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Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is united by a grim commonality: 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 gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. 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 fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a women's organization who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice breaking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

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

In recent years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in 2012.

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa warn about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating defense plans.

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 consider a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region attend a class in the town of Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“Over a decade back, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Investments were made in border security, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At border checkpoints, 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 enlisted the help of local residents in information collection.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (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 the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

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

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government 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 widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

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

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

Their attention is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.