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Among the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

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

Her husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a refugee settlement 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 fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice breaking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals 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 extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside government circles about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

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-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to attack so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in CAR.

Recently, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity forcing growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region 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 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities 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 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 nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists 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 infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, 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 custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also recruited assistance from 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 many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call law enforcement to notify about people who are outsiders.”

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

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in 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 informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the conflict has not spilled over from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

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

At Mbera, 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 focus is on a future that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.