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Out of the thousands of displaced persons 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 presumed dead or captured.

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

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization 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 breaking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

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

In recent years, concern has been growing inside and beyond official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

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, militants from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, 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 Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved 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 defensive actions will need to adopt a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been applauded for its anti-militant actions.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in border security, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants 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.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of violently mistreating 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 detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: armed groups 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 neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit the country 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 facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a few miles 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 focus is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.