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Among the many thousands of refugees who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their husbands are missing or held captive.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, 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 fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” 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 combat gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice cracking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The violence has been fuelled by a range of reasons, 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 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 jihadists across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to strike so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about new cells popping up 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 specific regions in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

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

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the AES alliance, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved 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.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region attend a class in the town of Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, 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 provided those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers 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 promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged 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 holding migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups leave the country alone and Accra turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of missing men including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.