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Out of the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is bound together 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 ended up confronting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization 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 continued, her voice cracking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Millions of lives have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside government circles about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability forcing growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, cross-border movements 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.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit 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 Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

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

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, 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.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, 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 wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials 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.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to notify about people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in 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 leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spilled over from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if fighters 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 the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons 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 Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.