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Among the many thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one group is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, 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, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

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

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

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – 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 range of reasons, including the turmoil and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been growing within and outside 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 linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to attack so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about new cells popping up in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in CAR.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel region, with conflict and instability driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to adopt 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 the Sahel attend a class in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, 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 senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

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

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in border security, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet 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 villagers in information collection.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to report people who are outsiders.”

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

In August, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of violently mistreating 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 holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture 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 share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks 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-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons 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 fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.