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Among the thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“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 fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

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

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

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

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

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in CAR.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, putting pressure on receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, issuing passports and coordinating defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in 2023 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 defensive actions will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

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

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged law enforcement of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

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

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

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

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the fate of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.