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Out of the thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

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

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

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

The violence has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition 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 extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, 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, informed media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to strike so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, 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 divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in 2023 after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to adopt a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region attend a class in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

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

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault 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 amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme 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 wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

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

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication 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.

“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 don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Far from there, in Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra turns a blind eye while injured militants, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring 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.

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [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 go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, 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 Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.