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Among the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one group is bound together by a tragic shared experience: their husbands are missing or held captive.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a gendarme who wound up fighting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing 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 said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, 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 continued, her voice breaking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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

Countless individuals have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel region – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea – 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 availability of ammunition and mercenaries that stemmed from the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an average of 26 security incidents each month were linked to jihadists 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 Benin's north, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

One diplomat in Douala, Cameroon, informed media outlets anonymously that there was intelligence about ISWAP cells moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and expanding their influence.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have sounded warnings about new cells emerging in the country’s Middle Belt, while experts on Central Africa caution about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

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

While three-quarters of those uprooted stay inside their nations, transnational migration are increasing, putting pressure on host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, UNHCR’s regional director for West and Central Africa, told journalists in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The trio were formerly members of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in 2023 after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-soldier reserve unit in March.

“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 an analyst, an Abuja-based analyst and research fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

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

The nation of Mauritania, another past participant 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 extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and high-ranking terrorist operatives as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, several years ago.

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

“Over a decade back, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these theological reorientation courses,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“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.”

Investments were made in frontier protection, supported by a multi-million euro agreement with the EU, which was eager to stop the migrant influx.

At border checkpoints, 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 villagers in information collection.

Troops from France join a regional anti-insurgent patrol 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 security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands faced with allegations of using the identical security measures for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation accused security officials of violently mistreating displaced persons and migrants over the last several years, allegedly subjecting them to rape and electric shocks. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for holding migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: militant factions leave the country alone and Ghana's government looks the other way while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are moved to and from adjacent Burkina Faso.

In Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread 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 share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest 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 go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the United States claimed to have found documents in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group and Mauritania's government. The national authorities continues to reject the idea of any such deal.

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

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the destiny of disappeared males including the spouse of Amina.

“We just want to go home,” she said.