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Out of the thousands of displaced persons who have fled Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one group is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a refugee settlement across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We came here because of conflict, abandoning all our possessions,” she said quietly while sitting among her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do community outreach in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat gender-based violence.

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

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with often weak state authorities.

The conflict has been driven by a range of reasons, including the instability and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In early this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

An official in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told journalists without attribution that there was information about ISWAP units moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups 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 “deadly triangle”: the area from specific regions in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about four million individuals were now uprooted across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, cross-border movements 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 journalists in the Swiss city.

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 AES alliance, issuing passports and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was dissolved in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to consider a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and research fellow at the an international research center.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region study in Dori, Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with huge inequality and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region generates more jihadist ideologues and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote a researcher, 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 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Investments were made in border security, supported by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At border checkpoints, officers use Starlink to share live information with the military, which launched a desert patrol unit that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and authorities have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

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. “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 accused of using the identical security measures for repression.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott rejected the claims, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Several thousand miles away, in Ghana, there are rumors about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government looks the other way while injured militants, supplies and resources are moved 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 conflict has not spilled over from neighbouring Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit the country to see their families, they refrain from bearing arms and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, only a short distance from the last documented insurgent attack in Mauritania, refugees prefer not to discuss the history of conflict or the conflict’s present dynamics.

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

“We simply wish to return,” she said.