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Among the many 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 missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

Her husband was a police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat 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 came here with empty hands.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in south-eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across 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 multiplied in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The conflict has been driven by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

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

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets 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.

“They [jihadists] 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 caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in CAR.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” 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 efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, 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 regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

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 forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

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

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing 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 the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers 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 don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their focus is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.