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Among the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

One woman, who we'll call Amina is one of them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been growing inside and beyond government circles about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in 2012.

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are increasing, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the AES alliance, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the an international research center.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel attend a class in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a soldier from Mali (left) in 2016.

“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 promptly contact law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the identical security measures for repression.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

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

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We just want to go home,” she said.