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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is united 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 extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against gender-based violence.

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

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a band of countries 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 conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing inside and beyond official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to attack so many military formations,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution 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 a Central African area in CAR.

Recently, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, putting pressure on host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, 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 adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel attend a class in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 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 and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its anti-militant actions.

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head 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 gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

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

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and authorities have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

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

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the identical security measures for repression.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.