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Out of the many thousands of refugees who have escaped Mali since a jihadist uprising began more than a decade ago, one group is united by a tragic shared experience: their spouses 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 ended up confronting extremist fighters. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border sheltering more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to start life afresh with little certainty if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, abandoning all our possessions,” she stated softly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to help expectant mothers and fight against gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she added, her voice cracking while children chased one another without shoes in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

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

Countless individuals have been upended in the last two decades across the Sahel region – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other violent non-state actors that have proliferated in countries with often weak central governments.

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

In recent years, alarm has been mounting within and outside government circles about armed groups expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were attributed to jihadists across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. 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.

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

An official in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets anonymously that there was information about ISWAP cells coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Nigerian officials have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between different militias in the so-called “triangle of death”: the zone from specific regions in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and Lim-Pendé in Central African Republic.

Earlier this month, the UN said about four million individuals were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving growing populations from their homes.

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

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 Association of Sahel States, issuing passports 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 Economic Community of West African States, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more defensive actions will need to adopt a more efficient and broadly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an expert based in Abuja and predoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Tax and Development.

Students escaping extremist violence in Sahel region attend a class in the town of Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in several years ago.

Mauritania, another former member of the G5 group, experienced frequent attacks and abductions in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country 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 and Sahara region generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, National Defense University, several years ago.

But the nation, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been applauded for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“Over a decade back, they provided those extremists who want to surrender some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said an analyst, Bamako-based director of the regional Sahel programme at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages 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 frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was keen to stem the inflow of migrants.

At border checkpoints, officers use satellite internet to share real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are forbidden for civilian communication and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation with a soldier from Mali (left) in several years ago.

“The nation has 5-6 million inhabitants and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, they promptly contact law enforcement to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, Mauritania also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for repression.

In August, a human rights investigation accused security officials of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last several years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: 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 neighboring 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 spilled over from nearby Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if militants visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they go back to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an effort at reconciliation between the organization and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to reject the idea of any such arrangement.

At Mbera, 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 focus is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.