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Out of the many thousands of refugees who have fled Mali since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while sitting among her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do community outreach 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 played together without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the actions of terror groups and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile state authorities.

The violence has been driven by a range of reasons, including the turmoil and availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In recent years, concern has been mounting inside and beyond official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

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

Fighters of the Islamic group Ansar Dine at the Kidal airfield in northern Mali in 2012.

One diplomat in the city of 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.

“These groups have developed attack capacities to attack so many army positions,” the official said.

Nigerian officials have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel region, with violence and insecurity driving growing populations from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced remain within their own countries, cross-border movements are increasing, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, a UNHCR regional director, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

A Winning Approach?

The current counterinsurgency approach is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and collaborating on military strategy.

The trio were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was disbanded in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in spring.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions 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 International Centre for Tax and Development.

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 former member of the G5 Sahel, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a traditional Muslim nation with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an archetypal fertile ground for radical elements.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they offered those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“They also funded village construction and water supply, unlike Mali where government presence is restricted to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control dangerous elements.”

Investments were made in border security, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, 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 desert patrol unit that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also recruited assistance from villagers in information collection.

French soldiers 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 immediately call security agencies to report people who are outsiders.”

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

In late summer, a human rights investigation alleged security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Ghana's government turns a blind eye while injured militants, food and fuel are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, speculation has been widespread 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 fighters 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 United States claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed referencing an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Mauritania's government. 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 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.