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Out of the thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a jihadist uprising began over ten years back, one group is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

Her husband was a police officer who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“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 community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera refugee camp in south-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 Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups 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 turmoil 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 inside and beyond government circles about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated 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 airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

An official in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units coming and going across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa caution about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

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

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, 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 current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, 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.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to adopt a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in Sahel region attend a class 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 extensive arid lands, 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 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 jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

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

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and officials have also recruited assistance from local residents in information collection.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a soldier from Mali (left) in 2016.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call security agencies to report people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged law enforcement of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers 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 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 group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike 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 unpredictable, much like the destiny of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.