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

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

Her husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border sheltering over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to rebuild her life 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 door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat violence against women.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women preparing food at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

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

The conflict 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 recent years, alarm has been mounting inside and beyond government circles about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

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

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

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

“They [jihadists] have built operational capabilities to attack so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials 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 the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity forcing growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “limited aid” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in Geneva.

An Effective Strategy?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have formed the AES alliance, creating shared documents and collaborating on military strategy.

The three countries were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to consider a more effective and truly regional approach to addressing the issue,” said an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region study in the town of 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 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 produces as many extremist thinkers 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 nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of amnesty and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

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 military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also recruited assistance from villagers in intelligence-gathering.

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

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and many are relatives who all know each other,” said Laessing. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact security agencies to report people who don’t belong.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the identical security measures for repression.

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged law enforcement of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Accra turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been rife for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spilled over from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the group and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At Mbera, only a short distance from the most recent recorded militant strike in Mauritania, displaced persons prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.