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Among the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

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

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, 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 came here with empty hands.”

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been growing within and outside government circles about armed groups extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in CAR.

Earlier this month, the UN said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities 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 splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force 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 an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, in 2016.

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

“Over a decade back, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” 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 restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of local residents in information collection.

French soldiers 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 Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

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

In August, a human rights investigation accused security officials of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups leave the country alone and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [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 documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

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

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.