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Among the many thousands of refugees who have escaped the Malian conflict since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who ended up confronting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp 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 came here because of conflict, 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 door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against gender-based violence.

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

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

The conflict has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the turmoil 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 militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a military formation 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.

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, informed journalists anonymously that there was intelligence about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to attack so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells popping up in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership 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 UN said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving growing populations from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are on the rise, putting pressure on host communities with “limited aid” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and coordinating military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the an international research center.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel attend a class in the town of Dori, the nation of 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 conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, backed by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones 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 Malian soldier (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. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

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

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

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions 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 neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spread 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 refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they return 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 effort at reconciliation between the organization and Mauritania's government. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance 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 attention is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the fate of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.