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Among the thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one community 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.

Her husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp 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, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat violence against women.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice breaking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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 spans a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

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

In recent years, alarm has been growing within and outside official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

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

An official in Douala, Cameroon, told journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province cells moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells popping up in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa warn about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Recently, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, putting pressure on receiving areas with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

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, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 group, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” 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 nation, 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 pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“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 simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, 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 communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact law enforcement to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an informal pact [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We just want to go home,” she said.