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Among the many thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with no idea 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 group of women 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 added, her voice cracking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The conflict has been fuelled by a multitude of factors, including the instability and access to weapons and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been mounting inside and beyond government circles about armed groups extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM attacked a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in 2012.

An official in the city of Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists without attribution that there was information about ISWAP units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to attack so many military formations,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s central region, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in CAR.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced 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 journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

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

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

The nation of 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 vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they provided those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty 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 neighboring Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in border security, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the army, which launched a desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and authorities have also recruited assistance from 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 many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they immediately call law enforcement to notify about people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the same tools of protection for repression.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of physically abusing refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: armed groups leave the country alone and Accra turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a similar accord, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons 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 documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

At the Mbera camp, only a few miles from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the current situation of the violence.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.