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Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Millions of lives have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

The conflict has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told media outlets without attribution that there was information about ISWAP units moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

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

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region study 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 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, 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 extremists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head 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 guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

Troops from France join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

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

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spilled over from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania 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 facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader 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 deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles 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 fate of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.