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Among the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is united by a tragic shared experience: their spouses are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp 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 came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” 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 fight against gender-based violence.

“Many lost their husbands in the war,” she added, her voice cracking while children chased one another barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a group of nations from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have multiplied in countries with often weak state authorities.

The violence has been fuelled by a range of reasons, including the instability and access to weapons and foreign fighters that resulted from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, alarm has been growing within and outside official channels about militant factions extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were attributed to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In January of this year, militants from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM assaulted a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in Mali's north in over a decade ago.

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

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts warn 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 Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

Earlier this month, the UN said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with violence and insecurity forcing increasing numbers from their homes.

While 75% of those uprooted remain within their own countries, transnational migration are on the rise, putting pressure on receiving areas with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in Geneva.

A Winning Approach?

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

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more security measures will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in the Sahel study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, 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 radical elements.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel and Sahara region produces as many extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded 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 religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water supply, unlike Mali where state authority is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the European Union, which was keen to stem the migrant influx.

At custom duty posts, officers use Starlink to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that patrols the desert. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and authorities have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

Troops from France join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in several years ago.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “When someone new comes into a village, they promptly contact law enforcement to report people who are outsiders.”

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

In August, a Human Rights Watch report accused security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining 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 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 spread from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an informal pact [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-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to deny the existence 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 focus is on a tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.