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Out of the thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

Her husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of a women's support group, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, her voice cracking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside official channels about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in Mali's north in 2012.

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told media outlets anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to strike so many army positions,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region study in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

The nation of Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to notify about people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands accused of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused law enforcement of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions leave the country alone and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, food and fuel are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the group and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their focus is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.