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Among the thousands of displaced persons who have fled the Malian conflict since a extremist insurgency began over ten years back, one community is united by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

Amina (not her real name) is among them.

Her husband was a gendarme who ended up confronting jihadists. In the Mbera camp, a Mauritanian camp across the border housing over 120 thousand refugees, she has had to start life afresh with no idea if her spouse is alive or deceased.

“We fled here due to violence, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of a women's support group, a group of women who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and fight against gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, 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 south-eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last two decades across the Sahel area – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

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 growing inside and beyond official channels about militant factions expanding their operations towards West Africa's coastline.

Between January 2021 and October 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to extremist fighters across multiple West African nations. In January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaida-linked JNIM assaulted a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

One diplomat in the city of Douala, Cameroon, told media outlets anonymously that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across Cameroon’s borders with Nigeria and widening their reach.

“They [jihadists] have developed attack capacities to strike so many military formations,” the diplomat said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about fresh militant units emerging in the country’s central region, while experts on Central Africa warn about a developing partnership between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from specific regions in the nation of Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in CAR.

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

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, straining receiving areas 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 present anti-extremist strategy is divided: three Sahel nations – which has openly hired the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the AES alliance, creating shared documents and collaborating on defense plans.

The trio were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year 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 defensive actions 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 the Sahel study in Dori, the nation of Burkina Faso in 2020.

Mauritania, another past participant of the G5 Sahel, experienced regular raids and kidnappings in the 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and vast desert space, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote a researcher, professor of countering violent extremism and counter-terrorism 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 2011, has been praised for its counterinsurgency efforts.

“More than 10 years ago, they provided those jihadists who want to surrender some kind of amnesty and had these theological reorientation courses,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at a European policy institute.

“Mauritania also invested in building villages and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where government presence is limited to the capital,” he said. “This gains local support and guarantees collaboration, making it simpler to manage threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, 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 real-time intelligence with the military, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite phones are banned for public use and officials have also enlisted the help of villagers in information collection.

French soldiers join a joint anti-militant operation with a Malian soldier (left) in 2016.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country 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 don’t belong.”

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

In late summer, a Human Rights Watch report alleged security officials of physically abusing displaced persons and migrants over the last five years, allegedly exposing them to sexual violence and torture. Officials in Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have enhanced standards for detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are rumors about an unofficial understanding: militant factions leave the country alone and Accra turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, food and fuel are transported to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the conflict has not spilled over from neighbouring Mali, which both share long land borders with.

“There are reports of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit Mauritania to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and don’t carry out attacks until they return to Mali,” said the analyst.

In over ten years ago, the United States claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the group 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, refugees prefer not to discuss the violent past or the conflict’s present dynamics.

Their attention is on a tomorrow that remains unpredictable, much like the fate of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.