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Among the thousands of displaced persons who have fled Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“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 door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice cracking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Countless individuals have been upended in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

The violence has been driven 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 mounting within and outside official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to jihadists across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a military formation in Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in Mali's north in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets without attribution that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about fresh militant units popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts warn about a developing partnership between different militias in the so-called “deadly triangle”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in CAR.

Earlier this month, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is divided: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has openly hired Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, creating shared documents and coordinating defense plans.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider 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 an international research center.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel attend a class in Dori, Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and counter-terrorism at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the nation, 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 provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike neighboring Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact security agencies to notify about people who don’t belong.”

Beyond the positive outcomes, Mauritania also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: armed groups leave the country alone and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved 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 another reason why the violence has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons 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 papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, only a few miles from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the current situation of the violence.

Their attention is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.