Why is Morocco the only country in North Africa not colonized by the Ottoman Empire?

Answer

Morocco has remained outside direct Ottoman rule due to a combination of factors:

• two strong dynasties resist conquest,
• there was a third player in the game with Spain who already switched sides,
• it was far from the Ottoman power centers, and
• control through a local vassal turned out to be easier than conquering.

And to answer your second question: yes, there were military conflicts, especially in the 16th century between 1517 and 1567, when the Ottomans really wanted to rule over as much of the Mediterranean coast as possible. From 1517 they advanced militarily, and conquered whole parts of what is now Algeria, then still under Moroccan vassal rule. The battles at Wadi Derma and at Tlemcen and the many sieges of Fez and Mostaganem were the military focal points.

Due to internal strife between the Moroccan dynasty of the Saadites and the Wattasis, the Ottomans regularly formed alliances with one of the two sides. Saadites and the Wattasids. Wattasids even used Ottoman troops to capture Fez, the Moroccan center of power, in 1554. After the Saadian victory at Tadla in 1554, an Ottoman invasion came, which was stopped in the Battle of Wadi al-Laban in 1558. There was another joint attempt by Saadites and Spaniards to strike back and capture Mostaganem, but that also failed.

Succession problems arose among the Saadites. The three youngest sons of Mohammed ash-Sheikh fled from their eldest brother… to Istanbul. Two of those sons later ended up on the Moroccan sultan’s throne, but of course had much better ties with the Ottomans after growing up at that court for decades. Abd al-Malek even used Ottoman troops to recapture Tunis from his brother in 1574 and Fez in 1576, he reorganized his Moroccan troops on Ottoman lines and even recognized the Ottoman sultan as his caliph, yet demanded and obtained the withdrawal of Ottoman troops and an independent foreign policy.

After that, all military expansion plans of the Ottoman Empire into North-West Africa ended, except for a short-lived conquest of Lanzarote in 1585.