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

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, 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, leaving everything behind,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

“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 refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

The violence has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been mounting inside and beyond government circles about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM 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 over a decade ago.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to strike so many army positions,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Recently, the UN said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

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

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force 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 expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with huge inequality 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 extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

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 lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

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

Funding were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps 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 2016.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they immediately call security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

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

In August, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have improved conditions 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 Accra looks the other way while injured militants, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread 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 have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities 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 organization and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government 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 violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

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

“We just want to go home,” she said.