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Among the many thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is united by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

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

Her husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in south-eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals 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 armed militias that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The conflict has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the turmoil and access to weapons and foreign fighters that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside official channels 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 linked to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM assaulted a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to strike so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

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

Recently, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those displaced stay inside their nations, 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 Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, 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 dealing with the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel study in Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

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

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, regional program head of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in border security, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the European Union, which was keen to stem 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 monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said Laessing. “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 same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation accused security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions avoid targeting the nation and Accra looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

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

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [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 US authorities claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their focus is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.