Flag: Algeria Emoji

The flag of Algeria, two equal vertical bands (green at the hoist, white at the fly) with a red five-pointed star inside a red crescent on the seam. Green stands for Islam and the fertile Tell Atlas farmland; white for peace; red for the roughly 1.5 million Algerians killed during the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The crescent and star are Islamic symbolism, with Algeria's crescent drawn with unusually long horns. Tradition holds that long horns invite happiness.

🇩🇿 has a strong second life outside Algeria. The country has one of the largest diasporas in Europe, concentrated in France (estimates run from 1.5 to over 4 million depending on whether you count second and third generation), and 🇩🇿 floods French timelines around two predictable moments: the Africa Cup of Nations and Algerian Independence Day on July 5. Outside football, the flag carries political weight: the 2019 Hirak protest movement) that ousted President Bouteflika after 20 years used 🇩🇿 as its core protest symbol, and authorities tried to ban the parallel Amazigh (Berber) flag, which made carrying both into a quiet act of resistance.

The flag was first sewn in 1934 by Émilie Busquant, the French wife of FLN founder Messali Hadj. It was adopted by the National Liberation Front (FLN)) in 1954 at the start of the war and made the official national flag at independence on July 3, 1962. The emoji is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1E9 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER DU+1F1E9 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER D + U+1F1FF REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER ZU+1F1FF REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER Z. DZ comes from Dzayer, the Tamazight name for the country, also reflected in the local-language self-name. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

🇩🇿 is the second most-posted Maghreb flag after 🇲🇦, and it spikes harder per capita because the Algerian diaspora in France posts heavily. Three communities drive almost all the volume.

The French-Algerian diaspora. Marseille, Paris (the 13th arrondissement, Saint-Denis, the northern banlieues), Lyon, and Lille each have huge Franco-Algerian populations. AFCON tournaments and Independence Day fill these neighborhoods with car parades, flag-draped balconies, and viral street videos that go national on French Twitter, often paired with debates about identity and dual nationality that get loud, fast.

Football fandom. Algeria's national team, Les Fennecs (the Fennec Foxes), has a fanbase that punches well above the country's weight. The 2019 AFCON title (Algeria's second) drove the biggest sustained 🇩🇿 spike on record, with celebrations across France, Belgium, Canada, and the US. The 2025 AFCON quarterfinal exit to Nigeria still produced a sharp window. The team qualified for the 2026 World Cup in Group J alongside Argentina, Austria, and Jordan, which has already started warming up the timeline.

Political moments. The 2019 to 2021 Hirak movement turned every Friday into a protest day, and 🇩🇿 became the movement's universal stamp on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts (the latter two were the primary organizing platforms). The Amazigh New Year (Yennayer, January 12) drives a parallel co-posting moment when 🇩🇿 appears alongside the Amazigh flag, which the army tried to ban during Hirak.

Music spikes a quieter wave. Raï singers like Cheb Khaled) (whose 1996 hit 'Aïcha' was a French chart-topper for months) and Algerian rap from the banlieues both keep 🇩🇿 in regular rotation across European music TikTok.

• 🏛️
  Capital: Algiers (36.75°N, 3.06°E)
• 👥
  Population: ~47.3 million (2025)
• 🗺️
  Area: 2,381,741 km² (Africa's largest country)
• 💵
  Currency: Algerian dinar (DZD, DA)
• 🗣️
  Languages: Arabic and Tamazight (both official), French (lingua franca)
• 📞
  Calling code: +213
• ⏰
  Time zone: CET (UTC+1), no DST
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  Internet TLD: .dz (from Dzayer)

Foods that show up next to 🇩🇿

Landmarks that anchor travel content

The flag's design predates Algerian independence by almost three decades. In 1934, Émilie Busquant, the French wife of Messali Hadj (founder of the Étoile Nord-Africaine movement), sewed a green-and-white banner with a red crescent and star for the Paris-based independence movement. Her husband had been campaigning for Algerian self-rule from inside the French Communist Party's anti-colonial wing, and the flag became the symbol of his Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) and later the MTLD.

When the FLN) launched the war of independence on November 1, 1954, it adopted Busquant's design as the standard of the Algerian Provisional Government. For eight years, French authorities banned its display in Algeria. Carrying it was a criminal offense, and many did anyway. After the Évian Accords of March 1962 and the July 1 referendum (in which 99.7% of Algerian voters chose independence), the flag was raised over Algiers on July 5, 1962, and made the official national flag.

The numbers behind the red. Estimates of Algerian war dead range from 400,000 (French scholarly low end) to 1.5 million (Algerian official figure), out of a 1954 population of around 9 million. The war reshaped both Algerian and French politics, brought down the French Fourth Republic, and produced one of the largest forced migrations in modern Mediterranean history when over a million pieds-noirs and Harki families fled to France in 1962.

A note on the Amazigh flag. Algeria's Berber population is large (the Kabyles alone number around 7 million) and increasingly visible. The blue-yellow-green Amazigh flag with the red Yaz (ⵣ) symbol predates the national flag and represents pan-Berber identity across North Africa. During the 2019 Hirak protests, the army's Lieutenant General Salah ordered protesters to display only the national flag and jailed dozens for carrying the Amazigh flag. The two flags are now often posted together on Algerian social as a quiet rebuke. Tamazight became an official state language in 2016 and Yennayer became a national holiday in 2018.

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  January 12: Yennayer: Amazigh New Year (year 2976 in 2026). Made a national holiday in 2018. Berber families gather for trida, couscous with seven vegetables, and chicken.
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  February 22: Day of Fraternity: Commemorates the 2019 Hirak movement that ousted Bouteflika.
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  May 1: Labour Day: Standard workers' holiday.
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  July 5: Independence Day: Marks the 1962 declaration of independence from France. Single biggest 🇩🇿 social window of the year, especially in the diaspora.
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  November 1: Anniversary of the Revolution: Marks the November 1, 1954 launch of the war of independence by the FLN. Military parades in Algiers.

• •Émilie Busquant, the French wife of independence leader Messali Hadj, sewed the first version of the modern Algerian flag in 1934, almost two decades before the war of independence began.
• •Algeria's national football team is nicknamed Les Fennecs after the fennec fox, a small big-eared desert species native to the Sahara that became the team mascot in the 1980s.
• •Algeria is Africa's largest country by area, bigger than Argentina, Greenland, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• •About 80% of Algeria is Sahara desert. Roughly 90% of the population lives along the northern coast, in a band less than 200 km wide.
• •Algeria became the first country to designate Yennayer (the Amazigh New Year) as a national paid holiday when President Bouteflika did so in December 2017.
• •Couscous was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2020 as a joint submission from Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia, a rare moment of Maghreb cooperation.
• •Algeria has the largest natural gas reserves in Africa and is one of the top three African oil producers, alongside Nigeria and Libya.
• •The Hoggar Mountains in southern Algeria contain Mount Tahat (2,918 m), the highest peak in the Algerian Sahara.