Two Capitals in Two Days

Drizan Shala, Security Desk

Major General Jasper Jeffers, commander of the International Stabilization Force for Gaza, was received in Tirana on Tuesday by Ferit Hoxha at the foreign ministry and then by Ermal Nufi at defence. The readouts were short. Hoxha wrote on X that Albania’s participation in the ISF turns into a real contribution on the ground and that countries, regardless of their size, can make meaningful contributions. Nufi said Albania remains determined to deepen cooperation with the United States and to contribute to joint international missions. The defence ministry’s note lists the strategic partnership, NATO, interoperability and regional stability.

What Albania has put behind those words is on the record. An Armed Forces assessment team went to Gaza in the spring; Nufi confirmed the visit at a press conference in May, with the Chief of General Staff, Arben Kingji, saying the first Albanian contingent would be part of the ISF headquarters. On 30 July the Council of Ministers approved a draft law on the participation of the Armed Forces in the ISF operation and sent it to parliament under accelerated procedure. The bill authorises up to forty personnel. “The Republic of Albania will have a presence in Gaza, starting initially with four staff officers,” Nufi said that day; the level and location of any further contribution is to be decided once they are in place. The Council of Ministers approved accession to the Board of Peace on 21 January; parliament ratified it on 22 January.

The day before Tirana, Jeffers was in Prishtina, where the record is one stage further along. On Monday he and Lieutenant General Bashkim Jashari signed Kosovo’s Participating Country Agreement, force to force, with the acting defence minister Ejup Maqedonci present. The ISF’s own release says KSF members have been at its headquarters since early spring, leading planning across logistics, civil affairs and unexploded ordnance clearance. The invitation to Kosovo came from US Central Command in a letter of 8 December 2025; the Assembly approved the deployment on 17 April by 89 votes to none; two KSF majors were welcomed as liaison officers at the ISF in May. Kosovo’s signature formalised work already five months old.

So the commander of an American-led force spent two consecutive days in the two Albanian capitals. One had signed and had people inside the mission. The other had a law in parliament, four staff officers announced, and a ministry that had already sent a team to look at the ground. Same mission, two stages.

The mission itself is not settled. Security Council Resolution 2803 created the ISF in November 2025. Israel’s cabinet approved an initial entry of up to 200 personnel on 26 July, subject to further sign-off by the prime minister, the defence minister and the foreign minister. Türkiye was vetoed by Israel. Indonesia, which had accepted the deputy command and pledged 8,000 troops, put that deployment on hold. Deployment is stalled over Hamas’s disarmament and Israel’s corresponding withdrawal commitments; on Monday the Board’s high representative, Nikolay Mladenov, said talks with Israel over its side of the roadmap were continuing and that “we’re not there yet.” Both Albanian capitals committed before any of that was resolved, and neither has withdrawn anything since.

The pattern predates Gaza.

Albania sent its first contingent to Afghanistan in 2002 and remained there through the subsequent NATO-led mission until it closed. It joined Operation Iraqi Freedom in April 2003, six years before its NATO membership, with its main contingent serving under a US-led division. In 2013, when Washington needed a country to take in members of the Iranian opposition being moved out of Camp Ashraf in Iraq, Albania offered to take 210; the relocation later expanded to roughly three thousand, housed outside Tirana. In August 2021, when the Kabul airlift produced tens of thousands of evacuees and few offers of shelter, Albania took in more than two thousand Afghans and housed them on the coast and in the capital while their onward cases were processed.

Kosovo’s record on the same test runs through Camp Bondsteel. In September 2021 the United States needed somewhere to hold Afghan evacuees whose cases required additional processing. Kosovo agreed to host them for a year at Camp Liya, next to Bondsteel, then extended the consent by another year; the US Defense Department recorded 759 people passing through the camp by July 2022. The KSF itself has been built over more than fifteen years with extensive American and allied support and trained to NATO standard. It is now sending demining officers to a mission the alliance is not part of.

Albania hosts the NATO summit in Tirana next year; Nufi said in May that the task force is already established. In March 2025 the defence ministers of Croatia, Albania and Kosovo signed a joint cooperation declaration in Tirana, and three joint exercises were planned for this year. Albania’s alignment with EU foreign policy declarations has been complete since 2017. None of it is glamorous.

Reliability of this sort does not mean political harmony. Washington’s planned Strategic Dialogue with Kosovo was suspended indefinitely in September 2025, two years after Washington cancelled Kosovo’s participation in Defender Europe 23 and American envoys said in public that the government in Prishtina was not treating the United States as a partner. The exercise returned to Kosovo the following year, and the year after that. Albania’s relationship has no such rupture on the record; a Strategic Dialogue was held in Washington in October 2022, and no subsequent round has yet been convened. The two capitals sit in different constitutional positions and hold different formal standings in NATO and the UN. Their arguments with Washington have been different too. They are not the same case.

They support the same finding by different routes. Political relations with either capital can be pressured or suspended. The operational record does not move with the political one. When the United States has needed a country to take a risk on its behalf, whether temporary accommodation for evacuees requiring additional processing or a home for an opposition movement it had promised to protect, it has found that country in Albania or in Kosovo. It has found it again for a force that has no entry date.

Whatever else the two days were, they were an itinerary, and an itinerary shows where an American-led mission, still waiting for permission to enter Gaza, expected to find partners it could use. It found one that had already signed and one that had already started. The relationship Jeffers was drawing on is the one Washington has been using, in Tirana and in Prishtina, for a quarter of a century.

Drizan Shala is a security researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Sarajevo. He writes on defense, private security, and the security architecture of the Western Balkans.