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Out of the thousands of displaced persons who have fled the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group 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.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, 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 dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while sitting among 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.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice cracking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Millions of lives 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 coast – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

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

In the past few years, concern has been growing inside and beyond official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM 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 over a decade ago.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells popping up in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups 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 Central African Republic.

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

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“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 Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region study 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 traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

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

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

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

“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 ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, 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.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing 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 Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack 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 unpredictable, much like the fate of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.