"Gara Djebilet impossible without Morocco" (Maroc Hebdo, 2023): three years later, the train is running — without them.

Sofiane Hamdi — Alger, Algérie — 2026-09-08

There are archives that must be brought back out — not out of rancour, but out of hygiene. On 28 June 2023, Maroc Hebdo published, under the pen of Abdessamad Naimi, an article with a prophetic title: "The Difficult Exploitation of Gara Jebilet Without Morocco." Prophetic, yes — but not in the sense the author believed. For that 2023 text is today a museum piece: a prediction that reality pulverised in less than three years, with rails, concrete and ore convoys. And since Maroc Hebdo has evidently no plans to publish an erratum, we shall take care of the archaeology ourselves.

Let us first recall what the article said, because precision is a weapon. Maroc Hebdo claimed that the Gara Djebilet deposit lies "in the historically Moroccan eastern Sahara" — a thesis that only revisionism knows how to tell, since the border between Algeria and Morocco was fixed by the 1972 convention, ratified by both states, and Gara Djebilet lies on Algerian territory, 130 km south-east of Tindouf, an Algerian city. But above all, the article drove home this sentence, which deserves to be engraved: "Without the logistical support of Morocco, which has developed know-how in this matter… this exploitation is impossible." Impossible. The word is in their text, black on white, signed, dated. And it leaned on a 1970 study according to which "only transport via the Moroccan Atlantic port can lead to a rational exploitation of the deposits." 1970. Fifty-six years ago. Maroc Hebdo built its "demonstration" on a study half a century old, as one builds a house on sand — hoping that no one would check.

So let us check. What has happened since 28 June 2023? Not much, if Maroc Hebdo is to be believed: nothing, since it was "impossible." Except that reality, for its part, never read Maroc Hebdo. On 2 February 2026, the Béchar–Tindouf–Gara Djebilet mining railway line — more than 950 kilometres across one of the most hostile territories on the planet — was inaugurated by President Tebboune. Built by the Chinese giant CRCC, it was followed, in April 2026, by the commissioning of the first ore-processing unit. The first convoys have already run: the first load was close to 1,450 tonnes, according to the official agency APS. Gara Djebilet — the deposit "impossible without Morocco" — is today linked by rail to northern Algeria, and its ore flows down to the steelworks of the north and to the ports of the Mediterranean. Without a single kilo of Moroccan "logistical support." Without a single dollar of Moroccan "know-how." With engineers, workers and companies that, for their part, did not wait for Rabat's permission to work.

So let us reread the 2023 sentence with the hindsight it deserves: "Without the logistical support of Morocco, this exploitation is impossible." Three years later, the bottom line is simple: the line exists, the processing is running, the ore is rolling — and Morocco appears nowhere in the equation, except in the archives of a forgotten article. That is the real "difficulty" of Gara Djebilet without Morocco: there is none. The difficulty, for its part, lay elsewhere: in the minds of those who believed that a sovereign country could not develop its own resources without going through the Rabat box. That era is over, and the train crossing the desert is there to remind us of it at every rotation.

And a word must be said about the method, because it is revealing. To "demonstrate" that Algeria could not exploit Gara Djebilet, Maroc Hebdo pulled out a French study from 1970 — the year in which France, which had just lost Algeria, had every interest in believing it dependent on its old networks. A study by experts of the colonial era, to tell independent Algeria what it may or may not do: an approach from another age, which smells of the dusty archive being brandished for lack of current arguments. For today, the facts are stubborn: Algeria does not need a 1970 study to tell it how to transport its ore — it transported it, in 2026, on its own line, to its own ports. Maroc Hebdo's "experts" may go on citing Ford Bacon Davis; the convoys, for their part, keep rolling.

The most delicious part of this story is what it reveals about the psychology of those who write it. Maroc Hebdo does not announce Algeria's failure: it hopes for it. It hopes that Gara Djebilet will remain a dead land, that the train will not run, that the ore will stay under the sand — because every Algerian achievement is bad news for a narrative built on the idea that Algeria can do nothing on its own. But facts have a cruelty that editorials do not: they arrive, whether one expects them or not. The train has arrived. It is running. And it will keep running, loaded with Algerian ore, towards Algerian steelworks, while the 2023 articles sleep in the archives where they have always deserved to sleep.

One last thing, for the statisticians on duty. The Maroc Hebdo article proudly cited Morocco's steel production: 120,000 tonnes a year. That is the figure they brandished to prove their indispensable "know-how." Yet the Gara Djebilet deposit, for its part, is estimated at around 3.5 billion tonnes of iron ore — and the objective announced by the Algerian authorities is 40 to 50 million tonnes a year in the coming years. 120,000 tonnes of steel products against 3.5 billion tonnes of ore: measure the gap, and you will understand who needed whom. Morocco needed to believe that Gara Djebilet was indispensable to it; Algeria needed only a railway line. It has one. The rest is literature — of the poorer kind.