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

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly 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 violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, her voice breaking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a band of countries 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 central governments.

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond government circles about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to strike so many army positions,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

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

While 75% of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

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

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in 2023 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 security measures will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel study in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, 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.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, 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 government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in border security, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share live information with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones 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.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania 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 several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards 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 Accra looks the other way while wounded fighters, food and fuel are moved to and from adjacent 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 violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

Their attention 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.