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Out of the many thousands of refugees who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting extremist fighters. 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 alive or deceased.

“We came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera refugee camp in 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 terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

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

In recent years, alarm has been mounting within and outside government circles about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked 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 the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts warn about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the United Nations said about 4 million people 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, cross-border movements are increasing, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, 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 the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon 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 infrastructure, unlike neighboring 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, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share live information with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices 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.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who don’t belong.”

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

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in 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 unofficial understanding: militant factions leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement 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 last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.