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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their spouses 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 extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp 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 came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of a women's support group, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, 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 upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The violence has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been mounting within and outside official channels about militant factions 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 January of this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to strike so many military formations,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the AES alliance, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

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 “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing 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, 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 huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives 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 nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, 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 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 supply, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, 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 inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact law enforcement to notify about people who don’t belong.”

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

In August, a human rights investigation accused law enforcement of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for holding 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 looks the other way while injured militants, food and fuel are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In 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 spilled over from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders 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 avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Osama 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 arrangement.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike 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 simply wish to return,” she said.