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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have fled Mali since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life 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 community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women 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 disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

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

In the past few years, concern has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in Mali's north in 2012.

An official in Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP units coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa warn about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are increasing, putting pressure on host communities 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 current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force 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 International Centre for Tax and Development.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel study in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

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 extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Funding were made in border security, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a soldier from Mali (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 law enforcement to report people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials 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 rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

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

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. 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 history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

Their focus 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.