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Out of the many thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one community is bound together by a grim commonality: their spouses are missing or held captive.

Amina (not her real name) is one of them.

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who ended up confronting extremist fighters. In Mbera, a refugee settlement across the border housing more than 120,000 refugees, she has had to rebuild her life with little certainty if her spouse is dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, 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 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 added, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We came here with empty hands.”

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 region – which spans a band of countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the actions of extremist organizations and other armed militias that have proliferated in countries with frequently fragile central governments.

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

In recent years, concern has been mounting within and outside government circles about militant factions expanding their operations towards coastal west Africa.

From early 2021 to late 2023, an monthly average of 26 security events were linked to extremist fighters across Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo. In early this year, militants from the al-Qaida-linked Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin attacked a military formation in northern Benin, leaving 30 soldiers dead.

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

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets without attribution that there was information about ISWAP units coming and going across the Cameroonian frontier with Nigeria and widening their reach.

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

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about fresh militant units 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 zone from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in Central African Republic.

Recently, the United Nations said about 4 million people were now displaced across the Sahel area, with conflict and instability driving increasing numbers from their homes.

While three-quarters of those displaced stay inside their nations, cross-border movements are on the rise, straining host communities with “scant assistance” available, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency's lead for West and Central Africa, told reporters in the Swiss city.

An Effective Strategy?

The present anti-extremist strategy is splintered: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged the Russian Wagner Group – have coalesced into the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating defense plans.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 Sahel, which was dissolved in last year after the withdrawal of AES nations, and the ECOWAS bloc, which “activated” a 5,000-troop standby force in March.

“As extremist dangers move towards the south, the more defensive actions will need to adopt 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.

Schoolchildren who fled from armed militants in the Sahel 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 regular raids and kidnappings in the early 2000s. As a conservative Islamic country with significant disparities and extensive arid lands, it was an ideal breeding ground for extremists.

“Relative to its population size, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area produces as many jihadist ideologues and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, expert on extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, National Defense University, in 2016.

But the nation, which has had no extremist assault on its soil since over a decade ago, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they provided 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 German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

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

Funding were made in frontier protection, supported by a multimillion-euro deal 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 authorities have also recruited assistance from local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a soldier from Mali (left) in 2016.

“There are 5–6 million people living in the country and numerous are interconnected families,” said the analyst. “Whenever strangers enter a community, 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 law enforcement of violently mistreating refugees and other 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 detaining migrants.

The Homecoming

Several thousand miles away, in the nation of Ghana, there are whispers about an unofficial understanding: armed groups avoid targeting the nation and Accra turns a blind eye 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 comparable agreement, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from nearby Mali, which both have extensive frontiers with.

“Accounts suggest of an unofficial deal [that] if fighters visit the country to see their families, they don’t carry or use weapons and avoid conducting assaults until they go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In 2011, the US authorities claimed to have found documents in the Pakistani compound where former al-Qaeda head Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Nouakchott. The Mauritanian government continues to deny the existence of any such deal.

At the Mbera camp, 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 tomorrow that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of missing men including the spouse of Amina.

“We simply wish to return,” she said.