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Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while sitting among 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 gender-based violence.

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

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The conflict has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

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

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted 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 over a decade ago.

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was information about ISWAP units coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to strike so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

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

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “limited aid” 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 splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – 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 withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force 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.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region attend a class in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

The nation of Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country 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 jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Investments 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 military, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation 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. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact security agencies to report people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for repression.

In August, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason 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 fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.