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Among the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one community is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Millions of lives have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The conflict has been driven by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond government circles about armed groups expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early 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 over a decade ago.

An official in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells popping up in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance 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 Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, straining receiving areas 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 splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, 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 dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants 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 regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, 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 counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, backed by a multi-million euro agreement 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 communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from local residents in information collection.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, 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 identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement 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 Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, supplies and resources 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 another reason why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles 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 attention is on a future that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.