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Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency 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 among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In Mbera, 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 dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly 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 fight against violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice cracking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Millions of lives have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and access to weapons and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, concern has been growing inside and beyond official channels about armed groups expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in 2012.

An official in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa warn about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the United Nations 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, cross-border movements are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, 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 predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country 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-Saharan area generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

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

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in border security, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in information collection.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

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

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining 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 transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

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

At the Mbera camp, 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 future that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.