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Out of the thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women 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 added, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The conflict has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing inside and beyond official channels about armed groups expanding their operations 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 early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in 2012.

One diplomat in Douala, Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are increasing, straining receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region study in Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in border security, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share live information with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in information collection.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the identical security measures for repression.

In August, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.