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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 tragic shared experience: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In Mbera, 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 alive or deceased.

“We came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice breaking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

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

In recent years, concern has been growing inside and beyond official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP units moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in 2023 after the withdrawal of AES nations, 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 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 Sahel region study in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where government presence 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 border security, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information 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 enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a soldier from Mali (left) in several years ago.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

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

In August, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of 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, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread 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 don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence 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 conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.