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Out of the thousands of displaced persons who have escaped Mali since a extremist insurgency began more than a decade ago, one group is united by a grim commonality: their husbands are presumed dead or captured.

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

The 50-year-old’s husband was a police officer who ended up confronting 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 dead or alive.

“We came here because of conflict, leaving everything behind,” she said quietly while meeting with her fellow members of Femme Resource, a women's organization who do door-to-door campaigns in the camp to assist pregnant women and combat gender-based violence.

“Numerous women lost spouses during the conflict,” she continued, her voice breaking while children played together barefoot in the sand. “We arrived with nothing.”

Women cooking meals at the Mbera settlement in eastern Mauritania.

Millions of lives have been disrupted in the last twenty years across the Sahel area – which stretches across a group of nations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea coast – due to the activities of terror groups and other armed militias that have multiplied in countries with often weak central governments.

The conflict has been driven by a multitude of factors, including the instability and availability of ammunition and foreign fighters that stemmed from the 2011 Nato invasion of Libya.

In the past few years, concern has been mounting within and outside official channels about armed groups extending their reach towards West Africa's coastline.

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 January of this year, fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated JNIM attacked a army base in northern Benin, leaving 30 troops killed.

Members of Ansar Dine at the Kidal airport in northern Mali in over a decade ago.

One diplomat in Douala, the nation of Cameroon, told media outlets without attribution that there was information about Islamic State West Africa Province units moving freely across the Cameroonian frontier with neighboring Nigeria and expanding their influence.

“These groups have built operational capabilities to strike so many army positions,” the official said.

Authorities in Nigeria have raised alarms about new cells popping up in the country’s Middle Belt, while central African analysts caution about a growing alliance between various armed groups in the so-called “triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in the nation of Chad to northern Cameroon and a Central African area in CAR.

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

While three-quarters of those uprooted remain within their own countries, transnational migration are increasing, putting pressure on receiving areas 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 current counterinsurgency approach is divided: three Sahel nations – which has publicly engaged Russia’s Wagner mercenaries – have formed the Association of Sahel States, issuing passports and coordinating military strategy.

The three countries were previously part of the G5 alliance, which was disbanded in last year after the AES members’ exit, and the Economic Community of West African States, which “deployed” a 5,000-troop standby force in spring.

“The more these jihadist threats shift southward, the more security measures will need to adopt a more effective and truly regional approach to dealing with the issue,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an Abuja-based analyst and predoctoral researcher at the an international research center.

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

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

“Compared to its inhabitants, no other country in the Sahel-Saharan area generates more extremist thinkers and senior militant leaders as Mauritania does,” wrote Anouar Boukhars, professor of countering violent extremism and anti-terror efforts at the an African research center, a defense academic institution, in 2016.

But the country, which has had no jihadist attack on its soil since 2011, has been praised for its anti-militant actions.

“More than 10 years ago, they offered those extremists who want to lay down arms some kind of pardon and had these religious retraining programs,” said Ulf Laessing, regional program head of the Sahel regional initiative at German thinktank Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

“They also funded village construction and water infrastructure, unlike Mali where state authority is limited to the capital,” he said. “This wins over locals and ensures cooperation, making it easier to control threatening actors.”

Funding were made in frontier protection, backed by a multimillion-euro deal with the EU, which was eager to stop the inflow of migrants.

At custom duty posts, officers use satellite internet to share live information with the army, which launched a camel corps that monitors arid zones. Satellite communication devices are banned for public use and authorities have also enlisted the help of local residents in intelligence-gathering.

French soldiers join a regional anti-insurgent patrol with a Malian soldier (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 security agencies to notify about people who are outsiders.”

Aside from successes, the country also stands accused of using the same tools of protection for authoritarian control.

In August, a human rights investigation alleged law enforcement of violently mistreating refugees and other migrants over the last five years, allegedly subjecting them to sexual violence and torture. Authorities in the capital, Nouakchott denied the allegations, saying they have improved conditions for detaining migrants.

Returning Home

Far from there, in Ghana, there are whispers about an informal arrangement: armed groups leave the country alone and Accra turns a blind eye while wounded fighters, supplies and resources are moved to and from neighbouring Burkina Faso.

In neighboring Algeria and Mauritania, conjecture has been widespread for years about a similar accord, which some see as an additional factor why the violence has not spread from neighbouring 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 go back to Mali,” said Laessing.

In over ten years ago, the US authorities claimed to have found papers in the facility in Pakistan where former al-Qaida leader Bin Laden was killed mentioning an attempted rapprochement between the organization and Nouakchott. The national authorities continues to deny the existence of any such arrangement.

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 current situation of the violence.

Their focus is on a future that remains uncertain, much like the destiny of disappeared males including Amina’s husband.

“We just want to go home,” she said.