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Out of the many thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

One woman, who we'll call Amina is one of them.

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea 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 group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice breaking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

The violence has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside 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 extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in 2012.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to attack so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa warn about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability forcing growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are increasing, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region attend a class in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is limited 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 keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for repression.

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

Returning Home

Far from there, in Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: militant factions leave the country alone and Accra looks the other way while wounded fighters, food and fuel are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults 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-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.