperialism, has dominated Algerian politics along with the military. The country went through a civil war between state forces and extremist militias following the scrapped elections in late 1991.
