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Out of the thousands of refugees who have escaped the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she continued, her voice breaking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritania.

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In recent years, alarm has been growing inside and beyond government circles about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a army base in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was information about ISWAP units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

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

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, 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 Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike neighboring Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, 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 information collection.

Troops from France join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a soldier from Mali (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 promptly contact security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In August, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

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

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as another reason why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

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

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

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

Their attention is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.