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Among the many thousands of refugees who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is bound together 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 Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

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

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been mounting within and outside official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM assaulted a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier 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 sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa 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 a Central African area in CAR.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability forcing growing populations from their homes.

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

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and coordinating military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel attend a class in the town of Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

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

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

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 custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from local residents in information collection.

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

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for repression.

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government looks the other way while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

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

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities 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 organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

Their focus is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.